The rest of the photos in this post were taken by my sister at the party.

The other thing that happened is that I discovered the Michael Jackson a capella archive on Hip Hop Is Read. A capellas are versions of a song with just the vocals isolated (though the MJ ones include some instrumentation too.) Getting access to these things set me off on a furious wave of sampling and remixing. Enjoy the results below.

My first thought when confronted with all the a capellas was to take a single song and lay it over a different beat, like this awesome batch of Fela Kuti samples:

Rock With Fela

Download audio file (Ethan_Hein_Rock_With_Fela.mp3)

“Rock With You” vs “Overtake Overtake Don Overtake”

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Next I got more ambitious and tried mashing up a bunch of songs together. The a capella for “Jam” has this awesome electronic percussion which sounds great over the breakdown section from “PYT.” So that was a no-brainer.

ABC Jam

Download audio file (Ethan_Hein_ABC_Jam.mp3)

“Jam” vs “ABC” vs “PYT” vs “Blame It On The Boogie”

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My friend Julia observed that a lot of the a capellas are for MJ’s relatively lame last few albums. She thought it would be interesting if I showed those songs some tough love, as she put it. It felt like a good challenge. I’m less familiar with that late period stuff, so it was easier to hear the vocals as musical raw material without being hung up on their original context. I think this is by far the best of the three tracks I did, it has the most of myself in it. For percussion, I used drums from “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” along with an atmospheric beat by Aphex Twin and some hand percussion by Glen Velez.

Like A Comet

Download audio file (Ethan_Hein_Like_A_Comet.mp3)

“Gone Too Soon” vs “Earth Song” vs “HIStory” vs “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” vs “Weathered Stone” vs “Golden Seal”

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My fantasy for the future of music is that every song gets released in stem format with all of the tracks separated out and conveniently sliced at all the rhythmic events. At this point I mostly view legal high-quality downloads and compact disks as a way to get access to decent-sounding samples. MP3s get a little crunchy with all the compression and decompression. What do you say, copyright holders? Want to make life easier for me? Or do I need to keep scrounging stuff off the web?

I really feel like recorded music belongs more to the fans than the recording artist. It’s weird and creepy the way music fans want to possess their idols — I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But there’s no harm whatsoever in wanting to possess recordings. The desire to repurpose the ideas that excite you is where all art comes from.

The greatest curse and blessing of Michael Jackson’s life was the insane degree to which he belonged to the fans. He never had a chance of developing a personality independent of his absurd fame. In the aftermath of his death, the saddest thing I heard anyone say on TV was when his friend Gladys Knight observed (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

We did this to him. We made him so famous. We just kept taking little pieces of him. Look what we did.

The only good thing about MJ’s untimely death is now we can focus our desire to own him where it belongs, on his music. Legally, ownership of the songs still belongs to MJ’s estate and creditors, but emotionally, we the fans are in charge of MJ’s legacy. I hope we’ll treat it well.

Filtered Beethoven

Download audio file (Ethan_Hein_Filtered_Beethoven.mp3)

Me vs Guarneri Quartet vs Babsy Singer vs Don Henley vs DJ Trace

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Envelope filter is one of my favorite electronica tricks. It makes everything sound cool, or at least weird.

Your mouth is an envelope filter. You use it every time you talk. Say “ssshh.” That’s white noise. Shape your mouth as if you’re saying “oooo” and hear the sound get lower. Shape your mouth like you’re saying “eeee” and the sound gets higher. Go back and forth between the two and hear a rhythmic whooshing. That’s envelope filtering: the envelope is the overall waveform of the sound, and filtering means blocking out different components of the waveform to shape the sound.

Most sounds are a blend of many different vibrations of the air at different frequencies. When the vibrations are patterned into nice regular sine waves, we hear them as musical. There are slower waves that make the low-pitched components of the sound, and faster waves that make the high-pitched components. The pitch of a sound is determined by its fundamental frequency, the slowest and loudest vibration. The overtones color the sound and give it texture. Different instruments playing the same note all sound distinct because they produce different blends of overtones. By filtering out the higher overtones, you can make a sound “lower” even if the fundamental pitch stays the same. By filtering out the lower overtones you make the sound “higher.”

Envelope filtering is a key technique in getting electronic instruments to make cool sounds. A wah-wah pedal is an envelope filter — you control the frequency of the filter cutoff with your foot. A talk box is an envelope filter you control with your mouth. Auto-wah or Mu-tron is an entertaining variant on the wah. Rather than controlling the filter frequency with your foot, the box controls it for you in response to the volume of your input signal. When you play louder, you get more wah effect. This calls exaggerated attention to the variations in your attack and opens up a new layer of expressiveness.

As Bootsy Collins demonstrates, Mu-tron sounds great on electric bass. The fundamental is low and loud, so the upper overtones are nicely audible too and there’s a lot for the filter to grab hold of. Stevie Wonder uses it on his clav on “Higher Ground” and “Maybe Your Baby,” and Jerry Garcia used a lot in the late seventies, like on “Estimated Prophet” and “Fire On The Mountain.”

Envelope filtering sounds awesome on drums, too. Drums produce a lot of white noise, and when the filter shapes the higher frequencies in the noise, the effect can be transporting. The drums in Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” got their whooshing sound from phasing, an analog version of envelope filtering. When you play two copies of the same recording with one very slightly behind the other, the waveforms rub against each other, giving you the effect of a slow envelope filter.

