After reading and re-reading Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time, now I’m listening to music with new attention to rhythmic subtleties. I have especially been digging into the relationship between J Dilla and Herbie Hancock–Dilla sampled Herbie on “Get Dis Money” and “Zen Guitar.” That digging made me go back to my favorite Herbie tune with fresh …
Tag Archives: rhythm
Get Dis Money
Since reading Dilla Time, I have been listening to J Dilla nonstop. In particular, I keep coming back to “Get Dis Money” by Slum Village. I first heard it on the Office Space soundtrack. It didn’t really grab me at first. In fairness to me, it’s a pretty weird piece of music! Let’s dig in.
Dilla Time
I recently finished reading Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time. It’s a good one! If you are interested in how hip-hop works, you should read it. The book’s major musicological insight is elegantly summed up by this image: “Straight time” means that the rhythms are evenly spaced and metronomic, like a clock ticking. (Think of a …
We Don’t Talk About Bruno
Lin-Manuel Miranda certainly can write an infectious earworm. His songs from Moana were in constant rotation in my apartment (and in my head) for years, and as much as I tried to resist Hamilton, I fell pretty hard for those tunes too. But nothing by LMM has gripped me or my kids harder than this: …
Led Zeppelin, “Ten Years Gone”
I like to dip into Rick Beato’s YouTube channel once in a while. He’s too Boomer-ish and curmudgeonly about current pop music for my tastes, but when he rhapsodizes about the 70s rock that he loves, he’s delightful. His list of the top 10 Led Zeppelin riffs is especially pure Beato essence. Number six on …
Lightnin’ Hopkins – “My California”
I’m spending this month in California with my in-laws, and so naturally I went searching my iTunes for thematically appropriate songs. One of the results was this exquisite Lightnin’ Hopkins recording. Here’s my visualization using Ableton Live. I tuned the recording up a half step so that it’s in A rather than A-flat, which makes …
Starfish and Coffee
My kids love “Starfish and Coffee”, and rightly so. The version on Sign o’ the Times is fine and all, but for me, this is the canonical recording, both musically and visually: According to the Genius annotation, Cynthia Rose was a real person who Susannah Melvoin knew growing up. All the details are taken from …
I Want You Back
Why is “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 such an uncontainable explosion of joy? It has the happiest chord progression ever, which I wrote about in a previous post. But the harmony is just the icing on the cake. The real heart of this tune is the groove. Let’s have a look! I …
Deep dive into the Bach Chaconne
You can now read this post in Spanish on Deviolines I have been spending much of my free time during the pandemic learning how to play the Bach Chaconne on guitar, drawing heavily on Rodolfo Betancourt’s transcription. Here’s Christopher Parkening doing my favorite interpretation by a guitarist (I do not sound remotely like this): This …
My Favorite Things
My kids have been watching The Sound of Music a lot lately. I have known many of the songs since elementary school, but I somehow never got around to watching the movie until now. Apparently it was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last musical, and boy did they leave it all on the stage. I was sitting …