music

"I believe the emergence and explosion of jazz in the last century is one of the pinnacles of human achievement."

"When I tell people I’m a trumpet soloist, there are three kinds of response I usually get: “Wow, what a great job!”, “Isn’t that unusual for a woman?” And “That’s jazz, right?”"

"You have to let music take you over, put ego aside, be a clean conductor – in the electrical sense."

"A fugue is like a canon, in that it is usually based on one theme which gets played in different voices and different keys, and occasionally at different speeds or upside down or backwards. However, the notion of fugue is much less rigid than that of canon, and consequently it allows for more emotional and artistic expression."

"To give an idea of how extraordinary a six-part fugue is, in the entire Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, containing forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, only two have as many as five parts, and nowhere is there a six-part fugue! One could probably liken the task of improvising a six-part fugue to the playing of sixty simultaneous blindfold games of chess, and winning them all. To improvise an eight-part fugue is really beyond human capability."

"As legendary bands in the scene continued to mature musically and grow away from the genres that they became known for, newly established musicians were creating blends that sparked new categories for scene music. In 2008, Fall Out Boy released their last album before their hiatus, and I Set My Friends On Fire popularized crunkcore. It was a landmark year in alternative music, as scene music expanded beyond its foundation of pop punk, punk, emo and hardcore. By 2008, electronic elements seeped into the scene, and party anthems became essential in nearly every album. At this particular time, fans steered toward bands who featured screamo vocals, any genre with the suffix -core and themes of moving forward toward a future beyond the emotional torment of emo music. These scene albums from 2008 created an all-new meaning to both the genre and community."

"At this point in heavy-music history, the breakdown is as much a building block of metal as the thrash gallop, the blast beat and the rippin' solo. Many of the biggest and most influential bands of the last 25 years have sections in their songs that elicit violent mosh moves, and in fact there are entire subgenres dedicated to crafting the heaviest, gnarliest breakdowns imaginable."

"The 1970s was arguably the single decade of the 20th century when recorded music was most central to culture. There were, of course, fewer kinds of media competing for the average consumer’s time—television meant just a handful of channels, video games were the size of refrigerators and could be found in arcades. As the used vinyl bins of the world are still telling us, records were the thing. Labels were flush with cash, sales of LPs and singles were brisk, and record stores were everywhere. Home stereos were a standard part of middle-class culture. Analog recording technology was at its zenith, FM radio was ascendant, and the AM dial still focused on music. The children of the baby boom were coming into their late twenties and thirties—young enough to still be serious music consumers, but old enough to have their own generation of children who were starting to buy music. And then there was the music itself. Disco, an entire cultural movement fueled by a genre of music—with massive impact on fashion, film, TV and advertising—was utterly ubiquitous. Rock music emerged from the ’60s as to go-to choice of white youth culture. Soul and funk were reaching new levels of artistry. Punk, the first serious backlash against the rock mainstream, came into its own. Records from Jamaica were making their way to the UK and, eventually, the U.S., changing sounds and urging a new kind of political consciousness. As culture moved in every direction at once, there were more great songs than anyone could count."

"The 1970s saw a number of genres flourish apart from just rock and disco. Everything from funk, soul and R&B to country, folk and reggae music emerged during the decade, and more importantly several artists within these styles established the “gold standard” for what exceptional music should sound like in these genres. And the same can be said about both rock and disco music, as many consider the pinnacle of these genres to come from artists of the ‘70s."

"Arguably one of the best decades of music, the 1970s saw the rise of disco, long shaggy hair, the continuation of the free love movement, and, of course, Rock and Roll at its height of fame."

"One hit single is one more than most bands ever achieve. That said, more often than not throughout music history, we tend to remember them as one-hit wonders. There were plenty of them in the 1970s."

"Shaking off the naturalism, daisy chains, and acid tabs of the 1960s was easier than expected. The 1970s unfurled as a paradox of both striking diversity and remarkable coherence: From high-concept prog nerds and high-octane guitar solo to high-heeled glam-rockers and rough-and-ready punks, the decade saw the rise and dominance of the album-as-unified-statement."

"The 1970s: It was the decade that punk and disco landed like a bludgeon against the bourgeoise stronghold on the arts as virtuosity made way for music of attitude and individualism. It was the decades that saw David Bowie unleash a constant swirl of singular masterpieces and inspire millions with his creative character studies. It saw Joni Mitchell make everybody cry with the folk explosion’s last hurrah on Blue, Californian rock ‘n’ roll went out in style with LA Woman, and the emergence of new masters on albums like London’s Calling, Marquee Moon, Paranoid, Horses, Rumours and an endless string of others. In short, it was the great decade of art in history."

"One thing I always encourage everyone to do is just try modulating in any direction. Just try it. Use the things you have - it’s so easy to just try and modulate. Even if it sounds like shit; even if you just do it really quickly just to see if you can pull yourself somewhere."

"Over centuries of music, composers have used modulations and changes in the key of the music to express emotion, drama and excitement. In pop and rock music a shift up a semitone is always a memorable moment, as a song clicks into an upper gear."