Envelope is more of a thing on electronic drums. They lend extra posthuman strangeness to the already uncanny sound. Extreme envelope filtering has turned into a techno cliche, but creative producers can still find ways to be expressive with it. My favorite example is on Björk’s “Jóga” –  you can hear it most clearly on the breakdown section at 1:12.

I did the sweeping in my track using the filter built into Reason’s loop player. You can set the filter to sweep up and down the frequency spectrum in automatic sync with the tempo, so it becomes another rhythmic element in the track. The sweep marks off every two bars going up and back down, a pattern for your ears to compare to the pattern of the drum hits, chord changes and melody. Rhythmic patterns are what make music fun.

The Soul Searchers were led by guitarist Chuck Brown, known in Washington DC music circles as “The Godfather of Go-go.”

Go-go is a regional flavor of  funk using a heavy swing feel and a lot of happening syncopation in the kick drum pattern. Early in my funk connoisseurship, I would have used the go-go beat as the definition of funk. The beat in “Ashley’s Roachclip” isn’t actually very typical of go-go since it uses straight eighth notes. You can hear a more typical one on Chuck Brown’s official web site.

The first time I listened to the “Ashley’s Roachclip” break I immediately thought of Eric B and Rakim:

Nice & Smooth use the break in “Down The Line” – they mix it with the intro from Charlie Parker and Miles Davis’ version of “A Night In Tunisia.” Hot!

PM Dawn takes the break in a very different direction by mixing it with “True” by Spandau Ballet for “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss.” Don’t you feel like PM Dawn is due for a comeback?

The break has attained wide familiarity outside of hip-hop in EMF’s “Unbelievable,” where it’s probably surprised to find itself combined with samples of Andrew Dice Clay. (Sorry, no embedding.)

Some other notable samplers of “Ashley’s Roachclip” include:

• 2 Live Crew – “Ghetto Bass II”
• 3rd Bass – “Oval Office”
• Color Me Badd – “Choose”
• Cutty Ranks – “The Stopper”
• Eazy-E – “Gimme That Nutt”
• Geto Boys – “Scarface”
• Ice Cube – “Jackin’ for Beats”
• LL Cool J – “Jack The Ripper”
• Milli Vanilli – “All Or Nothing,” “Blame It On The Rain” and “Girl You Know It’s True” (Milli Vanilli!)
• Moby – “First Cool Hive”
• Run-DMC – “Run’s House”

Another fun Chuck Brown/Soul Searchers fact: the beat from their song “Bustin’ Loose (Part 1)” was used by Nelly for “Hot In Herre.”

Sample culture is the best.

Nas has a great flow full of powerful imagery, but what makes this track for me is DJ Premier’s production. It’s a complex web of samples and scratches that tie together seamlessly, greater than the sum of their parts. A lot of the samples are from other songs by Nas himself. Here’s a diagram of all the samples, click to see it bigger:

Primo tells the story of the track, including the serendipitous discovery of the killer orchestral string sample, in The 14 Deadly Secrets by DJ Premier:

A transcript:

The day I made this record, I was at my house in Long Island, and I found this old record that I was gonna throw away. It was a ten inch record from a Lutheran church, and it was pink with a black fish on it. And I was gonna throw it in the garbage, ‘cuz it didn’t look like it had anything hot on it. But somethin’ told me “before you throw it away, put it on the turntable, see if you can find something on it.

And I found that sample of “Nas Is Like”, and I broke it into 3 parts, scratched it live to the drumbeat that I already had, with the little chirpin’ birds and from there, “Nas Is Like” was born, man…

The birds twittering during the intro beat are from “Why” by Don Robertson. And here’s the Lutheran record Primo’s talking about, “What Child Is This.” Very unlikely hip-hop source material.

Most of the lines in the chorus come from Nas’ breakout hit “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.” The “life or death” line is at 0:32, the “Nas is like” that gives the song its title is at 0:44, and the “half man half amazin’” comes in a few seconds later. “My poetry’s deep, I never fell” is at 2:41.

“It Ain’t Hard To Tell” includes some hot samples of its own, including the synth intro from “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson and a saxophone riff from the much-sampled “NT” by Kool & The Gang (listen at 3:12.)

The other source for the “Nas Is Like” chorus is Nas’ “Street Dreams” from 1996. Samples are at 3:16 (“I’m a rebel) and 3:18 (“no doubt.”)

This track is also a composite of different memes – it quotes “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics and samples “Never Gonna Stop” by Linda Clifford for its beat.

Maybe the most inventive sample in “Nas Is Like” is a single syllable from “Nobody Beats the Biz” by Biz Markie. It’s the line “highly recogNIZED as the king of disco-in’” at 2:06. Out of context, “NIZED” sounds like Biz is saying “Nas.” That’s production!

No wonder DJ Premier loves Biz — his music is rich with samples and allusions. The chorus is a play on a commercial jingle that’ll be familiar to anyone from the NYC region who grew up in the eighties (or has watched Seinfeld.) Biz also samples the drums from by “Hihache” by the Lafayette Afro Rock Band, “Fly Like An Eagle” by Steve Miller and, to heighten the self-reference even more, one of his own tracks, “The Def Fresh Crew” with Roxanne Shanté.

