Tag: rhythm

  • Take These Words Home and Think ‘Em Through: The Legacy of Mobb Deep’s Prodigy

    Take These Words Home and Think ‘Em Through: The Legacy of Mobb Deep’s Prodigy

    In the years since Mobb Deep‘s 1996 hit “Shook Ones (Part II)” was released, the song has attained legendary status among hip-hop listeners due to its many unique attributes, such as its darkly timbral, sonic world full of police sirens and impossible amounts of lingering reverb, and its equally rugged linguistic play, equipped with menacing threats…

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  • How to Make an Instrumental Track Shine with Vocal Samples

    How to Make an Instrumental Track Shine with Vocal Samples

    + Bridge the worlds of theory, improvisation, and jazzy hip-hop, and improve your piano chops with Grammy-winner Kiefer in his course, Kiefer: Keys, Chords, & Beats. Tons of producers making instrumental electronic music today scour YouTube and other online forums to find “vocal samples” to add to their tracks. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve googled…

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  • Focus on Simplicity: Exercises to Strengthen Your Foundations in Improvising

    Focus on Simplicity: Exercises to Strengthen Your Foundations in Improvising

    By Mike Casey Raise your hand if you’ve heard this cliché before: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Well, as cheesy as that sounds, I happen to believe it’s right on the money. After all, advanced musical devices, concepts, and patterns are usually just a slew of basic fundamentals stacked on top of one another, inverted,…

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  • How to Use Polyrhythms to Create a Perfect Beat

    How to Use Polyrhythms to Create a Perfect Beat

    We’ve all felt it before: four-on-the-floor fatigue. That feeling when you’ve listened to too much music with the same square beat. 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4… Don’t get me wrong — I’m a technohead, so 4/4 is my jam. Lots of music is built on 4/4 rhythm for a reason: It’s familiar and easy to dance to. Sometimes you might…

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  • Rhythm Section Essentials Workshop: Adding Flavor to Your Groove with Percussion

    Rhythm Section Essentials Workshop: Adding Flavor to Your Groove with Percussion

    In most production and ensemble settings these days, auxiliary percussion is used primarily to add extra sparkle and syncopated spice to a track. Yet, adding this flare effectively is more difficult than it sounds. If mismanaged, percussion additions can easily cause problems with the flow of your track. Let’s break down some of the ways you can…

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  • 6 Electronic Tracks That Kick Butt Without a Kick Drum

    6 Electronic Tracks That Kick Butt Without a Kick Drum

    There’s nothing quite like a four-on-the-floor beat to get your feet tappin’, heads bobbin’, and butts movin’. But as any truly clued-in musician knows, sometimes less truly is more. In fact, there are many creative ways to produce rhythmically forward-driving music without that dependable low-end kick pulse. So let’s look at six tracks broadly fitting…

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  • Rhythm Section Essentials Workshop: “Locking in” with Bass and Drums

    Rhythm Section Essentials Workshop: “Locking in” with Bass and Drums

    In most ensembles, a combination of drums, bass, guitar, percussion, and keys make up the rhythm section, which provides the rhythmic and harmonic direction of the band. Particularly for bass and drums, one of the most challenging things to understand is how to interact with each other to make music that achieves something specific. When…

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  • 6 Songs That Prove Otis Spann Sold His Soul to the Devil, Too

    Blues legend has it that at the corner of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, otherwise known as the “Devil’s Crossroads,” a young Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in return for the ability to play the bejeezus out of his guitar. Well, I’m here to make the case that there…

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  • Intro to Electronic Drumming: Adding a Drum Pad into Your Performance Setup

    Intro to Electronic Drumming: Adding a Drum Pad into Your Performance Setup

    Becoming comfortable with playing electronic percussion is a vital skill for the modern drummer, especially when playing contemporary, digital-heavy genres such as trap, neo-soul, and pop-rock. Contemporary music production has a tendency to involve a combination of very specific drum sounds and completely electronic sounds that cannot be easily emulated by acoustic drums, and as a…

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  • Sticking to the Beat: 4 Tips to Improve Your Timing

    Sticking to the Beat: 4 Tips to Improve Your Timing

    By Harvey Grant As musicians, we can spend so long trying to improve our technique in terms of scales and “speed” that we bypass one of the most important factors in the success of a piece: timing. Sure, you may say that Glenn Gould didn’t stick precisely to the given measures of Bach’s Goldberg Variations,…

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Elijah Fox at the piano