"Many of the biggest hits in pop music used to have something in common: a key change, like the one you hear in Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody." But key changes have become harder to find in top hits."

"Someone killed the key change in pop music, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to find the perpetrator."

"Musically, one of the most interesting things about [Sabrina Carpenter's] "Please Please Please" is the key change at the start of the second verse - not a songwriting trick that’s often pulled."

"Bon Jovi did it in "Livin' on a Prayer," Michael Jackson in "Man in the Mirror," and Celine Dion in "My Heart Will Go On." Taking a verse or a chorus up a notch by modulating the key was a way for pop stars to give their songs extra oomph for decades. We loved it because it made us feel things. And some of us are realizing just how much we miss the chills and thrills those modulations gave us."

"Changing the key – or shifting the base scale of a song – is a tool used across musical genres to "inject energy" into a pop number."

"If we’d like to be honest about gender in the music world, we need to address all parties. Women need to invest in themselves, hustle for gigs, network, and do the work of forming bands and cultivating their own talents if they would like to be taken seriously. The industry pretty much always rewards women who do these things. I’m not interested in any special handout just for being a woman. But on the other hand, if a woman is doing these things, yet she’s told ‘We already have enough women on the bill, so we’ll call you next year’—now that’s an issue. No one says to a male artist, ‘We already have enough men on the bill!’"

"In 1995, I was lucky enough to get a job traveling with a busy, all-male band. I was only 19 years old, and I’ve stayed employed ever since. It wasn’t until years into my career that I realized my experience could be considered rare. As a teenager, I was just happy to be playing my banjo and I didn’t dwell on any gender-specific issues. If they don’t have to play with an all-female band, a group led by another woman, or be the bandleader themselves, the number of job opportunities drastically increases. I believe that, eventually, gender won’t be an issue. One day, female musicians will just be musicians and that’s the ultimate goal."

"When I was growing up people would always say, and it was meant in the kindest possible way, ‘You’re really good for a girl,’ because there weren’t a lot of girls or women playing. Out of this small pond of people, it was surprising to them. In my opinion, you’d have to be pretty unworldly to make a comment like that anymore. Nobody had the success that Alison Krauss had. So, when that happened, I think it started to make it difficult for people to look at women in bluegrass as some kind of exceptional thing. Here was a woman who really blew out the boundaries for the music and really expanded the potential for the music and brought in new listeners."

"Napster affected rock CD sales disproportionately when it first came out in the late ’90s, because rock was what a lot of college students were listening to, and they were early MP3 adopters (and early pirates.) They figured out quickly how to download MP3s for free, so rock sales were the first to decline. It would take a while before piracy/the Internet/MP3s/downloads would cut into other genres, because it took old people a long time to figure out the Internet. [...] Everyone would suffer, but those artists and labels would feel it first and worst. After all the good times, this one-two punch at the turn of the millennium left indie — and rock music in general — reeling."

"From Keith Richards's ratty distorted guitar on The Rolling Stones's “Satisfaction” to T-Pain's Auto-Tuned vocals on Lil Wayne's “Lollipop,” music technology has often defined the sound of popular music."

"It's just that when you're playing in standard tuning all the time, you're sounding pretty...standard."

"The wah pedal (which in many cases is probably the award-winning Cry Baby by Dunlop) is one of the most original and easily identified guitar effects in the world. Nothing sounds cooler, and few sounds transcend genres so easily as the wah pedal."

"From around 1600 to 1750, the Baroque period witnessed the creation of some of the greatest musical masterpieces ever composed."

"The way I and most guitarists produce a pinch harmonic is to grasp the pick close to its pointed tip with your thumb and index finger. You then pick a downstroke, intentionally allowing a bit of the fleshy part of the thumb to graze the string at the same time."

"More than 40 years after the release of Van Halen, the opening riff in “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” - an arpeggiated Am-F-G5 passage played with palm-muted downstrokes - is still a favorite among beginning and intermediate pickers."

"In the ’80s, Peter Buck’s clean, chime-y arpeggios defined the sound of alt-rock to come."

"Dominant 9th chords figure prominently in Van Halen’s early rhythm work. As with the previously discussed triads, these more complex chords sound like crap when played with too much distortion."

"On 'Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,' during the solo, on the note A I would flick a harmonic, get it feeding back, and then go 'dit-dit-dit-dar-dar' with the switch. And by standing at certain angles I could get incredible sounds out of it, some of which were just characteristics of the Rickenbacker body, which I stuffed with paper. You could control it and it could be very musical. Certainly that sort of thing where you hit an open A chord and then take your fingers off the strings... the A string is still banging away but you're hearing the finger-off harmonics in the feedback. Then the vibrating A starts to stimulate harmonics in other strings, and it's just an extraordinary sound, like an enormous plane. It's a wonderful, optimistic sound and that was something that happened because I was posing — I'd put my arms out, let go of the chord then find that the resulting noise was better."

"I believe it was something people were discovering all over London. These big amps that Marshall were turning out — you couldn't stop the guitars feeding back!"

