Can't stop thinkin bout it
July 16, 2020 2:16 PM Subscribe
The astounding 646 tracks isn't the only thing that makes Jacob Collier's newest single absolutely remarkable - the second chorus modulates to C half-sharp major, a key most of us have never heard.
All I Need featuring Mahalia and Ty Dolla $ign live at home and live from a bathroom on Jimmy Kimmel and Tiny Desk at Home.
Jacob Collier talks about the track number, the unique modulation, and learning to play just off the beat to synch up with other musicians while collaborating remotely during the pandemic on Switched on Pop.
Jacob Collier previously.
All I Need featuring Mahalia and Ty Dolla $ign live at home and live from a bathroom on Jimmy Kimmel and Tiny Desk at Home.
Jacob Collier talks about the track number, the unique modulation, and learning to play just off the beat to synch up with other musicians while collaborating remotely during the pandemic on Switched on Pop.
Jacob Collier previously.
I've been in awe of this kid since day 1, but most of his music has actually been "too much" for me to enjoy. This is just about perfect though.
posted by STFUDonnie at 4:49 PM on July 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by STFUDonnie at 4:49 PM on July 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
Hah, comment from the first video that kind of sums up that "too much" feeling:
This guy is like the Jacob Collier of music
posted by STFUDonnie at 4:58 PM on July 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
This guy is like the Jacob Collier of music
posted by STFUDonnie at 4:58 PM on July 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Collier's almost-entirely-acapella arrangement of Moon River is astonishing and wonderful, warm and delicious. I find it an even more direct and accessible way to hear some of the amazing things he does with harmony.
It starts with a collage of 150 "moons" he collected of more and less famous musicians singing a single note to make the first chord (including Chris Martin, Cory Henry, David Crosby, Quincy Jones, Hans Zimmer, "my mum," Kimbra, and Steve Vai - "What I appreciate about Steve Vai's 'moon' is the cross-fade. That is so classy. So if you ever send a moon to somebody, do it with a cross fade.")
But then he hums and sings all of over 300 parts in an incredible harmonic arrangement of "Moon River." The quote above and this other info is from a 90-minute video stream he gave walking through what's in the arrangement and how it all works. Including gems like: "The first thing you need to know about this chord is that it doesn't exist" -- and then explaining how that can be. And the way he can just casually sing the difference between just tuning, Pythagorean tuning, and equal tempered tuning.
He says that he had to slightly raise or lower the pitch of the whole thing every now and then to give himself a break and stay fresh when recording the song over and over again adding all the parts.
posted by straight at 5:03 PM on July 16, 2020 [9 favorites]
It starts with a collage of 150 "moons" he collected of more and less famous musicians singing a single note to make the first chord (including Chris Martin, Cory Henry, David Crosby, Quincy Jones, Hans Zimmer, "my mum," Kimbra, and Steve Vai - "What I appreciate about Steve Vai's 'moon' is the cross-fade. That is so classy. So if you ever send a moon to somebody, do it with a cross fade.")
But then he hums and sings all of over 300 parts in an incredible harmonic arrangement of "Moon River." The quote above and this other info is from a 90-minute video stream he gave walking through what's in the arrangement and how it all works. Including gems like: "The first thing you need to know about this chord is that it doesn't exist" -- and then explaining how that can be. And the way he can just casually sing the difference between just tuning, Pythagorean tuning, and equal tempered tuning.
He says that he had to slightly raise or lower the pitch of the whole thing every now and then to give himself a break and stay fresh when recording the song over and over again adding all the parts.
posted by straight at 5:03 PM on July 16, 2020 [9 favorites]
Really great llinks all. The harmonies float and lift, so intoxicating. Thank you.
posted by erebora at 9:24 PM on July 16, 2020
posted by erebora at 9:24 PM on July 16, 2020
That kid's like the next step in human evolution or something.
