In case you've ever wondered what it's like to be me: this is what's been in my head for like the last 24 hours.



That's right: 5.195 seconds of A Tribe Called Quest's "Clap Your Hands", on loop, forever.

I felt like putting together another lesson, so here we go.

LESSON 2: FILTERED BASSThis lesson is about a technique that was popular in the early to mid '90s (the golden age of hip hop, in my opinion). Referred to by some as "filtered bass", this is essentially where you take an old soul record and apply a low-pass filter to it, making the bass ( Read more... )

So I've been feeling an urge for about a week now to put together some of my thoughts on how hip hop music works, in a technical, production sense. I'm starting today and this will be something I occasionally assemble for my LiveJournal. They'll be short form essays with accompanying music, some created by me and some clips of classic hip hop songs ( Read more... )

I was listening to the Dr. Octagon song "No Awareness" recently and was reminded of why I like the chorus so much. Lyrically it's not what you expect from a chorus in a hip-hop song:

"And you say no awareness
Swift as gold"It doesn't rhyme or have discernible meter or anything. Except it works, because it has consonance. It really sounds like this ( Read more... )

Remember a while back, when I said I thought the Pixies' "Cecilia Ann" would be the best chiptune ever? Well, thanks to a little cheating with musagi and some guitar tabs, I now have a brief proof of concept using the opening notes of the song (warning, pretty loud):



For reference, here's the original.

So I heard this song on satellite radio, called "An Imagined Affair" by Elbow. It is decent enough, although entirely a Coldplay ripoff (which is dubious in and of itself). But what caught my attention is that there's a guitar lick in the chorus that is straight out of Everyday Shooter. The first embedded mp3 has the chorus.

The second embedded mp3 ( Read more... )

So I was browsing through del.icio.us' help files and discovered that they have system tags for file extensions. Meaning that you can go here and listen to (and stream with a click!) any mp3s that people have been bookmarking ( Read more... )

I love Dan Bejar, and his band Destroyer. Here's a track from their new album, Trouble in Dreams, called "Dark Leaves Form a Thread".

He has a knack for moments that knock me on my ass. Around 1:38, after a bunch of na na nas:  "Nah, it's cool, you go, I'll stay, perfectly at home with this dread--DARK LEAVES FORM A THREAD!!" It reminds me of the " ( Read more... )

So I finally managed to import my iTunes library into a SQL database. It wasn't that hard, except for the stupid data integrity filtering stuff I had to do.

Anyway, I am now able to do stuff like ask the database who my top artists are, in terms of number of songs I own by them:

70    Of Montreal
70    Pavement
61    Miles Davis
59    Radiohead
46    ( Read more... )

I dreamt last night that I was a member of the original Public Enemy, before Chuck D. and Flava Flav joined the group. (Historically speaking, Chuck and Flav were actually the original members, so my dream is totally inaccurate.) Basically, though, it was just me and the Bomb Squad making beats. And then this guy named Smooth Chuck came along and ( Read more... )