After a few years of honing and balancing my various social media profiles and blogs, here’s how I have the information flowing. This doesn’t represent every last thing I put on the web, but it does cover the tools I use regularly.
Author Archives: Ethan
One for the treble, two for the bass
I’ve been hearing this line in a lot of hip-hop songs: “One for the treble, two for the time” or “One for the treble, two for the bass” or some variation. I wanted to find out what everybody’s quoting. After some internet detective work, here’s what I’ve got. The phrase is a play on the …
Tommy The Cat
Tommy [audio:http://www.ethanhein.com/music/Revival_Revival_Tommy.mp3] Revival Revival vs Primus mp3 download, ipod format download Vocals by Barbara Singer. Samples and programming by me. The guitar licks were originally played by Alex Torovic but have been chopped up pretty dramatically. This is part of our ongoing strategy, learned from hip-hop, of taking a familiar chorus and coming up with …
Music theory for beginner guitarists
Most beginner guitarists start by learning the same fifteen chords, usually called the “standard fifteen.” I’ve also heard them called the open chords because they make use of open strings and are thus easy to play. Major Seventh Minor A A7 Am — B7 — C C7 — D D7 Dm E E7 Em F …
Dig the big bang
In Annie Hall, young Woody Allen explains to his doctor that he won’t do his homework because the universe is expanding, so what’s the point? His mother exasperatedly tells him, “You’re here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding!” I post this because I’ve been reading Coming Of Age In The Milky Way by Tim Ferris, …
Muppet Silly Songs
For my 35th birthday, my sister gave me a CD of Muppet Silly Songs, a favorite of ours when we were kids. It’s been out of print for years and last time I checked wasn’t even available on the web, legally or not. We unearthed the vinyl at our mom and stepfather’s place when we …
Hey! Wait!
Let Us In [audio:http://ethanhein.com/music/revival_revival_let_us_in.mp3] Revival Revival vs Nirvana mp3 download, ipod format download Vocals and guitar by Barbara. Additional guitar, controller synth, 808 programming and sampling by me. Contains some salty language. This continues our recent push into mostly original rock material about Barbara’s complex romantic life. The sample comes from one of my favorite …
WordPress is why I love the internet
If anyone comes to me wanting a personal web site, I try to convince them they should have a blog, specifically, a WordPress blog. I’m doing several web sites for clients that use WordPress. The more I work with this platform, the more I come to love it. WordPress is free, hacker-friendly and supported by …
Drum machine programming
This post has been superseded by my giant collection of rhythm patterns, which you can see here. I wrote a general post about what makes a hot beat hot. As a followup, here’s how to program some generic patterns and a few famous breakbeats. The basic unit of dance music is a sequence of sixteen …
Blue notes and other microtones
Update: here’s a deeper and better-informed explanation of blue notes. Blue notes are a big part of what makes the blues sound like the blues. Most other American vernacular music uses blue notes too: jazz, funk, rock, country, gospel, folk and so on. In the video below, John Lee Hooker hits a blue note in …