I've never heard anything I can compare with the acapella Moon River, and I don't think I've seen anyone move their body the ways he does.
posted by jamjam at 9:54 PM on July 16, 2020
I've never heard anything I can compare with the acapella Moon River, and I don't think I've seen anyone move their body the ways he does.
posted by jamjam at 9:54 PM on July 16, 2020
I don't know if this exactly applies to "All I Need" (and I'm sure there are other MeFites who can explain microtonality better than I can) but from Collier's discussion elsewhere, I can explain a little bit of what's up with "C half-sharp major."
Music pitches are arbitrary. Most western music these days is calibrated so that the pitch of a 440 hz sound wave is called "A" and the other notes are all tuned in relation to that. A is 440, the next note A# is about 466, the next one B is about 494, etc.
But you could just as easily (and some people do) start by putting your A at 432 and shift all the other notes a tiny bit lower. (People argue on YouTube about whether / how much this makes any difference people can hear.)
So one of the things Collier does is, say he wants to sing a line from A to B but wants to do it in 5 steps instead of the usual 3 (A, A#, B). So he sings pitches that are between the notes, maybe A= 440hz then 452hz then A# = 466 then 487hz then arrive on B 494. But maybe he stops on 452. You might call it A half-sharp. And then shifts his entire song so all the pitches match that in-between note. So now the entire song has shifted to a key where all the notes are in between all the pitches from earlier in the song. This is barely noticeable to most people but the music (maybe) feels slightly brighter or darker.
posted by straight at 10:00 PM on July 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
Music pitches are arbitrary. Most western music these days is calibrated so that the pitch of a 440 hz sound wave is called "A" and the other notes are all tuned in relation to that. A is 440, the next note A# is about 466, the next one B is about 494, etc.
But you could just as easily (and some people do) start by putting your A at 432 and shift all the other notes a tiny bit lower. (People argue on YouTube about whether / how much this makes any difference people can hear.)
So one of the things Collier does is, say he wants to sing a line from A to B but wants to do it in 5 steps instead of the usual 3 (A, A#, B). So he sings pitches that are between the notes, maybe A= 440hz then 452hz then A# = 466 then 487hz then arrive on B 494. But maybe he stops on 452. You might call it A half-sharp. And then shifts his entire song so all the pitches match that in-between note. So now the entire song has shifted to a key where all the notes are in between all the pitches from earlier in the song. This is barely noticeable to most people but the music (maybe) feels slightly brighter or darker.
posted by straight at 10:00 PM on July 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
His early stuff is a bit MUCH sometimes, but he has been rapidly refining his craft. The latest few singles (including this one) are pure musical joy. I’d be envious of his talent if I wasn’t so enthralled by it. I can’t wait to see what he does next.
posted by Doleful Creature at 1:42 AM on July 17, 2020
posted by Doleful Creature at 1:42 AM on July 17, 2020
Collier is exceptionally talented. I love that he's not just pumping out singles en masse and takes the time to craft and refine everything he releases. I don't have the skill to break down and analyze the crap out of every note. I know that when I listen to his stuff, I am happier for having done it.
posted by prepmonkey at 6:27 AM on July 17, 2020
posted by prepmonkey at 6:27 AM on July 17, 2020
I always want to write entire essays on musical tuning, tonality, microtonality and tempering, so this is a bit lengthy about where the idea of a "half-sharp" comes from. And because it's me, I started with where the idea of notes comes from.
Fundamentally a lot of music is quite arbitrary, but some things are chosen because there are more or less universal human responses to certain frequencies and combinations of frequencies.
The most fundamental of these is probably the "octave". The frequency relationship between two notes an octave a part is a doubling - that is, if you play a note and then a note an octave higher than it, your second note will have twice the frequency of the first. Standard orchestral pitch these days is "the A above middle C is 440Hz". The A an octave above that A is 880Hz. This is almost never messed with by anybody, because it's the most fundamental frequency relationship.
At a perceptual level, humans hear 440Hz and 880Hz and 220Hz as "the same", but recognise that it's lower or higher in pitch.
But, now we have an octave, we need more notes than that. We need notes which are different to that.
