as fond as i am of idaho's more recent work, nothing will ever top 'three sheets to the wind' for me.  it seems to be the perfect balance point in jeff martin's career..  the band's distinctive sound feels fully-developed, but unlike the subsequent releases, harmony is still given as high a priority as texture.  and given his recent shift towards piano-based songs, it seems likely that the world will never hear anything like it again.

one of the most memorable tracks for me is the closer, 'get you back'.  despite the fact that it clocks in at about 55bpm, its dynamics and intensity are enough to keep even the most ardent slowcore skeptic interested.  and as it turns out, the tempo is part of what makes this song worth looking at.

it opens on a DbM7, and stays there long enough to make you think it's the tonic.  but it's not!  the second chord of the verse moves up a fifth to the Ab, and suddenly you realize that what you thought was the I was actually the IV, and Ab is the real tonic.  but it's not!  because then it moves up to the Bb, and it turns out that the Ab was actually a VII all along.

except, of course, that it wasn't.

on its face, this probably seems ridiculous.  all three chords can share Bb as a tone center, given a modulation from the parallel minor, something rock songs do all the time.  so why isn't this just III/i VII/i I?

because musical cognition is affected by tempo.  in particular, the longer you hang out on one chord, the less relevant the previous chords are to the way your mind parses the music.  this song would simply not be possible if it were faster.  try it yourself:  play these three chords at twice the tempo, and see if it still sounds (...)

ascii rave in haskell.

as i understand it, he's using the karplus-strong algorithm (that generic plucked string algorithm you find everywhere) for the consonants, and a formant filter for the vowels.  it's put together in hsc3 (supercollider with haskell bindings).  the source code is available here.

(via zealan on #psycle)

last week, i discussed a technique for revitalizing cheesy chord progressions, using the theme from 'chip n dale: rescue rangers' as an example.  i still believe it's one of the best demonstrations of this method, but i realize that a lot of people aren't likely to take my advice seriously without a more respectable example..  so here it is!  'yesterday', by the beatles: (...)

unless you're taking some severe steps to avoid it, cheese is a significant part of your musical diet.  not the sappy, maudlin sort of cheese; the generic, overused kind.  a cheesy song is a song that's already been written dozens or even hundreds of times before.  there's a reason why it's so ubiquitous in the world of modern music: it sounds good.  it's a lot easier to enjoy a song when it already sounds familiar on the first listen.

this fact puts the modern songwriter in an awkward position.  you need originality to sustain your artistic integrity, but you need cheese to sustain accessibility.  well-rounded songwriting means finding a balance somewhere in the middle, which can sometimes be a lot more difficult than it sounds. (...)