Continuing Numerical Notion
I get that this whole idea makes it seems like turning music into math and that is going to seem uncool to some people. I am not trying to make math seem cool. Advanced math is interesting to me because it’s completely beyond my comprehension. I know that it makes sense, but I don’t know how. I’ve never been a math nerd. Trying to explain music theory to someone who understands Calculus and Physics like it’s something that don’t immediately understand fully already makes me seem like the moron I am.
This is not advanced math, it’s very simple. Think about why Math sucks, C- minus Algebra I students who taught themselves guitar or whatever. It’s the bullshit like memorizing multiplication tables and equations, right? It’s the exact opposite of fun. Advanced Music Theory is kinda the same thing. You’ve probably noticed this if you tried to pick up a book on it but didn’t want to admit it. It’s not the subject matter, it’s the thought process. The Circle of Fifths is just like multiplications tables. They just tell you it makes sense without explaining it and you have to drill it and memorize it. Most people just muddle through. If you do learn it, you just know it without really understanding why it works. That’s my experience. Musicians (even some teachers) either don’t learn theory or don’t really understand it.
I think there’s a way to break it down. Just like you can break multiplication down into addition. It takes a little longer at first, because if you just memorize the answers you can just spit them out. But with practice, it’s gonna be just as fast and eventually you’ll know it the same, but you’ll also know the reason for the answer.
When you use numbers for the notes, the interval is apparent through simple subtraction. Here’s a chart for the differences:
1=minor 2nd (half step)
2=major 2nd (whole step)
3=minor 3rd (step & a half)
4=major 3rd
5=perfect 4th
6=tritone (aug. 4th/dim. 5th)
7=perfect 5th
8=minor 6th
9=major 6th
10=minor 7th
11=major 7th
And of course a difference of 12 is back to the same number an octave higher or lower. I’m working on a modified staff system to make this practically useful as written music for an instrument. But you’ve got to understand how this works as a concept first.
At this point you might be thinking this is not very useful for music that spans more than one octave, which is most music you’d want to listen to. Or hell, even any scale that doesn’t start at 0 has to cross over 0 and why are we doing this again? You’ve got to keep in mind that with lettered notation you’re doing the same thing with arbitrary values. The note after G is G# and the note after that is A. Then A#, then B, then C. Quickly then, what is the interval between A and C? You can either memorize that this is minor 3rd, or you can subtract 0 from 3. Easy. But what about G to C? It’s better to think of it like a clock:
image courtesy internet clock store, whatever
It helps to be on military time. You’re going to have to trust me on this. %
Benedict Drew | Non-Musician Complex
This was a free download exclusive to The Wire magazine’s website in April 2012, but it still works. I probably seem like the kind of guy who reads the Wire, as I’ve spent more than a couple years making music that no one likes. But I can’t afford the thing. Yet, if I’m really dedicated to this weirdness, can I afford not to read it? Maybe I’m a poseur with this stuff. I like loud guitars all right? And drums? Beats, man. Verses, choruses. I enjoy them. I enjoy this stuff, too. But sometimes I think I’m not enjoying it enough. Should I be enjoying it? I’m not really getting it.
I feel like an album like this should come with some kind of artistic statement. If something’s not inherently enjoyable, then it must be trying to say something. And if we know what it’s trying to say, we can judge if it’s succeeding or failing. I don’t know what this guy is going for so I have no idea. People never thought of liner notes as artistic statements, but they often served that didn’t they? I think we fucked up giving up on liner notes.
The tracks are mostly the names of instruments or just objects he makes some sounds with in an unconventional, or perhaps conventionally unconventional way. On the last track he spells “various” wrong. On purpose? This track is pretty harsh. Spun this record a few times in the background and now I’m just sitting here through the whole thing seeing if there’s a punchline I missed. “varios lengths of wire vibrating” Sounds like a machine in need of service. I mean, I kinda dig it. I like how it winds down from the many vibrating wires or whatever it actually is, to just a couple, then one. But is it supposed to be a parody of this kind of music or not? It could just come to a %
A$AP Mob | Trillmatic
The eternal question of modern pop music but especially Hip-hop: do guest artists belong in the title of the song? I think there’s some kind of music publishing rule. Same with special symbols and such. But let’s not worry about that. We just need to know what we’re talking about. It’s Trillmatic by A$AP Mob. It’s a single, with no b-side. And of course it features Method Man, which is what got my attention. Altho it may not be in the title of the song, it is in the youtube description and how else are you going to find out about download only singles.
