drum rudiments

I recently had to coach a drummer who was learning some rudiments like the rough half-drag and nine-stroke roll. Rudiments are really cool -- in fact I think anything is really cool that bumps up one's technique. But here's a site that not only does the rudiments on the snare but also in the context of a beat and a fill...nice applications!

rudiments from freedumlessons.com

On this page you can access all of the 40 rudiments offered, plus (scrolling down) there is a good description of each. Many, many thanks to Lionel Duperron for playing!

overtone singing

What is overtone singing? If you've ever heard Tibetan Buddhist chant you'll know. But here's a short, helpful tutorial.

Basically the tongue (and lips and so on) in this type of singing changes the overtones that are produced while on a constant fundamental pitch producing a "bagpipe" type sound -- i.e. a high changing melody over a low drone. For some examples on Amazing Grace:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO4Uh-Mini4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgyJ547oA4I&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFWYSW4vfcA&feature=fvw

This ties in to the post on subtractive synthesis, and makes clear that there's a lot more going on when one pitch is sounded than one commonly thinks.

tab snobs

I know that there are many, many guitarists out there who are "tab snobs", i.e. completely against the idea of communicating a music score in any other form than in familiar music notation. There are of course many, many, many more guitarists who can't read music or know where any notes are located on their instrument. So the tab snobs' position is somewhat understandable. But historically they're on the shakiest of ground, because if we go back and look at lute music from the 16th and 17th centuries it was only written in... (drum roll please) ...tablature. For the briefest of introductions check this site out. Also the Frederick Noad anthologies of Renaissance and Baroque music have some info regarding this, plus of course the Harvard Dictionary of Music, etc.

The reason that tab is useful is that it locates exactly where notes are to be played. In classical guitar scores this is settled by using a lot of extra information: fingerings, strings, positions, etc, which in a sense amounts to a tablature overlay on the score. I think that only offering up the notes without any indication of position and so on is lazy, unless we're only concerned about analyzing the notes and not playing them.

vinnie moore solo from morning star

Yup, more Vinnie (Moore). This is his solo from "Morning Star", the opening track from the album Time Odyssey (1988). The solo begins at 1:38. Click on the gif to get a bigger image.



There are a million great things to discuss about this solo, but I'll leave that for a bit later. I did forget to put in the chords over which he's playing, but they're not hard to hear. The main point is learn the solo, or parts you like, take it/them apart and see what else you can come up with!

There's a short Vinnie lick in this post.

negativland

So I dig Craig Baldwin's films a lot. The first one I saw (on DVD) a few years back was Spectres of the Spectrum. The next one was Sonic Outlaws, which takes as its main topic or point of departure a lawsuit that arose between the San Francisco based band Negativland and U2 (or perhaps more accurately U2's record label Island Records). I'll spare you the details here but I will give a shout out to Negativland. Check out that site. Basically the band and the film explore the issue of copyright, fair use and artwork creation from the point of view of originality. The word "explores" might be too generous, so let's say that there is an exploration down a certain avenue (mainly an anti-copyright one). Legitimate issues are raised, some breezed over...it's a worthwhile conversation.

naked women back at goodbye blue monday

Yes, playing again with Naked Women at Goodbye Blue Monday.
Tonight at 9pm.

the lineup:
Tom Blatt: bass
Matthew Polashek: sax
Charles Ramsey: guitar
Tom Swirly: electronic winds
Raymond Todd: 'bone + spoken word
Zebra: drums

...and Goldiva handling the dancing chores...

subtractive synthesis

A million years ago when I was very young I heard Wendy (but at that point in time Walter) Carlos' Switched On Bach. I think that it was the last movement of the 3rd Brandenburg Concerto that made my jaw drop and just sucked me into that world -- I desperately wanted a huge synthesizer that filled up rooms with equipment.

I only new the name of the synthesizer: Moog. I had no concept of "subtractive" or "analog" and so on. The first synth I ever got (much later) was the Roland Alpha Juno-2. Technically it's subtractive (it has digital oscillators and filters, etc, but has an analog sound). The only thing that made that hard was (1) there were no knobs -- all of the controls were buried inside and accessible only one parameter at a time; (2) I had no idea how synthesizers worked and consequently only made use of the presets occasionally making some modifications.