In Western musical theory you usually divide the octave into twelve semitones. From these twelve notes you pick eight notes for the current "key" - something like C major or D minor - and use those most of the time, sometimes picking up another note or two for what we call "chromaticism" (adding "colour" to the music) or shifting to a new key for anything from a few notes to the entirety of the rest of the piece. We give all these semitones names - there are seven letters used - C D E F G A B - and we can also describe notes in between these notes by saying it's "sharp" (one semitone higher than the letter) or "flat" (one semitone lower). Note that this means that, for example, G sharp and A flat might be the same pitch - in standard Western music of today they almost always are.
Now, there are rules for how to get the frequencies for all those notes, based on a system of "temperaments", and the principle of "tempering". This is a long and complicated topic which gets you from a set of other fundamental frequency relationships to a set of notes your instrument can actually play, but most of what you're going to hear ever is in 12 tone equal temperament and it's boring. It's also largely irrelevant to the point about microtonality.
What microtonal musicians do is they say okay, you can have your 12 notes per octave, but what if we divided the octave into some other number of notes? What about 19? What about 24 of them? What would music written in 24 tone equal temperament sound like?
And for microtonal systems based around conventional tonal systems, they tend to invent new note names which indicate how the new notes fit around the old ones (although the tuning of the old ones may also have to be different to make the whole system work).
So, Collier's "C half-sharp" is higher than C, but not as high as a conventional "C sharp". C half-sharp major is the same construction in terms of frequency relationships as any other major scale, but it just roots on C half-sharp, however he's defined that, rather than another note. And that's just fine, in a theoretical model. It just sounds odd to us because we're not used to hearing pitch changes which are that fine - we'd usually be used to hearing an entire semitone.
So microtonal musicians have access to more notes, basically. Collier's not really using much in the way of microtonality here - the melody itself isn't microtonal, he's just stepped slightly outside the conventional tuning system.
Very cool to hear it though.
(PS if you're wondering about those fundamental frequency relationships and why we can't just use those all the time, it's because nobody can be bothered to build, maintain or learn to play a piano with that many keys, or a piano which is perfectly in tune but only in C major. If you want to hear it, there's microtonal music built around that idea, or actually just listen to a really good barbershop choir because the human voice is not interested in your stupid mechanical limitations and can sing perfect intervals all the time if the brain controlling it knows what it's doing)
posted by mathw at 7:03 AM on July 17, 2020 [7 favorites]
Fundamentally a lot of music is quite arbitrary, but some things are chosen because there are more or less universal human responses to certain frequencies and combinations of frequencies.
The most fundamental of these is probably the "octave". The frequency relationship between two notes an octave a part is a doubling - that is, if you play a note and then a note an octave higher than it, your second note will have twice the frequency of the first. Standard orchestral pitch these days is "the A above middle C is 440Hz". The A an octave above that A is 880Hz. This is almost never messed with by anybody, because it's the most fundamental frequency relationship.
At a perceptual level, humans hear 440Hz and 880Hz and 220Hz as "the same", but recognise that it's lower or higher in pitch.
But, now we have an octave, we need more notes than that. We need notes which are different to that.
In Western musical theory you usually divide the octave into twelve semitones. From these twelve notes you pick eight notes for the current "key" - something like C major or D minor - and use those most of the time, sometimes picking up another note or two for what we call "chromaticism" (adding "colour" to the music) or shifting to a new key for anything from a few notes to the entirety of the rest of the piece. We give all these semitones names - there are seven letters used - C D E F G A B - and we can also describe notes in between these notes by saying it's "sharp" (one semitone higher than the letter) or "flat" (one semitone lower). Note that this means that, for example, G sharp and A flat might be the same pitch - in standard Western music of today they almost always are.
Now, there are rules for how to get the frequencies for all those notes, based on a system of "temperaments", and the principle of "tempering". This is a long and complicated topic which gets you from a set of other fundamental frequency relationships to a set of notes your instrument can actually play, but most of what you're going to hear ever is in 12 tone equal temperament and it's boring. It's also largely irrelevant to the point about microtonality.
What microtonal musicians do is they say okay, you can have your 12 notes per octave, but what if we divided the octave into some other number of notes? What about 19? What about 24 of them? What would music written in 24 tone equal temperament sound like?