Personally, I like the collective credit. I refuse to consider Wu Tang Clan ‘old school’, but let’s call it ‘Classic Hip-Hop’. It gives it that feel. And it makes it seem like all these other dudes in the video had something to do with the song when it’s almost entirely a solo for A$AP Nast. (Altho one of those dudes must be the producer of the song, Ty Beats.) The whole One Guy Against The Whole Damn World thing never appealed to me too much and that pretty much dominates now. This group (or their management) seems keenly aware of this and has taken the Wu Tang route in reverse, introducing solo rappers A$AP Rocky and Ferg first (which I’ve been vaguely aware of) and now you’re getting more of the whole group. And altho I haven’t heard any of that stuff which has this explicitly retro-sounding backdrop, the rapping itself is the classic East Coast skill-based wordplay that is supposedly dead. Just makes me dumb I guess. Or lazy, really. I’ve gotten like old dudes who won’t stop talking about the Stones and Zeppelin like there’s not any good rock bands like that anymore and there are, they just don’t play stadiums anymore and there’s not a billboard for them on every corner. You’ve got to look.
The song borrows its hook from Nice & Smooth’s Hip Hop Junkies. Which is interesting; it’s self-consciously referencing the 90s overall and through the magic of passage of time, stuff with a Bobby Brown-type chorus occupies the same mental space as the grimyness of years-later Wu Tang simply because it was the same decade. It’s just interesting how that happens.
So I guess they got me is what I’m saying. I’m going to have to pay attention to this stuff again.
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Understanding Why Lettered Notation is Illogical
Music is not Science. There’s some interesting sciencey things about music, but music itself doesn’t have to perfect or logical. Classical notation using letters is a great example. It hasn’t changed for hundreds of years altho the values and assignments are largely arbitrary. Here’s the notes on a keyboard:
Most pianos and keyboards will be tuned to A440 in equal temperament. Some have an issue with this but my beef is the assignment of the black and white keys, or really the concept of flats and sharps as they are assigned to the letters A-G.
The argument against redesigning this system from scratch may be that music is more about intuition than logic and that the existing system has prevailed precisely because of this and anyway, it’s all pretty logical it you study it long enough. But this is the problem. It only seems right because you accept these arbitrary assignments as a kind of Truth that is unquestioned. Staring from this, a logical construct is formed around it that supports itself and eventually, seems intuitive. But really, the process involves rote memorization which is wholly unintuitive. For example, the notes A and B are a whole step apart, but B and C are a half step. Why? There is a historical reason, but also, the notes themselves must be considered as nonsense. The white keys on the piano may seem “brighter” sounding or more “natural” in some way but this is only through repetition, ear training, and relative placement of notes. An older standard of note values places the A above middle C at around 415 Hz, a full half-step below A440. If a keyboard is tuned to the values of the notes when those notes were invented, the keyboard looks like this:
(it actually will look the same if you don’t paint the note values on there)
Unless you have perfect pitch (trained to 440), you might not even notice a piano has been tuned this way. It might sound off at first, but you’d get used to it. Time has proven this. The system of equal temperament is another example, but regarding the intervals. We are accustomed to hearing notes and intervals slightly wrong from what they were first intended to the point were the “right” values now sound wrong. Eliminating the arbitrary system of letter values with sharps and flats would make learning notes and intervals easier for new students.
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V/A | Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap
In the 60s and 70s, Lou Reed was legit down with the streets. But by the 80s he was punning about the dangers of strange candy. (Which makes him perhaps an innovator of proto-Modern J-pop. But focus.) Crack had just hit the streets. Social programs were being cut. Thousands were dying of AIDS. Lou had lost touch.
Luckily non-white people were also rapping.
Hold on. This is only about what it is. That’s the beauty of Ice-T’s documentary:
It’s also beautifully photographed. And it’s even better than this trailer if that’s not selling you. I don’t think it sold that many people went it came out but it’s there forever so you should check it out. I haven’t been into Hip-hop much in the last few years but I’ll always respect it as an artform. This even makes me take some people seriously I didn’t before, like Kanye. No Jay-Z in this thing, but they got Kanye. Even his best lines used to seem like throwaway jokes to me, but he can pull off a convincing acapella (if not freestyle). And it was funny hearing different stories contradict each other, I always like to hear KRS-One’s version of things.
I should probably get the DVD. I just watched it on Netflix and got the soundtrack. You can enjoy the soundtrack itself as a good mixtape album with some exclusive freestyles, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an intro to or overview of Rap like I would recommend the movie. I feel like the movie is really made for people who do not take Rap or Hip-hop culture seriously, but there’s so many movies about “Hip-hop culture” that really gloss over the Rap part. The doc proves it’s point pretty thoroughly but this soundtrack is a little random. There’s no chronology at all and of course they are limited by rights issues and I assume it’s Ice-T personal taste here, but it doesn’t include all of the freestyles in the movie, I would say the best ones are left out. (Wiki has a complete list of all the songs.)
My personal favorite inclusions are It Takes Two which was so huge when I was a kid but people forget that one outside of the East Coast I think and it doesn’t sound like anything else so it doesn’t fit into most history retellings. And P.S.K. by Schoolly D. Ice-T’s early stuff ripped off Schoolly pretty hard I thought, but he stayed underground so most people don’t even know that. That was cool of him to include.
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