I was walking along the canal last weekend a while back with my good pal discussing saxophone and how his work rota had allowed him more time at home during the day, meaning he can practise the (often) unwelcoming sound of overtones. Continue reading...
Like any self respecting music producer, you can’t help but be fascinated and influenced by the influence Steve Reich has had not only on contemporary classical music and minimalism but his ripples are felt through electronic dance music too. Continue reading...
Get Down Saturday Night is a classic 1983 hit by Oliver Cheatham written by himself and Kevin McCord, released on MCA Records. It peaked at #38 in the UK singles chart that year. Continue reading...
As a young impressionable teenager, it was first hearing Mingus’ tribute to Thelonious Monk – Jump Monk – that first turned me on to jazz. I’d been exposed to odds and sods during secondary school but this was a milestone in terms of me becoming obsessed with the sound. Continue reading...
A really neat feature of Ableton Live is the clip loop length. In session mode this can easily facilitate simple polyrhythm generation which can lead to some great results. Continue reading...
A breakthrough for me as a musician, and particularly as a composer, was when I stopped imagining harmony in rigid frameworks. The first instrument I excelled at to some degree was the guitar (being a fairly average pianist), and that had a great impact on the way I thought about chords. Continue reading...
One of the eureka moments I had studying music was when I began to understand the harmonic series and how in turn this relates to pitch, intervals, harmony, tuning, waveforms, frequency and latterly timbre. Continue reading...
When I was younger and first getting into learning about harmony I was always fascinated in particular by certain jazz pianists and their ability to string long complex chord sequences together, drifting in and out of original key with ease. Continue reading...
New York in the 1940s saw an explosion of musical creativity: small ensembles playing heavily reharmonized tunes, often at a flurried pace, and relying very heavily on improvisation – this is the music we know now to be bebop. Continue reading...
Quartal harmony is a system of building chord structures on perfect fourths. It’s been used by classical composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy and Bartók and innumerable jazz musicians like McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans and Chick Corea to name but a few. Continue reading...