The thing is subtractive synthesis isn't hard to understand at all. And grasping it really makes it easier to understand what might happen when you start tweaking the parameters. (By the way this is absolutely not true of other types of synthesis like FM -- frequency modulation -- found on the Yamaha DX-7.) And these days software synths are cheap and easily available.

So what is subtractive synthesis? Here's my terse and possibly awkward definition: taking a basic sound (waveform) and filtering (i.e. subtracting out certain harmonics from) it to give a new (desired) sound. And if you're using a synth (software or otherwise) that's subtractive and want a little more info about it/them google the term and root around. Here are a couple of helpful sites:

DarkSonus
Yala
Wikipedia (this has a nice comparison with the human voice to make the mechanisms more easily understandable -- of course it's wikipedia and could change in a minute)

Here's a diagram I lifted from a KVR wiki which visually clarifies what's happening in this type of synthesis:



Of course in the end it's certainly not necessary to know how a synth works to use it effectively. But that knowledge can help you and aids in conceptualizing how sound works more generally.

midnight tango bass solo

So I was thinking this morning that I've never done a bass transcription here. I remembered that there was a short, cool one in DiMeola's "Midnight Tango" (from the most excellent cd Elegant Gypsy) played by Anthony Jackson, so here it is. The solo starts at 3:52. Though short it's very interesting -- click on the gif to get a bigger image.

There are a number of things worth mentioning here:

1. The first motive (rhythmically 2 eighth notes to a long note, melodically a double stop of a perfect fourth that jumps up a 3rd and comes back a 2nd) is unifying but falls on different beats in the first 2 measures. It comes back on the 2nd beat in the 3rd measure but is varied.

2. The descending leap of a P4 in measure 5 is echoed but varied slightly in measure 7 (on the same chord).

3. Nice pedal point on C in measure 5.

4. The rhythmic motive of 16th triplets with 2 (non-triplet) 16ths in measure 4 is used again in measure 6.

5. Tonally measure 6 is a little surprising because rather than playing a form of A major over the E major chord he plays the parallel major, i.e. he opts for E mixolydian.

6. Overall the solo moves from longer note values to more florid ones (a well-used technique of composers going back at least to the Renaissance if not earlier).

Of course all of the above points are good food for thought, but in no way are they meant to be taken as the only interesting points. Actually the one main point (if you will) is the emotive content of the solo. The details we've pointed out are good for us a improvisers -- they may make us think and become more creative -- but their real use is in attempting to find correspondences between them and the emotive effect that they produce.

Also if you're interested I transcribed Al's solo (sequentially right after the bass solo in this tune) years ago. I was a sweep picking fanatic back then, so be warned: I did re-finger it slightly to bring it into my world view. I wouldn't actually play it the same way these days.

the ukelele

I teach some ukulele and I came across this post. Worth reading and worth checking out the site overall...



The larger question that comes from this post is just how lame is it to choose an instrument based upon what cultural associations it has attracted? It's quite possible that what the author is saying is that "instead of practicing and getting good on the guitar you can choose the ukulele which will not burden you with issues of virtuosity, technical limitations, etc." That shouldn't ever be considered a sound rationale for picking an instrument, even though once picked much fruit might be born. This gets into the whole issue of using music as an identity, which I feel almost always is a road that leads only to mediocrity.

Put another way for one to develop as an artist one might have to persevere through some criticism. If one can't stand up against "hair metal wankers" and "tedious singer/songwriters" (from the post) how week is that person???

BTW if you've got some extra time and dig on the ukulele go to youtube and search ukulele and while my guitar gently weeps...you might be surprised.

songs in the key of z

This is just a book that I've poked around in, but I love the topic of "outsider" musicians. Here's the site associated with the book which has some other things to check out.

more guitar this sunday

Playing more guitar at an art opening today for my friend and great painter Alexander Percy.

The skinny:

Rio Penthouse Gallery
10 Fort Washington Ave
(between 159th + 160th Streets)
New York, NY
Sunday, April 11, 2010
4-7pm

practicing music as entertainment

Mass communication has made the means of delivering and distributing music easier and easier: up to the point where if one were to want to escape the grasp of music in an urban setting the only means of doing so would be earplugs. It is ubiquitous. From radio to tv to all sorts of tape and vinyl formats to cds to mp3s to video games...