And for microtonal systems based around conventional tonal systems, they tend to invent new note names which indicate how the new notes fit around the old ones (although the tuning of the old ones may also have to be different to make the whole system work).
So, Collier's "C half-sharp" is higher than C, but not as high as a conventional "C sharp". C half-sharp major is the same construction in terms of frequency relationships as any other major scale, but it just roots on C half-sharp, however he's defined that, rather than another note. And that's just fine, in a theoretical model. It just sounds odd to us because we're not used to hearing pitch changes which are that fine - we'd usually be used to hearing an entire semitone.
So microtonal musicians have access to more notes, basically. Collier's not really using much in the way of microtonality here - the melody itself isn't microtonal, he's just stepped slightly outside the conventional tuning system.
Very cool to hear it though.
(PS if you're wondering about those fundamental frequency relationships and why we can't just use those all the time, it's because nobody can be bothered to build, maintain or learn to play a piano with that many keys, or a piano which is perfectly in tune but only in C major. If you want to hear it, there's microtonal music built around that idea, or actually just listen to a really good barbershop choir because the human voice is not interested in your stupid mechanical limitations and can sing perfect intervals all the time if the brain controlling it knows what it's doing)
posted by mathw at 7:03 AM on July 17, 2020 [7 favorites]
^ Many string and wind musicians play with pure intonation in practice, even if the music they're playing only appears to offer 12 pitch options per octave (e.g., any good ensemble player will know that, in C major, an F in a IV chord and an F in a V7 chord are essentially two different notes). I love that Collier has been swimming in the subtleties and intricacies of intonation and intervallic structure,* and this arrangement is gorgeous.
Interestingly, by modulating the overall frequency level ("C half-sharp major"), he's playing with something that has been collectively in flux for centuries now already: about 200 years ago, as best we can discern, we think A was much lower than 440, down around 432ish (so, at least a half-step flatter). Today, it continues to inflate, and is only consistently at 440 on the U.S. west coast--eastern U.S. and most of Europe has migrated to 442, with some pushing for 444. (Long explanation why, but mostly better materials and construction techniques allowed string instruments to hold more tension in strings, which lets them tune up a bit, which makes tone production more full and increases dynamic range for the string section; woodwind players in orchestras have a bad habit of playing slightly sharp anyway--helps them hear themselves a bit better--which pushes consensus pitch up and adds to what's already happening.) This causes a few problems, most noticeably with pitched percussion instruments (marimba, xylophone, chimes, etc.) because those are tuned slightly sharp when they're made, mainly to allow for pitch decrease over the life of the instrument, and if those are pitched at 442 but then the whole ensemble starts tuning to 442, before long most of your pitched percussion will start sounding flat to the ensemble. Also, A=442 just makes most music sound tense and strident to my ears, and I actually prefer 438 to 440 and if I were the czar of all large ensemble music-making we would return to a much more reasonable standard and stop all of this damn pitch inflation because before long we'll all be sitting around playing music that only dogs can hear and....
* Of course, microtonal and pan-tonal exploration in jazz has a long history, one of my personal favorites is Don Ellis' quarter-tone trumpet that he made so he and his band could play in the cracks.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:15 AM on July 17, 2020 [4 favorites]
Interestingly, by modulating the overall frequency level ("C half-sharp major"), he's playing with something that has been collectively in flux for centuries now already: about 200 years ago, as best we can discern, we think A was much lower than 440, down around 432ish (so, at least a half-step flatter). Today, it continues to inflate, and is only consistently at 440 on the U.S. west coast--eastern U.S. and most of Europe has migrated to 442, with some pushing for 444. (Long explanation why, but mostly better materials and construction techniques allowed string instruments to hold more tension in strings, which lets them tune up a bit, which makes tone production more full and increases dynamic range for the string section; woodwind players in orchestras have a bad habit of playing slightly sharp anyway--helps them hear themselves a bit better--which pushes consensus pitch up and adds to what's already happening.) This causes a few problems, most noticeably with pitched percussion instruments (marimba, xylophone, chimes, etc.) because those are tuned slightly sharp when they're made, mainly to allow for pitch decrease over the life of the instrument, and if those are pitched at 442 but then the whole ensemble starts tuning to 442, before long most of your pitched percussion will start sounding flat to the ensemble. Also, A=442 just makes most music sound tense and strident to my ears, and I actually prefer 438 to 440 and if I were the czar of all large ensemble music-making we would return to a much more reasonable standard and stop all of this damn pitch inflation because before long we'll all be sitting around playing music that only dogs can hear and....