To add yet another layer of reference, there’s a bit in here where Biz quotes the jingle for Meow Mix! Biz is so much bigger than copyright law.

“Nas Is Like” has a complex family tree, a set of allusions to allusions to allusions. This is as it should be. Fundamentally, all music is built of reshuffled bits of other music. Hip-hop makes this fact an explicit part of the music’s message.

Nas does a lot of bragging in his rhymes. I learned excessive self-deprecation as a virtue from both my Jewish and middle American Protestant sides, so swagger feels deliciously subversive for me. There’s nothing more balling than sampling yourself in your own songs. Any sample-based song carries a dense web of associations, and I love the complexity that gets introduced when people sample themselves, or when they sample tracks containing samples, or best of all, both.

The track isn’t so much a song as it is an early mashup. Aside from the chorus, just about everything in it is a sample or quote. Here are the sources:

• The eighties version of the Doctor Who theme music
• “Rock and Roll (Part Two)” and “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)” by Gary Glitter
• “Blockbuster!” by Sweet
• “Let’s Get Together Tonite” by Steve Walsh

Drummond and Cauty formed the KLF with the specific intent to thumb their nose at the concepts of ownership and copyright. Nevertheless, by the time of “Doctorin’ The Tardis” they attained enough commercial success that that they were able to license all of their samples and quotes. In spite of their not owning much of the publishing rights to their song, it ended up making the KLF over a million pounds. Not bad for a few days’ work. With a modern laptop and Pro Tools the track probably would have taken them twenty minutes.

“Doctorin’ The Tardis” was hot for a very brief instant in the UK, and an even briefer one here in America. I heard it on the radio probably once, after which I went around in an agony of frustration at never being able to track it down and hear it again. What I wouldn’t have given in the eighth grade for the internet. At the time, Doctor Who was a very fringe, very nerdy taste. Even the Trekkies looked down on Doctor Who fans. I still find it strange to know fans of the new series who have social lives and fashion senses and stuff.

Much as I love their one hit, I can’t say I’m too wild about the rest of the KLF’s music that I’ve heard. The only other really noteworthy track of theirs is another crazy mashup, “Whitney Joins The JAMS,” which combines “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “The Theme From Shaft” and the Mission: Impossible theme.

Also, Jimmy Cauty later went on to form The Orb, whose music I love as music and not just conceptually.

After their trip to the top of the charts, the KLF went on to write “The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.” It’s an excellent guide to the production of electronic music generally, which by the time of this writing includes just about everything. I was tempted to just paste the whole thing in, but that would have been ridiculous, so here are some choice quotes and my responses.

The emotional appetite that chart pop satisfies is constant. The hunger is forever. What does change is the technology this is always on the march. At some point in the future science will develop a commodity that will satisfy this emotional need in a more efficient way.

Hopefully something more participatory, interactive and gamelike. In the meantime, we have chart pop. To make this music, you don’t need a band, you need a programmer, a guy like me.

Just after 1 pm Tuesday telephone the studio that you have booked and tell them you are going to need someone who can programme, ideally a programmer who can play the keyboards. Every studio can get one for you. This programmer is going to be the person who will provide, sample, originate, compute, even play all the music you will need on your record.

In hip-hop terms, this person is known as the beatmaker. The word producer is also sometimes loosely used for programmers/beatmakers. The process of sequencing a dance track is more like cooking a meal or building a building than the Dionysian outburst of many people’s imaginings. There aren’t too many continuous performances happening in the studio right now:

It is going to be a construction job, fitting bits together. You will have to find the Frankenstein in you to make it work. Your magpie instincts must come to the fore. If you think this just sounds like a recipe for some horrific monster, be reassured by us, all music can only be the sum or part total of what has gone before. Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested. They have to believe it is through this sojourn they arrive at the grail; the great and original song that the world will be unable to resist.

So why don’t all songs sound the same? Why are some artists great, write dozens of classics that move you to tears, say it like it’s never been said before, make you laugh, dance, blow your mind, fall in love, take to the streets and riot? Well, it’s because although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before their own soul shines through; their personality demands attention. This doesn’t just come via the great vocalist or virtuoso instrumentalist. The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes – a million years of pain and lust.

We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.), we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul. There is no doubt, one will be better than the other. What we are basically saying is, if you have anything in you, anything unique, what others might term as originality, it will come through whatever the component parts used in your future Number One are made up from.

Creators of music who desperately search for originality usually end up with music that has none because no room for their spirit has been left to get through. The complete history of the blues is based on one chord structure, hundreds of thousands of songs using the same three basic chords in the same pattern. Through this seemingly rigid formula has come some of the twentieth century’s greatest music.

Can I get an Amen!

Inexperienced songwriters start with lyrics, treating the rest of the song as decoration. This is like starting a house with the wallpaper. Wiser songwriters start with a melody or chord progression. The smartest ones start with the groove, the foundation of any musical structure:

Before we go any further we had better define “groove”. It is basically the drum and bass patterns and all the other musical sounds on the record that are neither hummable or singalongable to. Groove is the underlying sex element of the record and we are afraid for U.K. Number Ones this can never be left too rabidly raw on the 7″ format. It upsets our subliminal national moral code. We can cope with smut but not grind. Of course, there are the odd exceptions.

