Ilan meets the Fugees

My youngest private music production student is a kid named Ilan. He makes moody trip-hop and deep house using Ableton Live. For our session today, Ilan came in with a downtempo, jazzy hip-hop instrumental. I helped him refine and polish it, and then we talked about his ideas for what kind of vocal might work on top. He wanted an emcee to flow over it, so I gave him my folder of hip-hop acapellas I’ve collected. The first one he tried was “Fu-Gee-La [Refugee Camp Remix]” by the Fugees.

https://youtu.be/pwx_fKIgizk?t=22m53s

I had it all warped out already, so all he had to do was drag and drop it into his session and press play. It sounded great, so he ran with it. Here’s what he ended up with:

https://soundcloud.com/ilpom/the-fugees-fu-gee-la-lilpom-interpretation

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Liora Bresler on qualitative research methodology

I’m continuing my public-facing note taking on PhD prep reading with my great-grandmentor, Liora Bresler, and her book Beyond Methods: Lessons from the Arts to Qualitative Research. She and her co-authors ask: How in the heck are you supposed to evaluate music education? Or any kind of arts education? Or anything having to do with the arts at all?

Liora Bresler, my great-grandmentor

Bresler et al propose that we look to ethnography in general and ethnomusicology in particular, and learn from their best practices. Furthermore, we can use music itself as a research methodology for music education. I’ve been using music creation and remixing as a tool for doing education for a while now, but using music as a research methodology for education is a new and exciting idea for me.

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Personhood and music education

With this post, I begin some public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman. The goal here is to explain the book to myself, but if this is helpful to you in some way, good.

Music Matters

What is the point of music education? For Elliott and Silverman, the goal is to develop each student as a person. Music engages and emerges from every aspect of your personhood, and so does music education. To talk about music education, then, you first have to define what a person is.

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Seeing classic beats with the Groove Pizza

We created the Groove Pizza to make it easier to both see and hear rhythms. The next step is to create learning experiences around it. In this post, I’ll use the Pizza to explain the structure of some quintessential funk and hip-hop beats. You can click each one in the Groove Pizza, where you can customize or alter it as you see fit. I’ve also included Noteflight transcriptions of the beats.

The Backbeat Cross

View in Noteflight

This simple pattern is the basis of just about all rock and roll: kicks on beats one and three (north and south), and snares on beats two and four (east and west.) It’s boring, but it’s a solid foundation that you can build more musical-sounding grooves on top of.

The Big Beat

View in Noteflight

This Billy Squier classic is on WhoSampled’s list of most-sampled breakbeats for good reason. There are only two embellishments to the backbeat cross: the snare drum hit to the east is anticipated by a kick a sixteenth note (one slice) earlier, and the kick drum to the south is anticipated by a kick an eighth note (two slices) earlier. It isn’t much, but together with some light swing, it’s enough to make for a compelling rhythm. The groove is interestingly close to being symmetrical on the right side of the circle, and there’s an antisymmetry with the kick-free left side. That balance between symmetry and asymmetry is what makes for satisfying music. Continue reading “Seeing classic beats with the Groove Pizza”

Project-based music technology teaching

I use a project-based approach to teaching music technology. Technical concepts stick with you better if you learn them in the course of making actual music. Here’s the list of projects I assign to my college classes and private students. I’ve arranged them from easiest to hardest. The first five projects are suitable for a beginner-level class using any DAW–my beginners use GarageBand. The last two projects are more advanced and require a DAW with sophisticated editing tools and effects, like Ableton Live. If you’re a teacher, feel free to use these (and let me know if you do). Same goes for all you bedroom producers and self-teachers.

The projects are agnostic as to musical content, style or genre. However, the computer is best suited to making electronic music, and most of these projects work best in the pop/hip-hop/techno sphere. Experimental, ambient or film music approaches also work well. Many of them draw on the Disquiet Junto. Enjoy.

Tristan gets his FFT on Continue reading “Project-based music technology teaching”

Beatmaking fundamentals

I’m currently working with the Ed Sullivan Fellows program, an initiative of the NYU MusEDLab where we mentor up and coming rappers and producers. Many of them are working with beats they got from YouTube or SoundCloud. That’s fine for working out ideas, but to get to the next level, the Fellows need to be making their own beats. Partially this is for intellectual property reasons, and partially it’s because the quality of mp3s you get from YouTube is not so good. Here’s a collection of resources and ideas I collected for them, and that you might find useful too.

Sullivan Fellows - beatmaking with FL Studio Continue reading “Beatmaking fundamentals”

The evolution of the Groove Pizza

The Groove Pizza is a playful tool for creating grooves using math concepts like shapes, angles, and patterns. Here’s a beat I made just now. Try it yourself!

 
This post explains how and why we designed Groove Pizza.

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Musical simples: Family Affair

We’re putting together the segment of Theory For Producers that deals with the minor modes. We needed an iconic example of natural minor, and we ideally wanted it to be by a woman. After many rejected alternatives, we settled on one of the high water marks of contemporary R&B, “Family Affair” by Mary J Blige.

I didn’t know until I looked it up just now that this was produced by Dr Dre. I’m not surprised, though, because it’s such a banger. Here’s my transcription of the string riff:

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Theory for Producers: the White Keys

I’m pleased to announce the second installment of Theory For Producers, jointly produced by Soundfly and the MusEDLab. The first part discussed the scales you can play on the black keys of the piano. This one talks about three of the scales you get from the white keys. The next segment will deal with four additional white-key scales. Go try it!

Theory for Producers: the White Keys

If you’re a music educator or theory nerd, and would like to read more about the motivation behind the course design, read on. Continue reading “Theory for Producers: the White Keys”

Afrofuturist pedagogy

Väkevä, L. (2010). “Garage band or GarageBand®? Remixing musical futures.” British Journal of Music Education, 27(01), 59.

I believe that music education should engage with the music that’s meaningful to students. The field is coming to agree with me. School music programs have been gradually embracing rock, for example via Modern Band. Which is great! Unfortunately, rock stopped being the driver of our musical culture sometime in the early 1990s. The kids currently in school are more about computer-generated dance music: hip-hop, techno, and their various pop derivatives. We live in an Afrofuturist world.

Afrofuturist album cover

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