Sampling keyboards
One of the greatest weirdnesses of electronic music is the sampling keyboard. You press a key and any sound recording you want pops out, at whatever pitch. The recent passing of John Hughes made me...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Good old Grateful Dead
See also a post about the Dead and electronic music. Whenever I play guitar, it comes out sounding a lot like Jerry Garcia. I can’t help it. From the ages of fifteen to twenty, my guitar-learning...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The case for sampling
My friend Adam, a non-musician but devoted music fan, asked me why sampling is good. He’s used to hearing me defend sampling from the accusation that it’s bad, but he’d never heard a positive argument...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Grateful Dead and electronica
In keeping with my posts thinking of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix as electronic musicians, I thought I’d round out the techno-hippie trifecta with the Dead. Their fans might lean to the crunchy granola...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Harmonica guide
I have a new harmonica student starting today, so while I gather materials for him, I figured I’d put them in a blog post too. I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Samples and community
The defining musical experience of my lifetime is hearing familiar samples in unfamiliar contexts. For me, the experience is usually a thrill. For a lot of people, the experience makes them angry....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Participatory music vs presentational music
In this post, I’ll be doing some public-facing note-taking on Music As Social Life: The Politics Of Participation by Thomas Turino. I’m especially interested in chapter two: Participatory and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Making better citizens through dance
Public-facing note-taking for Philosophy of Music Education with David Elliott This week, I’m taking a look at two chapters from a new book on the red-hot topic of artistic citizenship, the social...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Real vs hyperreal vs surreal
You can put all recorded music techniques and gestures into three categories: realist, hyperrealist, and surrealist. These categories have soft boundaries that broadly overlap. Nevertheless, I find...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Key centers in the Grateful Dead’s China>Rider
My emotions about the Grateful Dead have gone from intense obsession as a teenager, to embarrassment about my former intense obsession in my 20s, to nostalgic re-embracing of my fandom in my 30s. In...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Help on the Way -> Slipknot! -> Franklin’s Tower
In this post, I talk through my favorite Grateful Dead prog epic, the three-song suite of “Help on the Way,” “Slipknot!” and “Franklin’s Tower.” The Dead wrote many of these epic suites, usually a few...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleRemixing the Grateful Dead
There is no corpus of music I know better than the albums and concert recordings of the Grateful Dead. Some people memorize the works of Shakespeare; I, for better or for worse, spent my youth...
View ArticleJohn Oswald said he likes my Stevie Wonder/Laurie Anderson mashup
I got an unexpected email today from the legendary composer/remixer John Oswald, whose Plunderphonics project was a major inspiration for me. (For example, check out “Dab,” “Power,” and the terrifying...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleBrokedown Palace
My stepfather died a year and a half ago, but thanks to the pandemic, we’re only now able to have a memorial service for him. My sister, stepsiblings and I are going to sing a Grateful Dead classic:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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....
View ArticleSpoonful
One of the most intense and arresting recordings I have ever heard is Howlin’ Wolf’s recording of “Spoonful” by Willie Dixon. This is on my list of classic songs with no chord changes, along with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Defining key centers with rhythm
Let’s say you have two chords, G7 and C. According to Western classical theory, these two chords establish that you are in the key of C. The G7 is tense and unresolved, and it makes you yearn for the...
View ArticleSmokestack Lightning
The twelve-bar blues is not the only blues form. There is also a whole world of one-chord blues grooves over drones, pedal tones and static riffs. Howlin’ Wolf has several classic songs that follow...
View Article