But if we go back in time, say, 200 years there wasn't such a machine in place. In fact then the only means of hearing music was to hear it performed live. And live performances are not a great mechanism of mass delivery. What did suffice back in the day for that was sheet music. You could buy a Beethoven sonata or your favorite Schubert lieder or a Rossini overture arranged for solo piano and take it home and play it. Of course this presupposes that one could play, or even that there's a substantial population of "amateur" (I detest the term...more on that later) musicians who would consume the media in question. And there of course seemed to be.

This brings me to my main point: that practicing music is a great form of entertainment. Of course practicing music is often seen as a means to an end: usually a performance-of-some-sort end, and in this sense the term is loaded with laborious overtones. Also the word practice is highly equivocal: it might mean running scales, sight-reading through pieces or actually performing live (because performance needs practice, too). But no matter what you're practicing it should be fun -- though admittedly some things are just more fun than others (that's our world after all).

Globally viewed there's an advantage here, too. Were the world filled with people who practiced/played music at home, even just for themselves, there would be so much more music in the world! And a nice benefit to "professionals" is that there would be a much, much, much more informed audience base. And even if Stockhausen and Ornette Coleman always fetch a microscopically small slice of the population's attention, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent is still a large number when 6 billion people are under discussion.

random cd pulling: greensleeves

Soon because of spatial limitations I'm going to box all of my cds, and in an effort to get reacquainted with some of them I've begun shutting my eyes and randomly selecting one from the array. Today's pulling: Greensleeves: A Collection of English Lute Songs. The artists: Julianne Baird, Soprano and Ronn McFarlane, Lutes (both 8 and 10 coursed varieties). This cd, incidently, was nestled between King Crimson's Ladies of the Road and Stanley Jordan's Flying Home -- NOT the best way to organize any collection.



This recording hails from 1989 but I didn't get a hold of it until 1993 (I'm pretty certain of that date because I was working on songs from that repertoire for a recital in school). And this was a cd I didn't really buy: it came via a friend who had some sort of BMG mailing cd arrangement (like get 10 cds for a $1 or something like that). Anyway I dug/dig it. The playing and singing are both done deftly.

My favorite tune is Dowland's "Come Again", though I'm not entirely on board with the handling of the "To see, to hear, to touch..." section. It would've been nice to have Dowland's "Come, Heavy Sleep" but they can't include the entire repertoire, especially when the scope is broad composer wise.

Not all of the pieces are duets: there's a fair number of solo lute works thrown in, and they're played beautifully. As a guitarist I feel that these pieces sit on the guitar well, but it's always nice to hear them on lute: they're "lighter" if you will (they're also higher in pitch unless you correct for that on the guitar with a capo). The anonymous "Bonny Sweet Boy" was a nice surprise: it's a very melancholy piece, and kind of short.

One definite thing worth mentioning -- with a view to bridging what might seem prima facie as disparate styles of music -- is that this kind of Renaissance lute music is highly improvisational. That's not really true of the ricercare of da Milano, for instance, but in these stylized dance pieces it's really the case. I'm thinking particularly of the solo music, but it's also easy to imagine a lute accompanist spontaneously adding passages (or licks if you will) and experimenting to make the music as interesting and beautiful as possible (and not dull and the same every time). If you'd like to see that in action I would certainly recommend as a starter Frederick Noad's Renaissance Guitar book. It has solos, duets and songs. There's also a good book of only solo music by the Japanese Zen-on Guitar Library simply entitle Renaissance Guitar. I'm not so sure it's in print anymore: you can check out the Japanese site here: Zen-On. A used copy shouldn't be too hard to run down I'd think.

diamond dust

My all time favorite Jeff Beck tune (and there are a LOT of good ones from which to choose) from the classic album Blow By Blow. I think George Martin did the orchestration. This is the first chorus of the solo. Click on the image to get a bigger gif:



Some things to note about the tune: a couple of minMaj7ths and it's in 5. Also Beck does a great job of changing up whether he's starting phrases right on the 1 of the measure or not. And I noted on the chart where he goes for the Lydian mode.

