The Grateful Dead’s second and third albums were expensive, high-concept psychedelic odysseys that didn’t sell, putting the band deep in debt to their label. This forced them to bang out a series of low-budget quickies: a live album and two back-to-basics roots records. Ironically, this constraint produced the band’s best-loved and most iconic recordings: Live/Dead, …
Tag Archives: hypermeter
Happiness is a Warm Gun
The White Album is full of cobwebby subterranean corners, and this song is one of the cobwebbiest. The title comes from an issue of American Rifleman that John Lennon thought was funny in a bleak way. The joke became quite a bit more bleak after his death. You can listen to the isolated tracks here. …
Hypermeter
I didn’t find out about hypermeter until very late in my music theory learning journey. I think it should be part of the basic toolkit, especially for songwriters and improvisers. The explanation that follows might seem abstract, but behind the scenes, hypermeter provides the signposts that orient you in medium-scale musical time. The term “hypermeter” …
Identifying melodic motives
Motivic development is more of a classical music thing than a rock/pop thing. If you want to hear a motive carried through a series of elaborations and variations, you should look to Beethoven rather than the Beatles. Pop songs are a few riffs, repeated or strung together. But there are some songs out there whose …
The Man Who Sold The World
One of my older kid’s hipster friends introduced him to “The Man Who Sold The World” and he is super into it at the moment. I have been a Bowie fan since forever, but this song was slow to win me over. I have learned to love the song, but I struggle to connect to …
Remixing David Bowie’s “Starman”
In Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity, we include a series of project plans that are designed to scaffold student creativity. If you sit someone down in front of an empty DAW session and tell them to be creative, they are likely to be paralyzed by uncertainty or anxiety. It works …
Toni Blackman on the wisdom of the cypher
Toni Blackman is one of the three hip-hop educators I’m studying for my dissertation. She teaches freestyle rap as a way to build authentic confidence, and she gave a talk and a workshop on the subject at Ableton’s 2018 Loop Summit. Ableton recently posted the video of Toni’s talk. She concludes it with a freestyle, …
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