Most of us agree that the Beatles made great music. But some people don’t believe the Beatles to have been especially good musicians. Quincy Jones famously called them “the worst musicians in the world.” He’s exaggerating, but he has a point. By modern standards, the playing on Beatles records is sloppy. The parts are interesting …
Tag Archives: Beatles
Sampling composers
Morey, J., & McIntyre, P. (2014). The Creative Studio Practice of Contemporary Dance Music Sampling Composers. Dancecult, 6(1), 41–60. There is so much to love about this paper, starting with the title. You can read it the way it was intended, that dance music producers are composers. Or you can creatively misread it to mean …
How to tell funk from disco
Funk and disco overlap broadly, but they are not the same thing. Funk lovers like me instinctively know what the difference is. But how do we know? One thing we could do is point to the beat. Disco uses that iconic four-to-the-floor pattern, and funk doesn’t, so case closed, right? Well, it’s not so simple. …
The saddest chord progression ever
See also the happiest chord progression ever. The short-lived Russian composer Vasily Kalinnikov is best known (to the extent he’s known at all) for this piece of music: If you listen to this piece at 6:16, there’s a particularly beautiful and tragic chord progression. It’s in the key of E-flat, but I transposed it into C …
Ableton Session View and instrument design
We usually think of “recorded” and “live” as two distinct and opposed forms of music. But technology has been steadily eroding the distinction between the two. Controllerism is a performance method using specialized control surfaces to trigger sample playback and manipulate effects parameters with the full fluidity and expressiveness of a conventional instrument. Such performance …
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Electronic music tasting menu
Right now I’m teaching music technology to a lot of classical musicians. I came up outside the classical pipeline, and am always surprised to be reminded how insulated these folks are from the rest of the culture. I was asked today for some electronic music recommendations by a guy who basically never listens to any …
Repetition defines music
Musical repetition has become a repeating theme of this blog. Seems appropriate, right? This post looks at a book by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, called On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind. It investigates the reasons why we love repetition in music. You can also read long excerpts at Aeon Magazine. Here’s the nub of Margulis’ …
Remixing “Here Comes The Sun” in 5.1 Surround
For my final project in Advanced Audio Production at NYU, I created a 5.1 surround remix of the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun.” You can download it here. If you don’t have surround playback, you can listen to the stereo version: I was motivated to create a surround remix of a Beatles song by hearing …
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Did Yoko Ono break up the Beatles?
No. Paul McCartney joined John Lennon’s skiffle band in 1957, when they were fifteen and sixteen, respectively. George Harrison joined the following year, when he was fourteen. (Ringo didn’t join the band until 1962.) Who were your friends when you were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? Imagine yourself intensely and inseparably joined with these same people professionally, …
Visualizing song structures
How do you write out a pop, rock or dance song? There’s no single standard method. Some musicians use standard Western notation. Some use lyric sheets and do everything else by ear. Many of us use methods that fall somewhere in between. One such compromise system in widespread use is the lead sheet: Other systems …