Some issues: I did this transcription years ago, and even if I did it today I'd say don't get too hung up on the rhythmic values. Also I don't think that I'd play the notes the same way/places (but the notes themselves are accurate). And the chords get kind of approximate here and there...having said that it'll get you in the game. Lastly I did this in PowerTab (which is awesome) but the accidentals aren't really the ones I'd like to see. The only way around this would be to have the key signature change every measure or so at sections which is not really a great way to go. A good exercise in thinking enharmonically.

If you're interested in learning the head I have that up on my site:
diamond dust head.

This tune should be a standard.

repurposing pentatonics pars iii

One interesting thing to do with pentatonic scales is to use them as a way of creating totally chromatic music -- i.e. music constantly using all 12 equal tempered pitch classes.

Obviously a pentatonic scale has 5 different tones. If you subtract that from the total available 12 you're left with 7 pitches. The interesting thing here is that most scales have 7 tones. Consequently if one person/group of performers utilizes a pentatonic scale and another person/group makes use of some 7 note scale the result will be that all 12 tones are being used.

So what 7-toned scale is left over? Let's use a C minor pentatonic scale and see:

C minor Pentatonic: c, eb, f, g, bb
Remaining notes: c#, d, e, f#, g#, a, b

Rearranging these 7 remaining tones we get:

a, b, c#, d, e, f#, g#

...that's right, an A major scale! And for me it's easier to think of this as a B dorian:

b, c#, d, e, f#, g#, a

and that's because then we get this easy-to-remember relationship:

Any minor pentatonic scale played along with a dorian mode 1/2 step below the minor pentatonic will yield the total chromatic.

But there are other ways of conceptualizing the relationship between these 2 scales. E.g. C minor pentatonic is also Eb major pentatonic, which means that there's a tritone relationship between the 2 scales (Eb and A major). And actually this one is pretty nice because the tritone is symmetric, so you could flip the scale types while keeping the roots and you'll still end up with all 12 tones (A minor pentatonic and Eb major).

This way of conceiving of totally chromatic music has a nice benefit of building in some easy to understand structure...give it a go and see what happens.

See also: repurposing pentatonics part i, part ii.

tone matrix online synthesizer

Here's a cool little online sine wave synth.

It's very visual: just click in the grid where you want your sound to go and listen to the results. So you don't have to think like a musician: in fact you can just try to make pictures and hear what happens. You can also think about how symmetric your visual patterns are and how that affects the music produced (it seems to me that asymmetric patterns are more interesting, probably because they repeat so fast that symmetry is achieved that way).

The notes constitute a D major pentatonic scale, by the way, which means that it's this collection of tones:

d, e, f#, a, b, d...

You can also figure that temporally the 16 steps give you something like 16 sixteenth notes, or 4 quarter notes. If you look at it like this the quarter notes are coming by at M.M. 120.


Extremely fun.

the many flavors of 7th chords

Seventh chords are triads that have had a third added to their uppermost member, the 5th (a triad contains some form of 1, 3 and 5). The third will 'skip' a note if you're thinking alphabetically, meaning that it skips a scale degree -- there the 6th -- and so we end up with a tone that is a 7th above the root of the original triad.

OK, my apologies for such a convoluted definition. Since a picture is worth a thousand words here's a C major seventh (the gray notes are not part of the chord):


Looking at this it's clear that a seventh chord can also be seen as a triad with the interval of a 7th added to the root of that triad. Regarding this approach the first thing to keep in mind is that there are two main intervals of a 7th: major and minor. (There's actually another one that comes into play and we'll talk about it in a minute.) So if we recall that there are 4 basic triads we should be able to produce (4 triads x 2 types of sevenths =) 8 types of 7th chords.

So the major triad gives us a major 7th and a dominant 7th.

The minor triad: a minor/major 7th and a minor 7th.

The augmented: a major 7th +5 and a dominant 7th +5

The diminished...well, let's talk about this one for a second. Here we really need to look at the first way (of stacking thirds) of constructing sevenths to see how these come about. We could slap a major 7th interval onto the root of a diminished triad but in practice this doesn't happen: it's enharmonically equivalent to a B major triad with a b9. But the real reason that it doesn't "happen" is that seventh chords developed historically from voice leading and from functional harmonic concerns. The diminished triad is a chord that came about as a VII chord, and in neither the major nor the minor modes will we get a VII chord that is diminished and has a major seventh.