* Of course, microtonal and pan-tonal exploration in jazz has a long history, one of my personal favorites is Don Ellis' quarter-tone trumpet that he made so he and his band could play in the cracks.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:15 AM on July 17, 2020 [4 favorites]
Jacob Collier is clearly immensely talented, and I applaud him for being successful with the sort of inside-baseball music-theory-nerd stuff that in previous years has turned audiences off (and that no one was interested in talking to me about in high school). For me, his arrangements and vocal sensibilities are greatly influenced by Take 6 (who he featured among a billion other cameos in the "All Night Long" video).
I do think some of his stuff is "too much," but I attribute that to youth and the fact that you can basically do *anything* with modern digital recording.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:33 AM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
I do think some of his stuff is "too much," but I attribute that to youth and the fact that you can basically do *anything* with modern digital recording.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:33 AM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
I actually prefer 438 to 440 and if I were the czar of all large ensemble music-making we would return to a much more reasonable standard and stop all of this damn pitch inflation because before long we'll all be sitting around playing music that only dogs can hear and....
This is a masterful bit of typographic crypto-self-reference right here, damn.
posted by aws17576 at 9:56 AM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
This is a masterful bit of typographic crypto-self-reference right here, damn.
posted by aws17576 at 9:56 AM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
438, 439, whatever it takes...
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:04 AM on July 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:04 AM on July 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
Collier says when he was growing up he loved listening to Take 6 and trying to sing a 7th part along with them (presumably not live at a concert).
posted by straight at 11:08 AM on July 17, 2020
posted by straight at 11:08 AM on July 17, 2020
I actually prefer 438 to 440 and if I were the czar of all large ensemble music-making we would return to a much more reasonable standard and stop all of this damn pitch inflation because before long we'll all be sitting around playing music that only dogs can hear and....
OK but what's your preferred temperament tho?!
posted by entropone at 11:12 AM on July 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
OK but what's your preferred temperament tho?!
posted by entropone at 11:12 AM on July 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
I don’t know. Seems like quality production but I’m turned off by these technical points. 646 tracks? Sounds like a Stevie Wonder song fed through a Hall and Oates filter to me. No disrespect if you like this song. I play music with folks who would probably really like this. It is just a matter of taste. I have it and they don’t (jk, sorry).
As is shown in straight’s link from the second thread comment, all he does to achieve the tonal shift to a half sharp is turn the tuning knob of his virtual instrument up a quarter-step. The effect for me is that it “fucks with you” a little bit and is more a function of the tools used to make the music than any interesting take on musicality. When I clicked I was hoping for something having to do with temperament, that is the relationship between the harmonies themselves. This method maintains the ratios of the harmonies while simply shifting the pitch frequencies. IMO, rather trivial but cool in the sense that it is something different in an electronic pop song.
posted by dagosto at 11:16 AM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
As is shown in straight’s link from the second thread comment, all he does to achieve the tonal shift to a half sharp is turn the tuning knob of his virtual instrument up a quarter-step. The effect for me is that it “fucks with you” a little bit and is more a function of the tools used to make the music than any interesting take on musicality. When I clicked I was hoping for something having to do with temperament, that is the relationship between the harmonies themselves. This method maintains the ratios of the harmonies while simply shifting the pitch frequencies. IMO, rather trivial but cool in the sense that it is something different in an electronic pop song.
posted by dagosto at 11:16 AM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
Collier can clearly sing that microtonal stuff without turning a knob and just doing it with tech, though. And the example I gave was the least interesting thing he does with it. For instance he'll keep stacking just-tuned triads and instead of compromising the purity of the triad to stay aligned with equal temperment let them get further and further out of tune until he's at C-half-sharp or whatever and then pivot the rest of the song to be in tune with that.
