I made a new track for teaching swing
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
8M ago
I just finished my Groove Theories book proposal and sent it out, that was about twenty years of very slow work followed by two weeks of very fast work. So fingers crossed on that. I included two sample chapters, one on blues tonality, and one on swing. For the swing chapter, I wanted to find examples of the same piece of music played with and without swing for ease of comparison. In class, I usually play “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker Suite and “Sugar Rum Cherry” by Duke Ellington. This isn’t an exact comparison, though, because Ellington does more than change the time fe ..read more
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Warp factor
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
1y ago
In this post, I dig into a profound and under-appreciated expressive feature of Ableton Live: warp markers, the “handles” that enable you to grab hold of audio and stretch it precisely. Warp markers have practical applications for getting your grooves sounding the way you want, but they also open up unexpected windows into the nature of musical time itself. The image below shows an audio clip containing the Amen break. The warp markers are the little yellow arrows across the top. Each one corresponds to the onset of a drum hit. Think of an audio clip as a rubber band. At its original tempo ..read more
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Lonely Woman
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
1y ago
I have always had a hard time with Ornette Coleman, but I love “Lonely Woman”, because it manages to be both extremely weird and extremely catchy. Notice that at 2:09 during Ornette’s solo, someone goes “Woo!” Rightly so. Ornette never notated “Lonely Woman”, and even if he had wanted to, it is not at all obvious how he could have. But I wanted to learn it, and to get the nuances down, I needed to transcribe it somehow. The pitches are not the hard part, aside from a few unusual note choices. The real challenge is the rhythm. It defies easy analysis. People sometimes approach it as totally un ..read more
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Dilla Time in “Chameleon”
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
1y ago
After reading and re-reading Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time, now I’m listening to music with new attention to rhythmic subtleties. I have especially been digging into the relationship between J Dilla and Herbie Hancock–Dilla sampled Herbie on “Get Dis Money” and “Zen Guitar.” That digging made me go back to my favorite Herbie tune with fresh ears. This might be the funkiest thing in the history of funk. But what makes it so funky? I wanted to investigate the microtiming of that incredible opening groove to find out. The track begins with Herbie’s unaccompanied synth bassline. You can see my ana ..read more
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Theory Hacks with Ableton
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
1y ago
I’m happy to announce the release of my first project for the good folks at Ableton, a Classroom Project called Theory Hacks. It’s a set of free resources for educators who want to teach music theory and songwriting/composition to beginners using Live. In this post, I explain the pedagogical motivations for the project. Live’s MIDI effects have some potentially profound implications for the teaching of music theory. Live’s Scale device allows you to easily play in any scale or mode. If you set the device to, say, F-sharp Lydian dominant mode, then any note you play on the keyboard will be map ..read more
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Music Theory Songs
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
1y ago
Ashanti Mills from my Patreon had a brilliant idea. He said, hey, you know how you combined interviews with Toni Blackman with hip-hop songs to explain hip-hop pedagogy? You should do that with music theory: have songs that explain their musical content to you. This is one of those ideas that seems obvious as soon as I hear it, but it took Ashanti suggesting it to make me realize that. So: here is my first batch! Music Theory Songs by Ethan Hein The whole thing came together very quickly. In some cases, I took teaching materials I already developed in Noteflight, exported the MIDI, dropped it ..read more
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Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
1y ago
It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so:  But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this: The beauty of interactive interfaces is that your ears support your eyes and vice versa. However, any visualization scheme will work better for some concepts than for others. Standard Western music notation evolved over a long period of time to be human-readable, but it also evolved in a particular cultural context, one whe ..read more
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I Want You Back
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
1y ago
Why is “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 such an uncontainable explosion of joy? It has the happiest chord progression ever, which I wrote about in a previous post. But the harmony is just the icing on the cake. The real heart of this tune is the groove. Let’s have a look! I transcribed some key sections. The syncopation in this groove is devastating. To understand why it works so well, though, first you have to understand what syncopation is. It helps to see rhythm on a circular grid. Here’s the main drum pattern from “I Want You Back” on the Groove Pizza. Use this as a visual reference fo ..read more
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Kicking out the JAMS
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
1y ago
That’s JAMS as in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I wrote a review of Ableton Live 11 as a tool for musicology and education for their new issue. if you don’t have university library access and I’ll send you a PDF ..read more
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Lonely Woman but it’s Gregorian chant
The Ethan Hein » Ableton
by Ethan
1y ago
This morning I saw this tweet: Lonely Woman but it's Gregorian chant — wayne&wax (@wayneandwax) October 30, 2020 I read it and thought, huh, that’s interesting. So I opened an Ableton session and put “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman on a track. I have a few Hildegard von Bingen pieces in my iTunes, and I dragged them onto other tracks. Literally the first one I tried superimposed on Ornette was “Responsorium I: Nobilissima viriditas 39 Item de virginibus (VI)” performed by Ensemble San Felice. They sounded incredible together, without my doing any aligning or transposing at all. I did a ..read more
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