I made a Patreon page

I have a lot of blog posts and videos in the pipeline, but I’m feeling some anxiety about where all this work is taking me. Don’t get me wrong, I love blogging for the sake of blogging, it has improved my life immeasurably and has had major professional benefits as well. But it’s not very lucrative, and neither is academia, so I’m developing other plans too. I have some ambitions in commercial publishing and business, but these things move slowly and the rewards are far in the future. Meanwhile, I love blogging and Twitter (and also, recently, YouTube) because they’re so immediate. I write stream of consciousness threads, turn them into posts and videos, and continually refine and update them in response to all the feedback. It’s fun, like teaching without all the bureaucracy!

Someone on Twitter suggested that I try Patreon, and my feeling is, why not?

So what am I hoping to achieve with this?

  • Money in my pocket so I can keep rolling out the blog posts and videos with less guilt and anxiety about other things I’m supposed to be doing.
  • More feedback from the people who value my stuff the most, and more incentive for me to give them more of what they want.
  • A new place to build community. Apparently there are a lot of lurkers out there who don’t write blog comments or Twitter replies but who would happily make their presence known through Patreon. Someone suggested I do Adam-Neely-style Q&As, and I love this idea. I’d also be open to taking requests for songs to analyze or production techniques to break down. I’m interested to see what other ideas you folks have for me.

I have undertaken all of my online activities in the spirit of, okay, well, this thing seems cool, what happens when I post a lot stuff here? So far the rewards (lots of new friends, some great jobs, a doctoral fellowship, regular dopamine hits) have vastly outweighed the downside (occasional right wing hate mail). So let’s see what transpires with Patreon!

Nature Boy

There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy. His name was eden ahbez, he was a hippie decades before that was a common thing to be, and he wrote “Nature Boy“, which Nat King Cole turned into a major hit. The tune has become a jazz and pop standard, and has been recorded uncountably many times. I used Ableton Live to make a mix of my favorite versions, along with some related music:

Continue reading “Nature Boy”

Starfish and Coffee

My kids love “Starfish and Coffee”, and rightly so. The version on Sign o’ the Times is fine and all, but for me, this is the canonical recording, both musically and visually:

According to the Genius annotation, Cynthia Rose was a real person who Susannah Melvoin knew growing up. All the details are taken from real life, except for Cynthia’s preferred breakfast, which was actually starfish and pee-pee. That was a little too much even for Prince, though.

Continue reading “Starfish and Coffee”

Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed

It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so:

But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this:

Continue reading “Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed”

I Want You Back

Why is “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 such an uncontainable explosion of joy? It has the happiest chord progression ever, which I wrote about in a previous post. But the harmony is just the icing on the cake. The real heart of this tune is the groove.

Let’s have a look! I transcribed some key sections. Continue reading “I Want You Back”

Interview with the Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society

Klara Huebsch of the Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society was recently my host for a conversation about the Groove Pizza, music visualization, the health benefits of drumming, participatory music cultures, and antiracist music education. It’s a good one!

I was weirdly obsessed with this jazz tune when I was twelve

I mainly grew up in a classical radio type of household, but my folks had a couple of jazz albums too, including Duke’s Memories by Abdullah Ibrahim. It included an obscure Ellington tune called “Way Way Back.”

The melody is elegantly simple, and reveals greater depth with each listen. When I was in sixth grade, I was obsessed with this track. I listened to it over and over and over. I liked to sit and draw abstract geometric shapes and cartoon beings while I listened. I had no idea where to take this interest until years later. Evidently I had good taste as a kid! The tune is a great one, and the recording is deep in the pocket. I don’t love that 80s rubber-band-like upright bass pickup sound, but the groove is impeccable.

Continue reading “I was weirdly obsessed with this jazz tune when I was twelve”

Our book is out!

I wrote a book with Will Kuhn and now it exists in real life!

You can buy it from Oxford University Press, Amazon, Powell’s, Apple Books, and many other places. The foreword is by Adam Neely.

Electronic Music School is a complete guide to starting and running a creative music technology program. We include many battle-tested project plans and a methodology for designing your own projects. We also talk about equipment and budgeting, advocacy, live performance, and a progressive philosophy of music education that ties it all together. The book is anchored around our belief that general music should be taught as an art class, where students create original music in styles that are personally meaningful to them. You should read it!

The great scale flowchart

Here is a visualization of all the scales in the aQWERTYon, organized by the way I personally conceptualize them. This does not represent every scale in the world, just a broad selection of the ones in common usage in pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and film and game music.

I group scales into three broad categories: Major, Minor, and Neither. Major scales include a pitch that’s a major third above the root, and minor scales include a pitch that’s a minor third above the root. Makes sense! The “neither” category includes scales that have both major and minor thirds (e.g., altered, diminished) or just generally exist outside the major/minor universe (e.g., blues.) I hope you find it useful! And see also a list of typical uses for all these scales.

The blues and the harmonic series

In this post, I’m going to expand on an idea in my blues tonality treatise: that the distinctive scales and chords of the blues are an approximation of African-descended tuning systems based on the natural overtone series. Gerhard Kubik argues in his book Africa and the Blues that blues tonality comes from the overtone series of I and IV, and can only be approximated using instruments tuned to standard twelve-tone equal temperament (12-TET). Let’s unpack what that means!

Continue reading “The blues and the harmonic series”