I continue to refine my new groove pedagogy method: teach a complicated rhythm by presenting a very simplified version of it, then a less simplified version, then a less simplified version, until you converge on the groove in its full nuance. Imagine a pixelated image gradually gaining resolution. My goal with this is to have …
Author Archives: Ethan
God Make Me Funky
Herbie Hancock’s band on his classic mid-70s funk albums went on without Herbie as The Headhunters. Their biggest hit, “God Make Me Funky”, has been sampled in several hundred rap songs, and rightly so, it’s an amazing groove.
Playing “Giant Steps” as an instrument
Last weekend I went to a hip-hop jam session. There was a drummer, bassist, guitarist, pianist, and a couple of emcees, and I played samples from my laptop via Ableton. I was going through my jazz folder, dropping different things into Simplers and Drum Racks, and at one point I tried using the first few …
No one can agree what time signature “Row Row Row Your Boat” is in
“Row Row Row Your Boat” is one of the simplest songs in the world. Little kids sing it. It’s obvious what time signature it’s in. Or so you would think. But people are arguing about it on Reddit, and more people are arguing about it on Twitter, and there is no consensus. Is it in …
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Building the Funky Drummer beat
I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The goal is to help people understand and create Black American vernacular rhythms, specifically blues, rock, funk, dance, and hip-hop. As we started collecting and transcribing grooves, we quickly ran into a problem: all the really good ones use …
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
David Bowie was a great admirer of John Lennon, and like Lennon, Bowie had the gift of making weird songwriting choices sound natural. You don’t necessarily pick up on the weirdness from casual listening, but then you try to learn a Bowie tune, and it is full of surprises. “Changes” is a case in point. …
We’re just normal men
Why is this funny? I don’t know, but it is. Here’s the background. It means nothing, is a reference to nothing. That is so much better than if it was an in-joke. Does this have musical potential? I applied some Ableton audio-to-MIDI to find out. We’re Just Normal Men by Ethan Hein
Frequency and EQ
EQ (equalization) plugins are volume controls for specific parts of the frequency spectrum. Every DAW, mixing board and guitar amp has EQ controls, and they can radically transform your sounds. But while EQ is an essential part of audio engineering, it is also a source of confusion for beginners. In this post, I lay out …
Why did 13th century Europeans think that major sixths were dissonant?
In Adam Neely’s new video, he responds to a question about how “the major sixth was illegal in the Renaissance.” This isn’t quite true, they liked major sixths fine in the Renaissance, but it is true that medieval theorists considered them to be dissonant. Adam quotes an anonymous medieval music theorist who called the sixth …
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St Stephen
St Stephen might be the most “Grateful Dead” of Grateful Dead songs, the one that (for better or worse) sounds the most like them and the most unlike anyone else. It’s a cliche with the Dead to say that the live version is better than the studio version, but in the case of “St Stephen”, …