"Other people stumbled on feedback at the same time as me. Jeff Beck was using it when Roger [Daltrey] went to see the Tridents rehearsing. He said, 'There's a shit-hot guitar player down the road and he's making sounds like you.' Then later, when we supported the Kinks, Dave Davies was adamant: 'I invented it, it wasn't John Lennon and it wasn't you!'"

"When Tony Iommi deified himself in 1970 by unleashing upon the world that seminal riff from Black Sabbath’s infamous title track, he not only laid the groundwork for the future of heavy metal music, he also single-handedly executed one of the most noteworthy trills in rock ‘n’ roll history. Combined with the sound of pouring rain and the ominous ringing of the bell, his use of the trill on “Black Sabbath” demonstrated the latent power the classical embellishment has always held, but had hitherto never been actualized with proper amplification."

"Metallica’s crunch sound is often cleaner than people expect. [...] Don’t get me wrong, distortion is great, but there’s definitely a point where having too much turns your tone to mush. The low end loses its tightness and your overall tone gets flabby, with no definition or cut. When you’re first starting out, there’s always the temptation to hide behind distortion because it lets you get away with murder. But, when it comes to rhythm work, you’ve gotta back off that gain control a bit, especially if you’re playing with another guitarist. Actually, over the years, James and I have found that besides giving our tone more definition and cut, backing off the gain makes us play our riffs better because we can’t get away with being sloppy."

"There has always been a good deal of mystery surrounding the pinch harmonic, or, as hip players like to call it, “pick squeal.” A pick squeal is simply an artificial harmonic, or high-pitched sound, produced by choking up on the pick and allowing the thumb or thumbnail to catch the string in just as it is picked. The result, of course, resembles a squeal. Or a squawk. Or a scream. (It could take several tries before you get the desired "s" word.) Anyhow, what was once the domain of blues-rock string benders is now a staple for most metal guitarists."

"Historically, the trill has acquired associations with doom, gloom, and even the occult. More specifically, two noteworthy composers, Guiseppe Tartini and Franz Schubert, adopted the trill to express a sense of melancholy in some of the most definitive pieces of their oeuvre. While these composers were certainly not the only ones to use the trill in incisive ways, their use of the classic embellishment distinguished their work."

"The trill [is] a technique that early composers used due to its rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic properties. By rapidly alternating between two adjacent notes—usually a half-step or whole-step apart—composers could create a brief sense of dissonance and tension that clashed with the tonality of the respective piece. The trill naturally creates a sense of tension, and when used properly, it lends itself well to somber moods and melodies. Metal musicians picked up on this early on and, by passing it down through the airwaves, have made it a hallmark of heavy music today."

"When you pick the string just right, a higher pitch other than the fretted note is sounded. This higher pitch is an overtone, or harmonic, that stems from the overtone series related to that note. Indicated by the abbreviation P.H., the pinch harmonic is a fantastic expressive device to use when playing a solo or melody. Much beloved by rock, blues, country and metal guitarists alike, the pinch harmonic has been used to great effect by such legendary axemen as Roy Buchanan, Billy Gibbons, Eddie Van Halen and Zakk Wylde."

"In short, pick squealing, or pinch harmonics is part of the reason why a lot of people started using copious amounts of hairspray and dressing in very tight clothing during the '80s. However, pick squeals, or, in less cool words, pinch harmonics, can be used in a much broader spectrum of ways than just heavy metal, and the technique was originally probably first used by blues players of old."

"The so-called “wrong notes” people might tell you to not play are sometimes the ones that sound amazing against the riff and really make your playing stand out. Take Marty's playing on Megadeth's "Rust In Peace." He is throwing in all kinds of exotic scales and interesting note choices all over the place."

"Don’t forget the different modes of the major scale. These can be very helpful. Learn them and practice how to apply them all over your fretboard."

"I don’t even think about it. I just do it. I think Gary [Holt – Slayer’s other guitarist] has a harder vibrato than I do. It’s your own personal style, and how it evolves depends on how much you want to make it sing on its own. It has a lot to do with muscle development and getting calluses at the end of your fingers. When we are rehearsing for tours, we go from working on new material with no leads at all to live show stuff that has lots of leads. Sometimes I have to call time on practice because my fingers are dust; I have to just go home. You’ve got to build up the stamina."

"In the Seventies, stateside hard-rock acts like Aerosmith, Kiss and Ted Nugent played tunes heavily rooted in blues and boogie riffs. As fans of blues-based rock acts like Led Zeppelin and Cream, Van Halen certainly weren’t immune to this influence."

"The origin of using feedback as a tactful play is admittedly blurry. But one thing Davies and Townshend can agree on is how their use of it differed. Davies was more animalistic. Townshend’s art school background, meanwhile, saw him longing for a more musical application."

"For lovers of the ear-bleeding, the ugly, the wyrd and deranged, there might be a case for 1986 being the most formative year since the beginning of rock."

"Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys and the Minutemen all disbanded during this year, and most of the significant figures had cast themselves out through ambition – if not of stardom and cash, then of making art that challenged expectations and pushed personal boundaries."

"If you have a working knowledge of hair metal, thrash metal, jangly indie or hardcore punk, you’ll hear me on this one, I daresay – every genre has its genre exercises, its cookiecutter outfits."