The phenomenon of annoyingly persistent earworms is a great introduction to the meme theory: the idea that songs (and all other forms of cultural expression) are self-replicating informational “viruses” that use the mind as their host, the way DNA viruses use living cells and software viruses use computers. The best overview of this theory is Susan Blackmore’s book The Meme Machine.
Continue reading “What goes on neurologically when a song gets stuck in your head?”
When I was a kid, I’d listen to music and wonder, why is this chord progression so much more satisfying than that one? Now I know the answer: secondary dominants, chords that temporarily change the key in a logical-sounding way. If you want to take your songwriting in a more sophisticated direction, you definitely want to get hip to secondary dominants.
Why does folk music collector Alan Lomax have a copyright interest in “Takeover” by Jay-Z?
I learned the answer from Creative License: The Law And Culture Of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola. It’s a companion book to the invaluable documentary Copyright Criminals. The story of Jay-Z and Alan Lomax isn’t quite as epic a copyright failure as the Biz Markie lawsuit or the story of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” but it’s still pretty absurd.
It’s hard to figure out what key a piece of music is in. There are a lot of conflicting answers from different music theory texts. To make matters worse, it’s not at all unusual for a song to change keys, even within a section or phrase. Even rock songs written by totally naive songwriters can be full of key changes. So a lot of the time, you aren’t trying to figure out the key for the entire song; you’re figuring out keys for particular passages.
The good news is that while figuring out keys is complex, it’s not impossible. Before you can do it, you need to know what all the possibilities are, and you need some tools to help you in your analysis. I’m assuming here that you don’t have sheet music of the tune you’re trying to figure out, but you do have an audio recording. You’ll want a program that can loop and slow down different sections. I recommend Transcribe for this purpose. Audio editing tools like Ableton Live and Pro Tools work too.
The defining musical experience of my lifetime is hearing familiar samples in unfamiliar contexts. For me, the experience is usually a thrill. For a lot of people, the experience makes them angry. Using recognizable samples necessarily means having an emotional conversation with everyone who already has an attachment to the original recording. Music is about connecting with other people. Sampling, like its predecessors quoting and referencing, is a powerful connection method.
The odds of your making a living performing your own material are small, vanishingly small. But there are a lot of ways to make a living in music. If you do succeed at the singer-songwriter path using the tips listed in the other answers, mazel tov. In the likelihood that the singer-songwriter-musicia
I have one friend who’s a full-time professional singer-songwriter, touring on the lesbian folk circuit. She puts out albums once in a while but those aren’t a major source of revenue; they seem mostly to serve as souvenirs from her gigs. She supplements her touring income with some freelance non-musical work around the sides. Her life is possible because a) she’s just unbelievably good at what she does, b) she’s well-connected to a warm circle of fellow singer-songwriters who form a mutually supportive scene, and c) she doesn’t mind living on the road for long spans of time. I did a little light touring with a band that she was also in, and it just killed me. I couldn’t take it, even for a few days at a time. I need to be close to home. So no touring musician life for me.
I’ve tried a variety of different songwriting methods. I’ve written a set of lyrics and then tried setting them, or been handed a set of lyrics and told to make them work. I’ve come up with melodies and then set lyrics to them, found chords for them and so on. I’ve worked out basslines or chord progressions and then built on top of them. I’ve worked stuff out on paper, on instruments or in my head. I’ve moved the entire process into the computer, building tracks out of loops and MIDI sequences, sometimes playing stuff in via the keyboard but more often just drawing stuff straight in with the mouse.
Continue reading “What is the creative process like when writing a song?”
Probability is a deeply weird and disturbing topic. The harder I look at it, the weirder and more disturbing it becomes. I find the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to be the least weird and disturbing way to think about it.
The other night Anna and I went to see Beats, Rhymes And Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest.
Typical jazz compositions are written expressly as vehicles for improvisation. Mainstream jazz tunes since the 1940s take the form head-solos-head. The head is a written melody, and the solos are improvised around the chord changes of the head. Scores for these kinds of tunes take the form of lead sheets, like the ones found in the Real Books. The lead sheet writes out the head’s melody and chord progression. The specifics of accompaniment, interpretation and tempo are up to the performers.
Continue reading “How is it possible to compose jazz when improvisation is an essential component?”
