Watermelon Man

As part of my current J Dilla binge, I was excited to find a track where he flips a Herbie Hancock sample (no, not “Come Running To Me“, though that one is great too.) This sent me down a rabbit hole with “Watermelon Man.” This track has had quite a journey, both in its prehistory and in its afterlife.

I love that whenever Herbie tries to do something cynically commercial, it always ends up being an iconic work of art. “Maiden Voyage” was written for a Fabergé ad. “Rockit” was a last-ditch attempt to keep from getting dropped by a label. And “Watermelon Man” was meant to be ear candy to attract more listeners to Herbie’s debut album as a leader.

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What the heck is a decibel

If you are a musician or audio engineer, it is very important to know what decibels are. Unfortunately, decibels are extremely confusing. For one thing, there are so many different kinds of decibels! You only care about two of them: the decibels you see on a noise meter, and the decibels you see on a mixer. The decibel scale is meant to reflect the subjective experience of your hearing. A change of one decibel is a just noticeable difference: if you make something one decibel louder, that is just enough for the listener to notice that it’s louder. Makes sense, right? Unfortunately, decibels are logarithmic, which makes it hard to develop an intuition for the actual sound pressure levels that they represent. Let’s dig in.

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Get Dis Money

Since reading Dilla Time, I have been listening to J Dilla nonstop. In particular, I keep coming back to “Get Dis Money” by Slum Village.

I first heard it on the Office Space soundtrack. It didn’t really grab me at first. In fairness to me, it’s a pretty weird piece of music! Let’s dig in.

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Dilla Time

I recently finished reading Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time. It’s a good one! If you are interested in how hip-hop works, you should read it. The book’s major musicological insight is elegantly summed up by this image:

“Straight time” means that the rhythms are evenly spaced and metronomic, like a clock ticking. (Think of a Kraftwerk song.) “Swing time” means that the halves of each beat are alternately stretched and shrunk. (Think of a Duke Ellington tune.) “Dilla time” means that there are multiple rhythmic feels simultaneously, some straight, some swung, some on the grid, some ahead of or behind the grid. (Think of, well, a J Dilla track, like the ones discussed below.)

You frequently see Dilla time described as “unquantized” or “drunk.” My favorite description is from the intro to Kendrick Lamar’s song “Momma.” As its heavily Dilla-influenced beat plays, producer Taz Arnold says, “I need that, I need that sloppy, that sloppy, like a Chevy in quicksand, yeah, that sloppy.” Poetic though it is, though, this is not accurate. Dan Charnas makes clear that Dilla was never sloppy in his rhythms, that their deviation from the grid was intended and meticulously executed. Dilla “misaligned” his beats because it sounds good. But why does it sound so good? I am trying to figure that out.

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Aural Skills for Audio Engineers

Montclair State University asked me to develop and possibly teach a class on aural skills for audio engineers. It’s a great idea! It isn’t just audio engineers who need to know what frequencies and decibels are. These are concepts that any musician would benefit from knowing.

The internal ear

Here’s my first pass at a course outline. The main problem is that this is five semesters worth of material, so I’m sure some of it (a lot of it) will get cut. But these are the things I would want to cover in an ideal world.

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I wrote another rap song to inspire my Pop Practicum students

I’m making my students in the NYU Popular Music Practicum write and perform original rap verses. To encourage them, I wrote one too, like I did last year. The samples are from Erroll Garner’s recording of “Close To You” by the Carpenters.

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Designing learning experiences with music technology: good for whom, good for what?

In my Technology Trends in Music Education class at NYU, we are asking one main question: how do you know whether a technological tool is helpful for music learning and expression? How do you assess it? To find the answer, you first have to be clear about your pedagogical goals, and that is not easy to do. The first night of class, we got into a discussion of Noteflight, the online music notation editor. The debate we had is not specific to Noteflight; you could have it about any notation software. I use Noteflight a lot to embed music examples in this blog:

Noteflight and programs like it support naive trial-and-error learning by giving you lots of aural feedback. When you enter a note, you hear it. If you change its pitch, you hear the result. You can listen back to everything you write at any time. The software’s playback might sound stiff and awkward, but you will still get a good idea of how your music will sound.
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Hidden Place

At the request of Wenatchee the Hatchet, and also following my own long-standing interest, I took a dive into the opening track from Björk’s exquisite album Vespertine:

I love Björk for so many reasons. A big one is her ability to make weird ideas sound approachable, which is closely related to her ability to make conventional ideas sound strange. “Hidden Place” is a perfect example. Is it a pop song? An art song? A dance groove? A work of experimental ambient music? The answer is, yes, all of the above. The basic structure is pop boilerplate: verse-prechorus-chorus form, a looped bassline and ostinato-based groove organized into four or eight bar phrases. But on top of that standard foundation is a lot of weird stuff. Continue reading “Hidden Place”

The Anchor Song

Is there a difference between Ionian mode and the major scale? C Ionian mode and the C major scale are the same collection of pitches. Does that mean that they are the same thing? There is a lot of confusion about this. Classic FM says that C Ionian and C major are interchangeable. This Stack Exchange thread says they aren’t, with some useful historical context. The difference really comes down to pitch centrality. The C major scale has a strong sense of being centered around the note C, and it implies the whole complex system of tension and resolution that you learn about in music theory class. By contrast, C Ionian mode doesn’t so much “function” as it drifts around without really progressing.

It’s hard to find examples of Ionian! There are plenty of pop songs based on the white keys of the piano whose key centers are ambiguous between C major and A minor, but it’s hard to find a piece of major-scale music that just floats around. The closest thing I can think of is Björk’s beautiful tune “The Anchor Song”, with its delightfully angular saxophone arrangement that she wrote with Oliver Lake.

Björk has talked a bit about writing “The Anchor Song”, but only about the lyrics, not the music. She has conservatory training and is deliberate about all of her note choices, so I’m sure she constructed this tune with intention, but I don’t know what that intention was. I figured the tune out by ear a while ago, and came up with a guitar arrangement that I’m proud of, but I didn’t try to write it out. Recently I tried to warp the song out in Ableton, and I discovered that I could not suss the meter out at all.

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Hear J Dilla flip a Gary Burton sample three different ways

While I await my copy of Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time, I’m listening to lots and lots of James Dewitt Yancey. As I was poking around WhoSampled.com, I noticed that Dilla used a sample of Gary Burton in three different tracks in three consecutive years. It’s five seconds into Burton’s 1967 recording of Carla Bley’s tune “Sing Me Softly of the Blues.”

Here’s my transcription:

Presumably Dilla was drawn to this sample due to a combination of its harmony, rhythm and timbre. The sample’s basic harmony is a V-I cadence, B7 resolving to E. However, the B7 is really a bar each of B7b9 and F7(#11). These chords contain the not-very-E-major-ish notes C and F, respectively. Meanwhile, the E chord is actually E9sus4. That adds up to a lot of abstraction and ambiguity. The rhythm in the first bar of the sample is complex, too, a polyrhythmic-sounding half note triplet. The last note of the triplet extends into the rest of the bar, further blurring its metrical function. The timbre is pillowy and indistinct, thanks to the vibraphone’s inharmonics and the soft attack of the mallets.

Let’s dig into the sample flips!

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