America is a little looser in this regard but raw beats still make many of my fellow white people anxious.

In the same way that our sexual fantasies change and develop, sometimes double back over a period of months, so do our dance floor tastes in groove. It is always on the move, searching for the ultimate turn on and when you are almost there it’s off again and you’re left looking for a new direction.

Black American records have always been the most reliable source of dance groove. These records down through the years have inevitably laid so much emphasis on the altar of groove and so very little into fulfilling the other Golden Rules that they very rarely break through into the U.K. Top Ten, let alone making the Number One spot. A by-product of this situation is that gangsters of the groove from Bo Diddley on down believe they have been ripped off, not only by the business but by all the artists that have followed on from them. This is because the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody; groove doesn’t even get a look in. If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody. If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself. Right the wrongs.

The best place to find the groove that 7″ single buyers will want to be tapping their toes to in three months time is to get down to the hippest club in your part of the country that is playing import American black dance records. The unknown track the DJ plays that gets both the biggest response on the floor and has you joining the throng will have the groove you are looking for…

If there is neither a suitable club or specialist dance shop in your part of the country don’t throw in the towel as this is where the dance music compilations we have instructed you to buy on Monday morning come in. Stick them on the record player, turn it up loud and get lost in the groove, leave your mind on the bookshelf where it belongs, feel yourself if need be but keep going until you “feel the force” and you are “lost in music”, when the only answer to the question “can you feel it” is “yes”.

Pure dance music, if it has any lyrical content at all, will only deal in the emotions experienced within the four walls of a club late at night; basically desire and, more importantly, that area which is beyond desire at the very centre of the Human Psyche. Everything else is meaningless. Any creator of pure dance music that is attempting to communicate any other subject should be treated with deep suspicion. With a danger of getting too carried away on our own pretensions we state that it is through dance music and dancing we are able to get momentarily back to the Garden. Of course, in the clear light of day this is all very silly.

Not so silly, to my mind.

We of course used the Glitter beat, which was more by accident than design. It being the most clubfooted white beat going, it goes against the grain of what we are advising above. We think the British love/hate relationship with that said beat can only be tried once a decade. They won’t take it any more than that.

After the groove, the next key structural element is song structure. Like groove, it acts on your unconscious powerfully.

As we have already mentioned, the Golden Rule for a classic Number One single is intro, verse one, chorus one, verse two, chorus two, breakdown section, double chorus, outro.

Each of these sections will be made up of bars in groupings of multiples of four. So you might have an intro containing four bars, a verse sixteen bars and a chorus eight bars. At times the first verses can be double length verses, or the second chorus a double length. These sort of decisions are not going to have to be finally made until you reach the mixing stage of the record, when the engineer will have to start editing the whole track to make it work in the most concise and exciting way possible within three minutes and thirty seconds.

This last part is no longer strictly true. Pro Tools grid mode and MIDI editors make song-structural editing a snap and it’s often done in the midst of the recording/songwriting itself.

Hopefully, at sometime over the remaining days of the week, you will have been able to get out to a club and found the groove you need, been able to buy it on vinyl and get it home. It has to be the 12″ version as this will have whole great tracts of raw groove where each of the component parts of the groove are broken down and left exposed for your engineer and programmer to study and imitate when it comes to recording your record.

Again, the computer makes this easier. You can effortlessy loop a bar or two of anything. Dance mixes do make it easier to find loop-worthy grooves.

The next thing you have got to have is a chorus. The chorus is the bit in the song that you can’t help but sing along with. It is the most important element in a hit single because it is the part that most people carry around with them in their head, when there is no radio to be heard, no video on TV, and they are far from the dance floor. It’s the part that nags you while day dreaming in the classroom or at work or as you walk down the street to sign on. It’s the part that finally convinces the punters to make that trip down to the record shop and buy it.

In other words, the chorus contains the meme, the earworm, the mind virus. Your conscious mind is not your friend when it comes time to grow a new meme. You need to reach behind it, into the more evolutionarily ancient and intuitive brain systems.

So, slip on the 12″ or your dance compilation and sing along with the breakdown sections; any old words will do, just whatever comes out of your mouth. If you have difficulty in forming a tune in your head or you feel a bit inhibited, flick through your copy of the Guinness Book of Hits and pick any Top Five record that takes your fancy and see if you can sing the chorus of it along to the track.

Take for example:

“That’s the way a-ha, a-ha I like it a-ha, a-ha That’s the way a-ha, a-ha I like it a-ha, a-ha”

by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. That one usually works and should get you going in the right direction but there are hundreds to choose from.

The lyrics for the chorus must never deal with anything but the most basic of human emotions. This is not us trying to be cynical in a clever sort of way when we say “stick to the cliches”. The cliches are the cliches because they deal with the emotional topics we all feel. No records are bought in vast quantities because the lyrics are intellectually clever or deal in strange and new ideas. In fact, the lyrics can be quite meaningless in a literal sense but still have a great emotional pull. An obvious example of this was the chorus of our own record:

“Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, in the Tardis Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who”

Gibberish of course, but every lad in the country under a certain age related instinctively to what it was about. The ones slightly older needed a couple of pints inside them to clear away the mind debris left by the passing years before it made sense. As for girls and our chorus, we think they must have seen it as pure crap. A fact that must have limited to zero our chances of staying at The Top for more than one week.

Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7″ single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over – the Number One position was guaranteed:

“I’m never going to give you up”

It says it all. It’s what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:

“I’m never gonna let you down I’m never going to fool around or upset you”

GENIUS.

Michael Jackson may be the biggest singing star in the world. Sold more L.P.s than any other artist at any time in the history of pop but he has had very few U.K. Number Ones. If he would like to make amends on this front he should start co-writing with the SAW team or read this manual. He has quite a bit to learn about the opening line of a chorus.

Did these guys just compare Michael Jackson unfavorably to Rick Astley? Did I really just get rickrolled in a book written in 1988? That takes chutzpah.

We are afraid you can’t just go down to the local supermarket and listen to the check-out girls’ talk and hope you can pick up the right line before Waterman gets to it. The line has to come to you and when it does you’ve got to grab it. Mindlessly singing along to the 12″ groove track you have is the best way.

Yet another practice made easier by the computer. The routine practice now is to record this mindless improvisation into the computer. If something valuable tumbles out, you can easily grab it, copy and paste it and build around it.

You must be worrying by now how you, or if not you, who on earth is going to front this record! If you already think you are a great singer and a well happening front person, then we have a problem. It means you will have the sort of ego that will render it totally impossible for you to be objective about everything else that has got to be done. Singers have historically made the worst producers of their own work. The reason for this is simply that singers have to become so emotionally involved in their performance it cancels out any sort of over view. At the very least they need a musical partner that can give them some direction. If a singer was able to have this calculated view of their own work the end product would undoubtedly come over as cold and empty.

This is profoundly true. Singers like to mix vocals way out in front, with a distant accompaniment. This sounds super corny and dated. Cool music puts the beat up front.

The club D.J. (like his forerunner the dance band leader of the thirties, forties and fifties) realises that the most important thing is keeping the dance floor full and the thing that keeps the dancers dancing now (as it was then) is the music with its underpinning groove factor. Singing throughout has always just provided a distraction from the main event – what is happening on the dance floor and not on the stage.

Music that’s meant to be listened to alone can be lyrics-oriented and built around a vocal sound. But social music needs to center on the beat.

For the majority of people the sound of the vocals and the words that are being sung throughout the verses just merge into the over all sound of the track. The words that are being sung could be any old gibberish, only the words to the chorus have any real importance. Of course there are the exceptions when the classic narrative song breaks through and storms the Number One slot These can never be planned and I’m sure the performers of these freak hits are as surprised as anybody when it happens. So unless you want to risk everything on some bizarre tale you have to tell, stick with us.

Michael Jackson’s lyrics are usually totally incomprehensible, which is no obstacle to their enjoyment. I’ll take a blank slate I can project my own ideas over inane cliches anytime.

So now you can tackle the construction of the verse without worrying about singers.

Using the basic groove you have decided upon you are now going to have to choose a bass line that will work as the basis for the whole song, or at least the verse sections. We take it there is no point in us trying to describe what the bass line is in any great detail, but it’s the bit in the record that throbs and keeps the flow going. In days gone by it was provided by the bass guitar player, now it is all played by the programmed keyboards. Even if you want it to sound like a real bass guitar, a sampled sound of a bass guitar will be used, then programmed. It’s easier than getting some thumb-slapping dick head in.

The groove might already have a killer bass line in there, making the whole thing happen and to remove it and exchange it for another might destroy what you have already got. There are plenty of monster bass lines out there to try. You will know them, they are the ones that you can almost hum. The great thing about bass lines is that they are in public domain. Nobody, even if they do recognise it, will seriously accuse you of ripping somebody else’s bass line off.

Michael Jackson, who we cited earlier on for not being that adept at coming up with the killer Number One hit choruses, CAN come up with the bass lines. “Billie Jean” was the turning point in Jackson’s career. That song, on his own admission, took him into the mega stratospheres where his myth now reigns. The fact is, “Billie Jean” would be nothing without that lynx-on-the-prowl bass line; but he wasn’t the first to use it. It had been featured in numerous dance tracks by various artists before him. Jackson and Quincy must have been hanging out around the pool table in their air conditioned dimmed light atmosphere, L.A. studio one evening wondering: “What next?” when one of them came up with the idea of using the old lynx- on-the-prowl standby. Without making that decision back in 1981 there would have been no Pepsi Cola sponsored jamboree in 1988.

We are not trying to deny any of the very real talent that Jackson has, just trying to emphasise the possible importance of the killer bass line.

Serious groove merchants hate it when a song has a dynamite bass line for the verse and then when the chorus comes the chords change, dragging the bass away from its “bad self” into having to follow those limp wristed chords. For them the whole movement of the song is destroyed for the sake of some nursery rhyme element they would rather see dumped.

Somehow these two important elements are going to have to be made to work together without the power of the chorus or the propulsion of verse bass riff being destroyed. Ideally, when a song hits its chorus it should feel it’s the natural thing to happen, a release from the tension of the verse. By the end of the chorus you must feel like nothing is desired more than to slide back down into the vice-like grip of the bass line.

