music
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Keywords: Genre & Style Thinking
Genre & style thinking is reflecting on the kind of music you could be making. You may find inspiration in what you listen to, but the music you could be making is more than the sum of your fandoms. In fact, it probably isn’t like anything you already know. Try to imagine its sound— its… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Ravel/Peter Phillips, “Miroirs: No.5, La Vallée des Cloches” (1904-1906). MIDI’s non-electronic predecessor was the piano roll, a punch card-like storage medium that was used to direct “player” pianos in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Piano rolls were continuous (looped) rolls of paper with perforated holes whose vertical and horizontal locations on the sheet represented,… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
M.C. Escher, “Relativity” (1953) Stereolab, “Crest” (1993). I first heard this song—and learned about Stereolab—during a musicology graduate seminar over twenty years ago. Another student had chosen the track as way to talk about a topic in musical time which I don’t recall, but the music mesmerized me and I’ve never forgotten it. Years later… Continue reading
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Notes On Virtual Instruments
If you played a musical instrument when you were growing up you spent years getting to know how the instrument worked and how to work with it. It took time—concentrated lesson time with teachers and diffuse time alone, practicing for thousands of hours. You learned good tone, technique, repertoire, and how to play this repertoire… Continue reading
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Perspective Lessons
(Photo: David Hockney) “I feel the important part of making a track is to recognize the point where you have to listen to what the track wants. This point comes in around 40 – 50% of the whole process, where it’s not so much about what you want with the track anymore, but what the… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Benge, Twenty Systems, “1981 Yamaha CS70M.” Benge (Ben Edwards) is an English musician with a longtime interest in analog synthesis. His 2008 recording Twenty Systems is an archeology of iconic synthesizers that traces a history of selected models from the late 1960s to the late 80s. Each track features a single instrument recorded without effects,… Continue reading
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Performance Lessons
“The performer necessarily comes at the music from within […] Most often the performance situation catapults a musician into a rare and unusual condition, one that reveals the basic features of experience with eloquent directness, free, at least to some extent, from the usual overlay of cultural and philosophical presuppositions that nearly always obstruct our… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Stars Of The Lid, “Even If You’re Never Awake.” Good music often doesn’t go how you thought it would go. It may have parts and sections that repeat, it may use recognizable sounds, it may introduce themes, it may have a discernible structure, but still it manages to surprise you by how it goes and… Continue reading
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