When The Levee Breaks

The drum intro from Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” is the perfect embodiment of The Awesome Majesty Of Rock.

John Bonham

What makes John Bonham’s drums on this track so staggeringly heavy? Partially it’s his playing, and partially it’s the innovative production. Bonham’s performance was recorded by engineer Andy Johns in Headley Grange, a Victorian-era house in England. Bonham played a brand new drum kit at the bottom of a big stairwell. The microphones were placed at the top of the stairs three stories above. The stairwell created a huge natural reverb, making the sound both big and powerful, and oddly diffuse and distant. To make the drums sound even more humungous, the band slowed the tape down a little, lowering the pitch and giving the track a thick, sludgy quality.

Zeppelin only ever played “When The Levee Breaks” live a couple of times. On the recording, the tempo is seventy beats per minute, which is a tempo more usually associated with ballads. It’s very hard to maintain a heavy groove when you’re playing that slow. Also, it’s impossible to replicate the timbre of the pitch-shifted drums acoustically. It’s as if “Levee” was meant to live purely in the electronic realm. Continue reading “When The Levee Breaks”

Herbie Hancock gets future shock

Herbie Hancock is a musician’s musician. He pushed the boundaries of acoustic piano in the sixties. He found a uniquely personal voice on an array of synthesizers in the seventies. And in the eighties, he helped bring turntablism into the pop mainstream.

People have been experimenting with recording playback devices as musical instruments for a hundred years. But the concept didn’t cross into mass consciousness until the rise of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1980s. The breakthrough moment for a lot of people was Herbie’s song “Rockit” from his 1983 album Future Shock. The song includes turntable scratching over a blend of live and programmed drums and synths, along with some heavily processed robo-vocals. Future Shock is named for the Curtis Mayfield song, which is itself named for the Alvin Toffler book. The basic gist is, “Too much change too fast is stressful for people.” Herbie, at least, has managed to get some pleasure from his future shock. Continue reading “Herbie Hancock gets future shock”

Bad meaning good

“Peter Piper” is the leadoff track on Raising Hell, the third album by Run-DMC. It was their big commercial and critical breakthrough. My stepbrother Dan had it on cassette and it pretty much defined the sound of my sixth and seventh grade experience.

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God don’t ever give me nothing I can’t handle, so please don’t ever give me records I can’t sample

The title is a lyric by Kanye West on Common’s track “They Say.” A hundred percent of my musical energy right now is coming from and going into sample-based music. To wit:

Records I Can’t Sample

[audio:http://ethanhein.com/music/Ethan_Hein_Records_I_Cant_Sample.mp3]

Me vs Michael Jackson vs Herbie Hancock vs Missy Elliot vs Kanye West vs Fab Five Freddy

mp3 download, ipod format download

Synth strings played on video game controller MIDI.

Just about every music purchase I made in the past year was to get high-quality samples. I use my CD collection as a valuable hard-copy backup of a vast, well-recorded sample library. For just about any song except the major masterpieces, I’d much rather listen to the hook repeated endlessly over a hip-hop beat than the song itself. Reason and Recycle are only too happy to oblige me. Being able to effortlessly homebrew my own dance music has given me some insight into how good it must feel to make your own cheese or wine or shoes or sushi or computer programs.

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How to make a hot beat

Here’s a more specific post on programming various well-known beats.

The brain is a pattern recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry. But we only like it up to a point. Once we’ve recognized and memorized the pattern, we get bored and stop paying attention. If the pattern changes or breaks, it grabs our attention again. If the pattern-breaking happens repetitively, itself forming a new pattern, we find it super gratifying. Continue reading “How to make a hot beat”

Human technology is part of nature

Humans are animals. Our tools are extensions of our bodies into the environment, like beavers and beaver ponds, coral and coral reefs, plants and oxygen. We’re unusual in the extent of our bodies’ impact on our environment, but plenty of other organism shape their environment to suit their needs. Technology is part of our extended phenotype, as much a part of us as our social groups. We’re part of nature, and so is everything we make and use.

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Self-reference in computer programming and hip-hop

Like this sentence, computer programs and songs can refer to themselves. Many computer programs and songs are made of loops within loops within loops. Self-reference gives computers their extreme versatility. It also makes for richer, more interesting music.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jerkhaircut/3538413244/

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The Michael Jackson sample map goes viral

I’ve been making sample maps, diagrams showing what songs include samples of what other songs. I’m a big sample geek. I like knowing where my music comes from the same way I like knowing where my food comes from. This map shows many, probably not nearly all, of the songs that sample Michael Jackson’s solo work. Click to see it bigger.

Michael Jackson sample map

MJ is in the middle, with his songs in the first ring out. The next ring shows songs that sampled MJ. The outer ring shows the artist who did the sampling. Most of the information comes from the Rap Sample FAQ and wikipedia. I included MJ quoting “Soul Makossa” and Björk quoting “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” even they aren’t technically samples, but I figured, musically and legally it’s the same thing. Continue reading “The Michael Jackson sample map goes viral”

Songwriting and computer programming

Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of loops and control flow.

The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most popular music is. The loop is the basic compositional unit of nearly every song you could dance to. The problem is that writing loops out sequentially is very tedious.

Rather than writing the same passage over and over, you can save yourself a lot of laborious writing by using repeat markers. They’re like the GOTO instruction in BASIC. Here are the first four bars of “Chameleon” by Herbie Hancock. This four-bar phrase repeats hundreds of times over the course of the song. You wouldn’t want to write them all out. With repeat markers, you don’t have to. Repeat markers give sheet music the topology of a clock face. 
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The natural history of the Funky Drummer break

“The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by James Brown and the JBs is one of the most-sampled recordings in history.

But even though the track is a cornerstone of hip-hop and other sample-based electronic music, for the first decade after its release, it was an obscurity. It’s not as catchy as James Brown’s big hits like “Sex Machine” or “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.” It is hardly even a “song” at all, and it doesn’t have verses or choruses; instead, it’s just an open-ended groove, with extended solos traded back and forth between James Brown on organ and Maceo Parker on tenor sax.

It’s a mother

Four and a half minutes into the recording, James Brown tells the band: “Fellas, one more time I want to give the drummer some of this funky soul we got going here.” He tells drummer Clyde Stubblefield, “You don’t have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got… Don’t turn it loose, ’cause it’s a mother.” That last word will turn out to be prophetic.

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