Some groove merchants have a talent for getting it all their own way by coming up with a bass riff that never shifts from the beginning of the song until the end: intro, choruses, verses, breakdowns, outro all fitting around the same bass riff. For a song to sound like this and work away from the confines of the dance floor, it is going to have to be a real mutha of a riff. There must be some pretty insistent action going on on top of it to keep the casual radio listener interested. Even on “Billie Jean” they moved off the bass riff for the chorus.

Actually the prechorus. But point taken.

There’s a ton of good songwriting advice in here, like, don’t use a bridge, use a breakdown section instead. And it should be just the rhythm tracks with some ambiance on top, not a solo, because:

Nowadays, solos either get in the way or have to be fabulously stunning at the same time as being able to fit in with the studio sculpting that is going on around it. Having some guitarist give you his interpretation of what a really good guitar solo should sound like is totally out of the question. Guitar solos only work in modern pop records when they are over the top things full of hideous histrionics and lacking in any emotional depth whatsoever. This type of guitar solo is one of the very few things that heavy metal has given back to Top Ten chart music. Yet again, Jackson’s name comes in here. It all started when he used Eddie Van Halen on the “Thriller” L.P. So unless you have a mate that can play just like Eddie – forget it.

The only other reason for having a meaningless solo on your track is to give the record some instant profile upon the record’s release by making it known in the media that it features a boring but sainted muso, thus giving it some fake cred. The tried and tested guest soloists of the late eighties are: Miles Davis on trumpet, Courtney Pine on saxophone and Stevie Wonder on harmonica. Untried possibilities that might create some interest would be Jimmy Page or Junior Walker. But really we would recommend you don’t bother – unless you can get Jimi Hendrix to do it.

Finally, here’s a perfect description of how the production process feels at its best:

From now on in you will begin to feel the inevitable pull of the unseen life force of the record you have allowed to be created. It will be as if you are in a sailing boat and suddenly from nowhere a wisp of wind fills the sails. Your job is to hold onto the rudder and at all times never lose sight of the harbour lights. Let the crew bail out the water. Let the crew trim the sails. Let the crew man the galley. Remember, if you ever leave go of the rudder to help the crew all hands may be lost – along with any chance of ever hearing your record being played at five minutes to seven on Radio One on a Sunday evening.

Very zen. Very true.

I follow science news the way normal dudes follow sports. If you’re geekily inclined like me, you may have heard that the particle physics people are getting closer to producing the Higgs boson. You may have wondered what that is exactly, and why you should care. The science press has nicknamed the Higgs “the God particle,” which is poetic but doesn’t move me any closer to understanding. Here’s my best effort to wrap my head around the idea — maybe you’ll find it helpful, or at least entertaining. If you’re a real scientist and want to clarify or correct anything I’m saying here, please jump in on the comments.

Okay. So. The Higgs boson is involved in the weak nuclear force, which is the weirdest and least famous of the basic four forces in the standard model of particle physics. I have a pretty firm handle on the other three. There’s gravity, you know what that is. There’s electromagnetism, which is behind pretty much everything in our direct experience aside from gravity. And there’s the strong force, which sticks quarks together into protons and neutrons, and sticks those together into atomic nuclei.

But then the weak force. This one is harder to nail down in a single pithy sentence. When you get to the section on the weak force in most popularly-oriented physics texts, the language becomes vague and evasive. There’s usually a feeble bit about how the weak force “is involved in certain kinds of radioactive decay.” This is true, but it doesn’t begin to tell the story. What the weak force really does is transform one kind of particle into another.

Here’s the weak force at work, transforming a neutron into a proton.

This might be happening inside an unstable atom, like nitrogen-16 (nitrogen with too many neutrons.) Time goes from bottom to top, as indicated by the arrow. At the bottom is the neutron, with its three quarks: up, down and down. As the nucleus wobbles, it’s possible for its components to come within the weak force’s extremely short range. A weak force carrier particle, represented by the wavy line labeled W-, changes the flavor of one quark from down to up. That changes the neutron into a proton, and in the process spits out an electron and an antineutrino. With its new proton, the former nitrogen atom is now oxygen. Shazam!

Weak interactions are part of the fusion reactions powering the sun. They’re the reverse of the one pictured above, since the sun turns protons into neutrons, spitting out positrons and neutrinos. Weak interactions produce some of the heat coming from the Earth’s core, and there are more weak interactions in the upper atmosphere as high-energy particles slam into air molecules. Aside from nuclear reactors and particle accelerators, there isn’t too much weak force happening in our day to day lives. Your best chance to experience the weak force first hand is in a hospital PET scanner. Anna asks, looking over my shoulder, if it scans to see if you have any pets. Um, no.

Before you lie down in the scanner, you get injected with a radiotracer containing unstable isotopes of oxygen, nitrogen or some other biologically-oriented element. These isotopes come attached to glucose or water molecules. You lie in the scanner, and as your body metabolizes the radiotracers, weak interactions emit positrons (thus the term Positron Emission Tomography.) The positrons are antimatter, and they don’t get far before they smack into electrons, mutually annihilating into pairs of high-energy photons that zip away in exactly opposite directions. The scanner ring registers all the photons hitting it, and devotes mammoth amounts of computer power to ignoring all of them except the ones originating on opposite sides of the ring. From there, the computer can deduct where the photons are originating, and voila, you get a 3D animated picture of your metabolism in action.

