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: songwriting
The Blurred Lines lawsuit
Marvin Gaye is one of the great singers and songwriters of all time, with a status deservedly approaching secular sainthood. Robin Thicke is a sleazy dirtbag who made a giant pile of money by knocking off one of Marvin’s songs to produce a rapey earworm, accompanied by a porn video. Naturally, I side with Team …
Pop songwriting in the age of the Digital Audio Workstation
Bennett, J. (2011). Collaborative songwriting – the ontology of negotiated creativity in popular music studio practice. Journal on the Art of Record Production, (5), online. My professional life at the moment mostly consists of teaching classical and jazz musicians how to write pop songs. While every American is intuitively familiar with the norms of pop …
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DJ Earworm on the art of the mashup
DJ Earworm is the foremost practitioner of the art of the mashup. I don’t think there’s a more interesting musician in the world right now. I was on public radio with him once! His main claim to fame is the United State of Pop series, where he combines the top 25 US pop songs of …
Pop musicians in the academy
Together with Adam Bell, I’m planning some in-depth writing about the phenomenon of pop musicians (like me) teaching in formal, classically-oriented institutional settings. This post is a loosely organized collection of relevant thoughts. What even is “pop music?” As far as the music academy is concerned, all music except classical or folk is “popular.” People …
Adam Bell evaluates my teaching
Adam Bell is a fellow pop musician turned academic, and he hired me to teach at Montclair State University. He recently offered to observe my teaching; here’s what he found. Teaching Observation of Ethan Hein – MUTC-101: Introduction to Music Technology As the students began to trickle into the music technology lab and power up …
How to write a pop song
My students are currently hard at work writing pop songs, many of them for the first time. For their benefit, and for yours, I thought I’d write out a beginner’s guide to contemporary songwriting. First, some points of clarification: This post only talks about the instrumental portion of the song, known as the track. I …
Killen and Marotta
Participants in Play With Your Music were recently treated to an in-depth interview with two Peter Gabriel collaborators, engineer Kevin Killen and drummer Jerry Marotta. Both are highly accomplished music pros with a staggering breadth of experience between them. You can watch the interview here: Kevin Killen engineered So and several subsequent Peter Gabriel albums. …
Announcing the Peter Gabriel edition of Play With Your Music
You may have noticed a lot of writing about Peter Gabriel on the blog lately. This is because I’ve been hard at work with Alex Ruthmann, the NYU MusEDLab, and the crack team at Peer To Peer University on a brand new online class that uses some of Peter’s eighties classics to teach audio production. …
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Composing improvisationally with Ableton Live
I just completed a batch of new music, which was improvised freely in the studio and then later shaped into structured tracks. https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/sets/tabla-breakbeat-science I thought it would be helpful to document the process behind this music, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I expect to be teaching this kind of production a lot …
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