Blue notes and other microtones

Update: here’s a deeper and better-informed explanation of blue notes.

Blue notes are a big part of what makes the blues sound like the blues. Most other American vernacular music uses blue notes too: jazz, funk, rock, country, gospel, folk and so on. In the video below, John Lee Hooker hits a blue note in just about every single guitar phrase.

For such a foundational element of America’s music, there’s a surprising amount of confusion as to what a blue note is exactly. So allow me to clear it up: a blue note is a microtonal pitch in between a note from the blues scale and a neighboring note from the major scale.

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Bach to the future

I’m not a big classical music guy for the most part, but I never get tired of Bach.

This stodgy eighteenth century Lutheran doesn’t seem a likely inspiration for a hipster electronica producer like me. There aren’t too many other wearers of powdered wigs in my record collection, and Bach is the only one in the regular rotation. Why? When I studied jazz guitar I was encouraged to learn some Bach violin and cello music. I learned a lot about music theory that way but I had a surprising amount of fun too. Those pieces are complex and technical, but they’re easy to memorize – it’s one catchy hook after another after another.

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Do that stuff, aw do that stuff

One of the funkiest albums ever recorded is The Clones Of Dr Funkenstein by Parliament. Even if you never listen to it, you’ll get funkier just by looking at the cover.

There’s much to love about this album beyond its joyously ridiculous science fiction theme. There are the deft, bebop-flavored horn charts by James Brown’s trombonist Fred Wesley. There are the irresistible beats by Jerome Brailey, who laid the rhythmic foundation of hip-hop (along with Clyde Stubblefield and the Incredible Bongo Band.) And there are the squiggly Moog synths by Bernie Worrell.

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Life in one day

Our creation myths start with the assumption that we’re the most important thing in the world, the reason for everything else’s being. The story that science tells relegates us to the periphery. Life has mostly been smaller and simpler than us. I think it’s important to recognize that we might very easily wipe ourselves out, and the microbes will barely have noticed we were even here.

Life appeared very early in the planet’s history, earlier than you might have naively guessed. But then for billions of years, it existed only as simple single cells floating in the ocean or sitting in cracks in the rocks. Big complex creatures visible to the naked eye didn’t appear until the planet was two-thirds of the way to its present age. The first insects didn’t appear until nine-tenths of the way to the present, and humans didn’t show up until ninety-nine percent of the way.

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Here comes the sun

Today in the NY Times there’s an article about NASA’s new Solar Dynamics Observatory. Check out this amazing video of the sun in action.

The sun was on my mind today anyway, it being so nice and cloudless outside. But days like today also cause me anxiety. I’m a fair-haired sunburn-prone type, and my dad died from skin cancer, a combination of Scandinavian genes and long hours as a young guy on a ladder helping Grandpa paint houses, plus many more hours on boats and beaches with no sunblock. I stick to the shade, wear hats and generally play it very safe, but still, I feel some dread about the amount of radiation I’m getting from the great thermonuclear reactor in the sky.

My dread does have an upside. It’s fueled a lot of fascination. The sun is a bottomless source of interest if you’re a science geek like me. Continue reading “Here comes the sun”

Tales of an Apple fanboy

I’ve now had a couple of opportunities to play around with an iPad, and to surreptitiously watch other people use it. I have strong and mixed feelings. The touchscreen interface is pretty wonderful and I have no doubt that it’s going to send the mouse the way of the floppy disk. But the walled garden aspect disturbs me. It smells a little Microsoft-y. As long Apple’s products are so delightful, I guess I don’t care that deeply what their business philosophy is. But not everything that Apple makes is equally delightful, and gorgeous though it is, the iPad gives me some qualms.

A little background. I got my first Mac exposure in 1988, eighth grade, back in the days of System 6 and Pagemaker 1.0. It was love at first use. The mouse interface is old hat now but then it was a tremendous improvement on typing arcane DOS commands.

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Impeach The President

Hip-hop sampling has a way of elevating obscure tracks into the cultural pantheon.  “Impeach The President” by the Honey Drippers is a perfect example (the president in question is Nixon.) While the song itself isn’t well-known outside of sample geek circles, I can guarantee you’ve heard its opening few seconds. According to WhoSampled.com, it’s the most-sampled breakbeat in history.

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The Revenge Of The Nerds band

As I mentally prepare for my Revival Revival show tonight, I find myself thinking about the scene in Revenge of the Nerds when they perform their talent show:

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What does live music mean in the laptop era?

This weekend my electronica band Revival Revival is doing some shows for the first time in many months. We’ll be doing a lot of what my non-electronic-musician friends consider to be cheating. The lead vocals and guitar will be live, as will some of the synths. Everything else will be canned, recordings played back from a laptop. Here’s the setup:

From left to right, you’re seeing an Mbox, the audio interface that goes with Pro Tools. We plug the vocal mic into it so that the computer can perform its magic, like Auto-tune and compression. Next is a little mixer sitting on top of a headphone amp. Then there’s Babsy’s laptop running one of our Pro Tools files, showing some of the backing vocals she’ll be singing over. On the right is a Line 6 Pod, a guitar effects unit and amp modeler. It’s a lot easier to carry to gigs than a real amp. Using a fake amp modeler isn’t very rock and roll but it fits perfectly with the spirit of electronica. For the show we’re going to use two computers, Barbara’s to run Pro Tools, and mine for Reason synths and playback of ordinary audio files.

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The Grateful Dead and electronica

In keeping with my posts thinking of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix as electronic musicians, I thought I’d round out the techno-hippie trifecta with the Dead. Their fans might lean to the crunchy granola side, and they did some of their most endearing work in unplugged mode, but for the most part the Dead were a cutting-edge high-tech operation. By the time I was going to see them in the 1990s, they were heavily into MIDI guitar and electronic drums. They released an entire album of their synth-heavy improvisation called Infrared Roses, with cover art by Jerry himself.

Infrared Roses

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