So what chords do we get? If we add a minor seventh to the triad we get a (classically appelled) half-diminished chord. On modern charts you're most likely to see this called a minor 7 b5.

Then there is a fully diminished seventh chord: it results from stacking minor thirds up from the root. In the key of C we could start on B and get:
b, d, f, a-flat.
And if we added another minor 3rd we'd be back to b. (If we examine the sort of 7th here we don't have a major or a minor variety: in this case it's a diminished 7th.)

This chord is unique because any of it's tones could be the root (and because of this in 19th century music it was used a pivot chord in modulations). Mo' on dat in a later post...

There is one more seventh that is not a basic triad with an added third. It kind of results from whole tone harmony, or it can be seen as an analogue of the dominant 7th +5:
the dominant 7th b5:

You won't really see a C-E-Gb chord floating around out there all on it's own, but this seventh chord is not uncommon at all (and not just in jazz: it comes up in Granados' Valses Poeticos if memory serves).

Play the sevenths, use them, they're beautiful...

the wayward cloud

This is a 2005 film by Tsai Ming-Liang (and in a way uses two characters from his 2001 film What Time Is It There?). It's a musical, or has musical numbers. And the music is great: it recalls 50s, 40s American music with singing in Mandarin.


Basically the setting of this film is a drought-stricken Taiwan where water is really hard to come by. Mix in a lot of watermelons. And a porn star and the filming of his scenes. Yeah, you get it: this is NOT a musical for the entire family -- in fact it's probably a fit for only the smallest minority -- though the film apparently made a lot of bread. If the image above doesn't prove that then check out the trailer (you have to be over 18 to watch it...the subtitles in the trailer are in French). You can hear (and see) in the trailer that the musical numbers really do constitute a "celebration of life": colorful, imaginative, funny, lascivious, weird...that's life, right?

The film's title in Chinese is 天邊一朵雲.

stage shows

So I happened to see a band the other night (they took to the stage after the band I came to see played). They were really good: all of them had command of their instruments/voices, their songs were highly emotive and interesting and so on.

Buuuuuuut I had one issue, a pet peeve of mine, because I've been involved in these situations, namely please make a set list before you go on stage! I guess the idea behind no set list is to give off a vibe of "we're really laid back," and "we're so good that whatever we decide to play will work," etc. And several years ago I saw Chick Corea's Electric Band and he seemed to have that approach. And, hey, if you're at Chick's level you can make this approach work (though Chick was almost a comedian in between songs which added to the show and made his laisez-faire approach to the next tune really work).

The issue is most people really aren't there. So if you don't have legions of fans worldwide I'd give this advice: make a set list. It has 2 main beneficial side effects:

1. The set you're playing will stand a better chance of having some well-defined, good shape. Calling out the tunes you want to play next can yield good tunes, but all minor key, sad songs might get bunched up where you don't want them. Also it's a good idea to consider the energy that needs to be projected at the opening and closing of sets.

2. The performance should be a performance and not a rehearsal on stage in front of people. Others may not be so bothered by this, but I find it highly annoying to have to hear the discussions of what song would be good to do next, etc.

There's another possible benefit, too. The band I saw the other night attempted a cover and failed, started over, and stopped again. They proclaimed, "We didn't write this," though they did have a chart for the tune in front of them. It seems that a set list might concretize the fact that all the tunes need to be at a performable level.

OK, point made...

sarah bush art opening

So I'm playing some classical guitar at an art opening tomorrow. The artist is Sarah Bush and her stuff is wonderful.


The opening is at the Made With Love Bakery. It's from 6-9pm. And yeah, that bakery is in Jersey City. If you're in the area come on out...

The Made With Love Bakery is located at

530 Jersey Ave
Jersey City, NJ
Saturday, April 3, 2010

(not too far from the PATH)

perfume's vitamin drop

Yeah, another Perfume post. This one not just because they're super-hyper-ultra cute but because of the synth part: it's noticeably detuned. By a microtone? Anyway hearing it, and hearing how catchy it still is, should cause one to wonder just how far afield one might be able to stray in pop (and other styles of) music and still remain palatable...



Here's the link straight-up if you prefer it that way.