Maybe I'm not understanding/explaining that quite right and maybe it's something a capella choirs do naturally all the time? But he's definitely making decisions about how to compose around the differences in temperments rather than just sweetening the intervals in occasional chords while staying tied to equal temperment. And maybe that's something a lot of modern composers have done but it's new to me.
I've heard a lot of modern music that experiments with various kinds of minimalism but not so much composers trying to keep adding one more note without everything turning to mush. I'm definitely not tired of Collier's stuff yet.
posted by straight at 11:45 AM on July 17, 2020
Maybe I'm not understanding/explaining that quite right and maybe it's something a capella choirs do naturally all the time? But he's definitely making decisions about how to compose around the differences in temperments rather than just sweetening the intervals in occasional chords while staying tied to equal temperment. And maybe that's something a lot of modern composers have done but it's new to me.
I've heard a lot of modern music that experiments with various kinds of minimalism but not so much composers trying to keep adding one more note without everything turning to mush. I'm definitely not tired of Collier's stuff yet.
posted by straight at 11:45 AM on July 17, 2020
OK but what's your preferred temperament tho?!
None whenever possible, of course, bc pure intonation is the physics of musical sound, what results when the whole-number ratios are just right; but if I must deal with temperament--and one almost always must--then equal temperament is preferred, as the least out-of-tune compromise to allow chromatic modulation within a dodecaphonic pitch system using heptachord set-based tonality. (as JS Bach virtuosically argued/demonstrated a couple hundred years ago : )
For instance he'll keep stacking just-tuned triads and instead of compromising the purity of the triad to stay aligned with equal temperment let them get further and further out of tune until he's at C-half-sharp or whatever and then pivot the rest of the song to be in tune with that.
This is a pretty terrific explanation of why what he's doing is different than just turning the MOD wheel or clicking 'transpose'. An analogy might be calendar years, which are 365 days long, and actual years, which are 365.25 days long, and so every now and then we get a 366-day calendar year to correct for that, to "temper" the calendar years so that they are, overall, even cycles that match actual years. If we failed to correct for that and allowed our calendar to slowly go out of phase with the earth/sun dynamic, after a while we'd be in a weird place where the calendar and seasons and stuff don't quite line up, a strange in-between where the actual phenomenon doesn't match its label or measure.
I think part of what Collier is doing here is just trying to get us to hear equal temperament a little more clearly (like the old joke about fish and water) by playing with what happens when you remove the small, constant corrections that it imposes. It's an essential kind of musical play, more working with the phenomenon than composing within a system, which is a big part of what makes his work consistently interesting and challenging to me.
posted by LooseFilter at 12:28 PM on July 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
None whenever possible, of course, bc pure intonation is the physics of musical sound, what results when the whole-number ratios are just right; but if I must deal with temperament--and one almost always must--then equal temperament is preferred, as the least out-of-tune compromise to allow chromatic modulation within a dodecaphonic pitch system using heptachord set-based tonality. (as JS Bach virtuosically argued/demonstrated a couple hundred years ago : )
For instance he'll keep stacking just-tuned triads and instead of compromising the purity of the triad to stay aligned with equal temperment let them get further and further out of tune until he's at C-half-sharp or whatever and then pivot the rest of the song to be in tune with that.
This is a pretty terrific explanation of why what he's doing is different than just turning the MOD wheel or clicking 'transpose'. An analogy might be calendar years, which are 365 days long, and actual years, which are 365.25 days long, and so every now and then we get a 366-day calendar year to correct for that, to "temper" the calendar years so that they are, overall, even cycles that match actual years. If we failed to correct for that and allowed our calendar to slowly go out of phase with the earth/sun dynamic, after a while we'd be in a weird place where the calendar and seasons and stuff don't quite line up, a strange in-between where the actual phenomenon doesn't match its label or measure.
