The folks at Olympia Noise Co recently came out with a new circular drum machine for iOS called Patterning, and it’s pretty fabulous. The app’s futuristic look jumps right out at you: flat-colored geometric shapes with zero adornment, in the spirit of Propellerhead Figure. There’s nothing on the screen that doesn’t function in some way. It’s a …
Tag Archives: drumming
The Great Cut-Time Shift
There has been a dramatic shift in American popular music’s grooves over the past sixty or so years. To understand it, you need to know what swing is. Here is a piece of music played without swing: Here is that same piece of music played with swing:
Rhythmic simples
In the service of teaching theory using real music, I’ve been gathering musical simples: little phrases and loops that are small enough to be easily learned, and substantial enough to have expressive value. See some representative melodic simples, more melodic simples, and compound simples. This post showcases some representative rhythmic simples, more commonly known as …
Compound musical simples
As I’ve been gathering musical simples, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to categorize them. There are melodic simples, otherwise known as riffs, hooks, and licks. There are rhythmic simples, otherwise known as beats, claves, and rhythm necklaces. And then there are the simples that combine a beat with a melody. Alex …
Steve Reich’s Clapping Music: The Game
The Steve Reich Clapping Music app turns a minimalist classical work into a rhythm game. This is a cool idea, but even better, the app is also fun, addictive and SUPER HARD. When’s the last time you heard something related to classical music described as “fun” and “addicting”?
Circular rhythm visualization talk at Spotify
Today I got to talk about rhythm visualization in general and the Groove Pizza in particular at the Spotify Monthly Music Hackathon. Click the image to see my talk, I start at 1:23:47. Here are my slides: Circular rhythm visualizations from Ethan Hein Want me to come to your school, company, meetup or whatever, and …
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Beats and scales
I don’t know a lot about Afro-Caribbean rhythms, beyond the fact that they cause me intense joy whenever I hear them. My formal music education has focused almost exclusively on harmony, and I’ve had to learn about rhythm mostly on my own. That’s why it was so exciting for me to discover the work of …
Rhythm Necklace
I have a thing for circular rhythm visualizations. So I was naturally pretty excited to learn that Meara O’Reilly and Sam Tarakajian were making an app inspired by the circular drum pattern analyses of Godfried Toussaint, who helped me understand mathematically why son clave is so awesome. The app is called Rhythm Necklace, and I …
Listening, hearing, and the infinite loop
Rob Walker wrote a blog post listing different strategies for how to pay attention. (Update: he later wrote a whole book about it, I’m quoted in it.) Deep attention makes the difference between looking at something and actually seeing it. Rob is talking mostly to visual artists and designers, but his methods work well for …
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What is groove?
You hear musicians talk all the time about groove. You might wonder what they mean by that. A lot of musicians couldn’t explain exactly, beyond “the thing that makes music sound good.” The etymology of the term comes from vinyl records. Musicians ride the groove the way a phonograph needle physically rides the groove in …