There are a couple of weird and cool things about the weak force. One is that it has a preferred handedness. All particles spin, either clockwise or counterclockwise. Physicists call these spin directions right-handed and left-handed. If you think of your thumb as your spin axis, then your fingers curl in the direction of spin. The weak force defies common sense by only acting on left-handed particles (and right-handed antiparticles.) This is a startlingly odd asymmetry. Gravity and electromagnetism act the same on left and right-handed particles and there’s no obvious reason why the other forces shouldn’t behave the same way. Could this asymmetry could be related to the slight imbalance between matter and antimatter produced by the big bang? Is it necessary for a universe that’s hospitable to our existence? What do you say, scientists?

Another weird and cool thing about the weak force is its relationship to electromagnetism. They turn out to be different aspects of the same force. This is where the Higgs boson comes in. It’s the particle aspect of the Higgs field, which is thought to pervade all of space. The standard model of particle physics credits this invisible energy field with giving the various force-carrying particles their various masses. The idea is that the Higgs field gives the universe a weak force charge, the way electric charge pervades a cloud before a thunderstorm. The weak force has such a short range because the W and Z particles that convey it drag against the Higgs field and quickly lose their juice. Photons have an infinite range because they don’t interact weakly, so they pass right through the Higgs field.

So here’s the thing. At very high temperatures, the Higgs field evaporates. W and Z particles no longer drag, so they become massless and indistinguishable from photons. In other words, electromagnetism and the weak force reveal themselves to be different aspects of the same force, the electroweak force. The standard model predicts this, and experiments have confirmed it. This fact gives physicists hope that at higher energy levels  still, the electroweak force will unify with the strong force, and at even more ridiculously high energy levels, they’ll all unify with gravity. Sadly, testing electroweak and strong unification is very far out of our technological reach, and testing for unification with gravity would require a particle accelerator bigger than the solar system. That hasn’t stop physicists from dreaming of finding a single unified theory of the forces, a mathematical description of the universe that would fit on a t-shirt. Einstein spent decades of his life searching for such a theory, though without success.

The Higgs boson is the particle form of the Higgs field, the way the photon is the particle form of the electromagnetic field and the electron is the particle form of the lepton field. The Higgs boson has never been spotted. It’s assumed that it takes more energy to produce them than particle accelerators have been able to bring to bear. A major mission of the Large Hadron Collider is to produce Higgs bosons.

Here’s what such an event would look like on their computer screens:

And so who is this Higgs guy? Here’s what he looks like.

He was one of the major movers behind the electroweak theory and is presumably twiddling his thumbs in a university office somewhere, waiting to see if they do indeed find his particle. I’m rooting for him.

This is exactly the kind of golden age hip-hop song I love, a party-friendly beat and lyrics delivered with enough pissed off attitude to give it some bite. Dres and Mista Lawnge, I salute you.

The samples are particularly awesome. The upright bass loop comes from McCoy Tyner’s version of John Coltrane’s “Impressions” – it’s at 3:03 in the track.

The beat and accompanying guitar twang comes from “Humpin’” by The Bar-Kays. The sample is right at the beginning.

“Big Sur Suite” by Johnny Hammond Smith supplies the organ lick, listen for it at the fifteen second mark.

(Tons of other people have sampled this track, including Dr Dre, Gang Starr, the Beastie Boys, DJ Krush, and, um, Insane Clown Posse.)

The most unexpected sample Black Sheep pulls out is the scratchy guitar hook. It comes from “Her Favorite Style” by Iron Butterfly, of all people. Iron Butterfly! Who knew they even had any songs aside from “In A Gadda Da Vida?” That’s some big-eared listening.

Finally, the James Brown-like grunt and “come on” is Sweet Linda Divine in her song “I’ll Say It Again” – listen at 1:52.

Talk about a track being greater than the sum of its parts. If handed all of these records, I’d enjoy some of them, be indifferent to others, and I very much doubt I’d come up with anything so devastatingly tight and seamless as “The Choice Is Yours.”

It seems like there would be a lot of songs that would sample this one, but I only turned a few from casual web searching:

• Fatman Scoop includes the “Engine engine number nine” part in his tune “Be Faithful.”
• Fatboy Slim quotes the chorus in “Weapon of Choice” ft Bootsy Collins.
• Dres does a verse over a sample of “The Choice Is Yours” on “Where Are They Now” by Nas.

There have to be others, right? Let me know in the comments. Doo-dah dipity.

I resisted liking the song because of what I imagined it representing. I mean, watch this video with the sound off, these guys look like incredible douchebags. As a teenager I was very invested in the idea of purity in music, and INXS was the exact opposite of pure. The band was and is a capitalist venture above all else. I hadn’t yet learned that commercial music can be incredibly good, and that pure artistry is no guarantee against awfulness.

“Need You Tonight” was INXS’ biggest hit, but before it dropped there was concern on Atlantic Records’ part about its commercial prospects. Here’s a quote from the band’s manager Chris Murphy, courtesy of the wikipedia:

They hated it, absolutely hated it. They said there was no way they could get this music on rock radio. They said it was suited for black radio, but they didn’t want to promote it that way. The president of the label told me that he’d give us $1 million to go back to Australia and make another album.