I think part of what Collier is doing here is just trying to get us to hear equal temperament a little more clearly (like the old joke about fish and water) by playing with what happens when you remove the small, constant corrections that it imposes. It's an essential kind of musical play, more working with the phenomenon than composing within a system, which is a big part of what makes his work consistently interesting and challenging to me.
posted by LooseFilter at 12:28 PM on July 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
He just came out with a new track - He Won't Hold You (feat. Rapsody)
Where the track in the FPP is more upbeat, this one (which is also in a half-sharp key) is a great meditation on loss and moving on, featuring yet another half-sharp key, close vocal harmonies, behind-the-beat phrases, and a slower plod of a rhythm with wonky clicks that sound like walking your bike along a path. It fits this moment well.
posted by pianoblack at 12:46 PM on July 17, 2020
Where the track in the FPP is more upbeat, this one (which is also in a half-sharp key) is a great meditation on loss and moving on, featuring yet another half-sharp key, close vocal harmonies, behind-the-beat phrases, and a slower plod of a rhythm with wonky clicks that sound like walking your bike along a path. It fits this moment well.
posted by pianoblack at 12:46 PM on July 17, 2020
Listened to He Won’t Hold You. Here it seems like the drifting tuning achieves a lot of what you would get in an ensemble of any sort. It’s nice. I hear the shifting tuning between sections as kind of natural drift you would get with a group that doesn’t retain pitch. Pleasant
I’m just not super impressed by the novelty. Whether it be through tech, ear training or innate talents, it is just that, novel, to a jaded person like me. If it gets people interested I’m all for it. May I suggest listening to James Brown’s The Boss with the concept of tuning in mind?
posted by dagosto at 1:25 PM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
I’m just not super impressed by the novelty. Whether it be through tech, ear training or innate talents, it is just that, novel, to a jaded person like me. If it gets people interested I’m all for it. May I suggest listening to James Brown’s The Boss with the concept of tuning in mind?
posted by dagosto at 1:25 PM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
438, same as in town...
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 1:36 PM on July 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 1:36 PM on July 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
composers trying to keep adding one more note without everything turning to mush
Found the part in Collier's talk I was alluding to: "One thing I like to do is have a chord planned and then add as many notes as I possibly can to the chord before it gets too much. Then I can start to take those notes out. If I need to. But I don't always need to, do I?"
posted by straight at 2:02 PM on July 17, 2020
Found the part in Collier's talk I was alluding to: "One thing I like to do is have a chord planned and then add as many notes as I possibly can to the chord before it gets too much. Then I can start to take those notes out. If I need to. But I don't always need to, do I?"
posted by straight at 2:02 PM on July 17, 2020
Amazing! I particularly jaw-dropped listening to his version of the Flintstones theme.
posted by Quasimike at 2:06 PM on July 17, 2020
posted by Quasimike at 2:06 PM on July 17, 2020
This tickles the same parts of my brain as Earth Wind and Fire and early Chaka Khan, and that's about the highest praise I can ever offer anyone. It's delicious, and thank you for bringing it.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 4:58 PM on July 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by halfbuckaroo at 4:58 PM on July 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
A great sounding song, but I could not help but notice the similarities to Kirk Franklin’s “Love Theory”. I am not super knowledgeable about music though, but I imagine the songs are different enough to avoid lawsuits?
Link to YouTube
posted by joe_monk at 8:32 PM on July 17, 2020
Link to YouTube
posted by joe_monk at 8:32 PM on July 17, 2020
Both of those songs remind me of Don't Disturb This Groove by The System. Even though The System's song is not in the same key, all three have similar, but not exactly the same, chord progressions in their opening bars, and they all go da-da-da/da-da/da-da-da-da. I don't know what that's called.
posted by droplet at 10:23 PM on July 17, 2020
posted by droplet at 10:23 PM on July 17, 2020
Dude I KNOW
posted by JaiMahodara at 2:02 PM on July 20, 2020
posted by JaiMahodara at 2:02 PM on July 20, 2020
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posted by Modest House at 4:20 PM on July 16, 2020 [1 favorite]