Let’s just get Vanilla Ice out of the way first. White people and hip-hop, oy. “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie is a testament to the power of a great bass groove. The song itself is pretty weak sauce–it emerged out of studio jam sessions and it doesn’t sound like it was ever really finished. …
Category Archives: Music
Musical simples – Teenage Dream
I’m working with Soundfly on the next installment of Theory For Producers, our ultra-futuristic online music theory course. The first unit covered the black keys of the piano and the pentatonic scales. The next one will talk about the white keys and the diatonic modes. We were gathering examples, and we needed to find a well-known pop song that …
Milo meets Beethoven
For his birthday, Milo got a book called Welcome to the Symphony by Carolyn Sloan. We finally got around to showing it to him recently, and now he’s totally obsessed. The book has buttons along the side which you can press to hear little audio samples. They include each orchestra instrument playing a short Beethoven …
Ultralight Beam
The first song on Kanye West’s Life Of Pablo album, and my favorite so far, is the beautiful, gospel-saturated “Ultralight Beam.” Say what you want about Kanye as a public figure, but as a musician, he is in complete control of his craft. See a live performance on SNL. The song uses only four chords, but they’re …
Inside the aQWERTYon
Update: try the Theory aQWERTYon! The MusEDLab and Soundfly just launched Theory For Producers, an interactive music theory course. The centerpiece of the interactive component is a MusEDLab tool called the aQWERTYon. You can try it by clicking the image below. (You need to use Chrome.) In this post, I’ll talk about why and how we developed the …
Theory for Producers
I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new interactive online music course called Theory for Producers. It’s a joint effort by Soundfly and the NYU MusEDLab, representing the culmination of several years worth of design and programming. We’re super proud of it. The course makes the abstractions of music theory concrete by presenting them in the form …
Music education at the grownups’ table
I was asked by Alison Armstrong to comment on this Time magazine op-ed by Todd Stoll, the vice president of education at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Before I do, let me give some context: Todd Stoll is a friend and colleague of Wynton Marsalis, and he shares some of Wynton’s beliefs about music. Wynton Marsalis advocates for jazz as …
What should we call classical music?
Everyone can agree that the term “classical music” is silly, unless we’re specifically talking about European music of the Classical period. It’s incorrect to call Baroque or Romantic or modernist music “classical,” even though we all colloquially do, to the annoyance of the classical tribe. It makes even less sense to call the music of Steve …
Please stop saying “consuming music”
In the wake of David Bowie’s death, I went on iTunes and bought a couple of his tracks, including the majestic “Blackstar.” In economic terms, I “consumed” this song. I am a “music consumer.” I made an emotional connection to a dying man who has been a creative inspiration of mine for more than twenty years, via “consumption.” That …
Space Oddity: from song to track
If you have ever wondered what it is that a music producer does, David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” provides an excellent example. A producer turns this: into this: