The best guitar solo ever recorded is in Prince’s 1986 classic “Kiss.” Don’t be fooled by Wendy Melvoin’s mimed guitar playing in the video; Prince himself played the solo. It might seem unfair that one of the best singers, songwriters, dancers, bandleaders and producers in history should also have played history’s best guitar solo, but, …
Tag Archives: swing
Swing primer
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah” – Duke Ellington Aside from the blues, swing is the United States’ most significant musical innovation. People typically associate its rubbery, sensual feel with jazz, but swing is everywhere in the musics descended from the African …
What is going on in this Noname beat?
Hip-hop in the post-Dilla era has been pushing the boundaries of rhythmic dissonance. The coolest and most mysterious groove I’ve heard in a rap song lately is “Sunny Duet” by Noname. The rhythms here are bananas and I struggled for quite a while to figure out what was going on. I got very excited for …
Children of Production
My four-year-old daughter is currently super into “Children of Production” from Parliament’s classic 1976 album The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, their followup to Mothership Connection. If that album called down the holy mothership, this one introduces you to its occupants. This is the kind of groove that sounds effortless until you try playing it. Here’s …
My favorite Jerry Garcia riff
Before he wrecked his brain with heroin in the 1980s, Jerry Garcia was my favorite guitarist in the world. I was so saturated in his music during my key guitar-learning years that now everything I play tends to sound like him, up to and including Bach violin partitas. Here’s my single favorite four-bar passage of …
Donna Lee
Here’s a Charlie Parker recording that’s not widely known outside of jazz, but is absolutely foundational inside it: This recording features a very young Miles Davis on trumpet. Miles later said that he wrote the tune, and that its copyright attribution to Charlie Parker was a record label error. I believe him. It sounds more …
The Groove Pizzeria
For his NYU music technology masters thesis, Tyler Bisson created a web app called Groove Pizzeria, a polyrhythmic/polymetric extension of the Groove Pizza. Click the image to try it for yourself. Note that the Groove Pizzeria is still a prototype, and it doesn’t yet have the full feature set that the Groove Pizza does. …
Deconstructing the bassline in Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon”
See also an analysis of this tune’s amazing drum groove. If you have even a passing interest in funk, you will want to familiarize yourself with Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.” If you are preoccupied and dedicated to the preservation of the movement of the hips, then the bassline needs to be a cornerstone of your practice.
Seeing classic beats with the Groove Pizza
We created the Groove Pizza to make it easier to both see and hear rhythms. The next step is to create learning experiences around it. In this post, I’ll use the Pizza to explain the structure of some quintessential funk and hip-hop beats. You can click each one in the Groove Pizza, where you can customize or alter it as you see …
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Musical simples: Stir It Up
The I-IV-V chord progression is one of the cornerstones of Western music, uniting everything from Mozart to Missy Elliott. Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” is as clear and concise an introduction to I-IV-V as you could ask for. The song uses three chords: A, D, and E. They’re shown in the diagram below as turquoise, …