Songs in film and television

As my Song Factory course at the New School comes to its conclusion, we are moving past the specifics of particular genres and eras and into larger questions about the cultural life of songs. This week we are discussing songs in movies and TV shows. The conversation deliberately will not include scores or musicals, interesting though those are; instead, we will focus only on soundtracks. We will start off by distinguishing between scores and soundtracks: scores are custom-created for the film or show, while soundtracks are compiled from existing music. They are created by different people, too; scores are written by composers, while soundtracks are selected by music supervisors.

Next, we will explore the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic music. Diegetic music is part of the characters’ reality: songs playing on a car radio or home stereo, or a musical performance taking place. Non-diegetic music, on the other hand, is not part of the characters’ reality, it exists “outside” it. Nearly all film scores are non-diegetic, but soundtrack songs can work both ways.

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Building the Amen break

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 each simplified version still stand on its own as a musically satisfying groove. I tried the method on the Funky Drummer break, and now I’m doing something more complicated, the Amen break. 

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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.

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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 seconds of “Giant Steps“. That made me remember that I had remixed it a few years ago, and that I should try doing it again.

"Giant Steps" chart

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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 4/4 with a triplet or swing feel? Is it in 3/4? Or 6/8? Or maybe 12/8? Some people have seen it notated in 2/4. A number of people say that the answer is obvious, but they don’t agree with each other what that answer is. I decided to settle the question once and for all. Using my Time Signature Song as a backing track, I recorded myself singing it in 4/4, 2/4, 3/4, 6/8, 12/8, 5/4, 5/8, 10/4, 7/4, 7/8, 9/4, 9/8, 11/8, and 13/8.  

Hope that clears things up. You can all go on with your lives now.

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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 complex syncopated rhythms that are hard for beginners. Meanwhile, the music in beginner-level method books is rhythmically bland and unfunky. What do we do?

Heather takes a creative approach to arranging for her school bands. For each part, she creates two versions: a simplified one and an advanced one, which she places side by side in the score. Students can start out playing the simplified versions, and when they are ready to challenge themselves with the “real” music, they can just jump seamlessly over. This enables Heather to accommodate players at different levels in the same ensemble. I like this idea, and it made me think we should do something similar for groove pedagogy. My thought was this: for each groove, create a series of simplified versions, moving in incremental steps from basic quarter notes to the full syncopated complexity of the actual music. The real challenge is that we want each version of the groove to be musically satisfying, so even if you can’t handle the pure uncut funk yet, you can at least play something that sounds good.

In this post, I test the method out on the Funky Drummer break. The video below shows an Ableton Live session I made that moves from an extremely simplified  quarter note version through incrementally more advanced rhythms every four bars.

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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.

From my first hearing of this song as a kid until literally yesterday, I thought the chorus went, “Time to face the strain.” Nope, it’s “Turn to face the strange.” I guess I imagined that Bowie was singing about the strain of things changing? I’m not alone in this! According to this book, some of Bowie’s own backup singers heard it as “strain” too until he corrected them.

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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.


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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 some key vocabulary.

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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 a “vile and loathsome discord.” Another 13th century theorist, Johannes de Garlandia, had a more nuanced take; he defined the major sixth as an “imperfect dissonance”, explaining that a dissonance is imperfect “when two voices are joined so that by audition although they can to some extent match, nevertheless they do not concord.” This is weird! If you play C and the A above it on a piano or guitar, they will sound perfectly fine together, so what the heck are these medieval people talking about?

Adam attributes the idea that the sixth is dissonant to the arbitrary and ever-changing nature of musical aesthetic conventions. He also mentions changes in tuning systems, but brushes quickly past that as an explanation. I disagree about that; while cultural conventions are the major factor, I also think we shouldn’t discount tuning as a basis for those conventions. As 12tone likes to say: Fight me, Adam Neely! (No, don’t fight me, I like Adam, I was in one of his videos, he wrote the foreword to our book, he is good people.) 

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