This quote makes Atlantic Records seem like racist schmucks, but in fairness, it is kind of amazing that INXS managed to pass off such a pure techno song as rock. The beat is programmed on an icy-sounding drum machine. The guitar lick sounds like it was copied and pasted in Pro Tools. The band had to play the song to a click at shows so the sequenced synth stabs would line up. Aphex Twin produces more organic-sounding tracks than this one. This is nothing against INXS at all — quite the opposite. Their techno-futurism is what makes their song still sound terrific all these years later. Props to producer Chris Thomas, who, by the way, had his first professional studio job playing for some band named the Hollies, and had his second playing keyboards on the White Album, at age 21. I might be just a little bit jealous.

The production isn’t the only reason “Need You Tonight” sounds so hip. It has no chord progression. Like the best Michael Jackson songs, it’s a modal groove. The guitar part and vocal melody are clearly minor, but the synth stab is a major chord. The lyrics are hip too. They don’t rhyme, at all. Michael Hutchence is in a dialog with himself, his low whisper calling, his higher open-throated belt responding. It’s called songcraft, kids. Unfortunately, this song’s pop-cultural context gets in the way of its full enjoyment. Music videos are a terrible way to learn about how music works. What do kids think when they see a drummer miming along with the beat from a drum machine, and miming totally the wrong drums at that?

I’m very surprised to learn the song hasn’t been sampled more. How has Kanye West or someone not wanted to jump on this beat? I could only find two hip-hop tracks that use it. Big Pun and Beenie Man use it on “Make Me Sweat” from the soundtrack to How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which is okay, but not too special. Someone named Professor Green has a tune called “I Need You Tonight” which is pretty dumb. The last word in INXS samples has not yet been spoken. Get to it, MCs! I did find an interesting cover version by St Vincent, and a pretty excellent mashup by DJ McSleazy, who combines it with Neneh Cherry’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

(DJ McSleazy’s mashup of Michael Jackson and the Charlatans is good too.)

I feel obligated to say something about Michael Hutchence’s death, which came at the end of what seems to me like a pretty unhappy life. But you know what? I don’t know anything about it, except what it says on the web, and who knows how much of that is true. Also, I don’t care. I really just like this song.

There are a lot of “serious” musicians who think that the best way to express their inner pain is by causing pain to the listener. The music I like uses inner pain as the starting point for pleasure. “T.R.O.Y.” tells a somber story, but it uses attractively tight and funky music to do it. The track was inspired by the life and early death of Pete Rock’s cousin and friend  “Trouble” T. Roy of Heavy D & the Boyz. In a 2007 Village Voice interview, Pete Rock said:

I had a friend of mine that passed away, and it was a shock to the community. I was kind of depressed when I made it. And to this day, I can’t believe I made it through, the way I was feeling. I guess it was for my boy. When I found the record by Tom Scott, basically I just heard something incredible that touched me and made me cry. It had such a beautiful bassline, and I started with that first. I found some other sounds and then heard some sax in there and used that. Next thing you know, I have a beautiful beat made. When I mixed the song down, I had Charlie Brown from Leaders of the New School in the session with me, and we all just started crying.

The Tom Scott record in question is his rendition of “Today” by Jefferson Airplane. The great sax riff comes in at 1:37.

Pete Rock wasn’t the first hip-hop producer to have noticed this riff. Slick Rick used it a year earlier it on “It’s A Boy.” A ton of hip-hop tracks sample the beat from Tom Scott’s “Sneakin’ In The Back.” I had never heard of the guy before writing this post, but I turn out to have heard a lot of his work. He wrote the theme songs for Starsky & Hutch, Hill Street Blues and Family Ties. He plays sax and lyricon on Terrapin Station by the Grateful Dead and about a zillion other albums.

And what about the original Jefferson Airplane song at the head of this memetic family tree? Here it is, in all its trippy glory. Enjoy the psychedelic light show that the YouTube poster thoughtfully added.

The chain of ideas from Jefferson Airplane to Tom Scott to Pete Rock and CL Smooth reminds me very much of the chain from Paul Simon to Bob James to Run-DMC that culminates in “Peter Piper.” It seems like a recipe for success: golden-age hip-hop group samples jazz fusion cover of sixties pop-rock song.

I’ve debated the musical merits of sampling with my friends, musician and non-musician alike, many times. “T.R.O.Y.” is a perfect example of why  sampling is so valuable. There’s no other conceivable way Pete Rock could have arrived his sound. Sampling lets him give the relaxed intensity of the loose-limbed original recording a laser-like focus. Even if they had wanted to hire Tom Scott to come in and play his sax riff live in the studio, it wouldn’t have sounded nearly as good. There wouldn’t be all the background instrumentation and ambiance from the original recording, the bassline and drums and groovy chanting. And even if they had been able to recreate all of that stuff exactly, emotionally there wouldn’t necessarily have been the same flavor. There’s much to be said for pulling a sample from the middle of a performance. If you ask a sax player to just play a riff off a sheet of paper, it’ll sound different than if it’s flowing out spontaneously.

The chain of memetic inheritance doesn’t end with Pete Rock and CL Smooth. Little Brother sampled “T.R.O.Y.” for “The Listening.” Mary J Blige samples it in a remix of  “Reminisce.” The lyrics have been quoted and referenced by dozens of emcees. I’ve been on an obsessive kick with it and am insistently playing it for anyone who’ll listen, including, hopefully, you. It makes me feel good about the world that Pete Rock’s pain has inspired so many new ideas.