What is it about...?

Down at The Old Vinyl Emporium™ Go Premium A spin through the JC’s crappy record collection.Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Reviews Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

JC is no expert but he likes to twang on his guitar and he knows what he likes. This will be a series of deeply idiosyncratic investigations of unique songs — the type that stick in your head — to set up a story of why they stick in your head. Why are these different?

Along the way, we will look at the musical composition, instrumentation, technology, performance and recording techniques that made these songs unique.

1. The Sound of Music: a primer:
   1. Do re me
      1. Notes: All music is divided into twelve “semitones”. These are the black and white keys on the piano. Once you get through the twelve notes they start repeating themselves. The interval between those notes before they start repeating is an “octave”. This is confusing, and contains a Western prejudice, but bear with it for now. Audio freaks: a to go up or down an octave is to double (or half) the frequency of the tone: Middle A is 440 Hz. A one octave higher is 880 Hz. And so on. Guitar freaks: the octave of an open guitar string is exactly halfway between the bridge and the nut. Physics.
      2. Intervals: Different cultures divide up the twelve semitones of an octave up differently.
         1. Eastern: Much “Eastern” music has six “tones” equally spaced by two semitones — hence it is called a “whole-tone scale”. This is easy and nicely mathematical: 12 semitones divided by 2 is six. The semitone intervals between each note are therefore: 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2. However: the wholetone scale sounds odd to Western ears. It isn’t “odd”: Western ears are just acculturated to something different.
         2. Western: Western music has, for the most part, seven tones. Since 7 doesn’t go into 12, you have uneven intervals between the notes: they are 2 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 1. Those eight notes: well, seven plus the one to get back to the beginning) is where the word “octave” comes from. Hence the monocultural bigotry of our musical notation. But anyway.
         3. Popular: Popular music comprises, principally, five tones. Five doesn’t go into 12 either, so again there are uneven intervals: two are three semitones and the rest are two semitones: 3 - 2 - 2 - 3 - 2. This does not sound so odd to Western ears. You can see why if you compare the Eastern, Western and popular intervals in a table: the five-tone scale (called a “pentatonic” scale) is a subset of the western 7 tone scale, just skips the two half-tone steps:

            Scale	Semitones
            	01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12
            Eastern “whole tone”
            Western “seven-tone”
            Western “Pentatonic”

            But there is something else about that five-tone pentatonic scale. Nudge it along one tone and we can see is the inverse of the Western seven-note scale and fits into all the gaps between the notes:

            Scale	Semitones
            	01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12
            Western “seven-tone”
            Western “Pentatonic”	→		→			→		→		→

            And if we put these together and, say make the “pentatonic” notes black and the “western” ones white, we get, well, a piano keyboard:

            Scale	Semitones
            	01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12
            Western “seven-tone”

      3. Key: Every song has a “base tone” in the octave — the “key” — which the melody is based around. This is an anchor, and determines which notes sound nice and which do not. So, pick a key. All of the scales and intervals above revolve around that key.
      4. Modes: Okay now it gets a bit ninja. The western interval is 2 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 1, but it is like one of those choose-your-own adventure books. You can make any of the seven notes your key. Depending on where you start you get a different flavour of Western music. They have names which are needlessly arcane:

         Mode	Mood	Semitones
         		01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12
         Ionian	Major: happy.
         Dorian	Jazz. Avoid.
         Phrygian	Jazz. Avoid.
         Lydian	Jazz. Avoid.
         Mixolydian	Blues.
         Aeolian	Minor: sad.
         Locrian	Jazz. Avoid.

         A lot of this is jazzy nonsense, but there is something really interesting: The Ionian mode is the happy one. Doe a deer, and so on. But the Aeolian mode — the exact same sequence of intervals, only starting in a different place, sounds really sad. It is the minor key.

         1. Do re me is a tune set in the Ionian mode.
         2. Why do re me? Eleventh-century Italian Guido of Arezzo invented a notational system after the first syllable of each line of the Latin “Hymn to St. John the Baptist”, each of which started on a successive note of the major scale. A seventh tone, ti was added later. The eighth note of the “octave” is the first one repeated up one level (which, er, “brings us back to doh”.)

      5. Octaves and frequency: To raise a note by an octave is double its frequency: at concert pitch, “middle A” (“A0”) is 440Hz. A1 is 880Hz, and so on.

         1. The reason notes sound in (or out of) tune is because of mathematical interactions of frequency. the major scale seven of 12 possible “semitones” that don’t sound out of tune, before you start again.
         2. Western music takes seven of those notes, that: and the importance of do, fa and la.

      6. Intervals:

         1. the importance of the Perfect Fifth: neither major nor minor.
         2. The importance of One, Four, Five: I, IV, V: tonic, dominant and subdominant.
         3. A fifth up from the tonic is the dominant. A fifth down from the tonic is the subdominant.

   2. Spaghetti Western punk disco at the end of the world: Blondie’s Atomic

      1. The major and minor and the perfect fifth
      2. The saddest of all licks

   3. The saddest lick: Oxygène IV, “Heroes” and Brothers in Arms

      1. Analog synthesisers and how to shape a sound
         1. Square waves, sine waves, saw tooths and flat waves
         2. Oscillators
         3. Attack and release
         4. Envelope

   4. Echo, slap back reverb and delay

      1. Reverb - spring reverb and delay
      2. Echo
      3. Delay - Edge and Freddie Mercury
      4. Arpeggiators

   5. Hard rock boogie: how some Scottish Australians stumbled upon the sacred laws of rock ’n’ roll

      1. Economy of design: There are some things they just got right first time
         1. Volkswagen Beetle
         2. Zippo lighter
         3. Bic biro
         4. Telecaster
      2. The 1-4-5
      3. Chord voicing:
         1. those open chords
         2. that big snarling G

      4. progressions and melodies

         1. major: country,
         2. minor: rock
         3. mixture: blues
      5. Syncopation: drums and bass on, Vocals and Guitars off
      6. Groove
         1. Straight eight
         3. 12:4 - shuffle and boogie
      7. Pan left and right
      8. EQ
         1. Bottom: bass and kick
         2. Lower middle: guitars
         3. Upper middle: vocals
         4. Top: Cymbals and hi-hats
      9. The golden rule: keep it simple

   6. Everything is off-kilter: all-out transgression before it was fashionable: Ashes to Ashes as the genius of David Bowie condensed to 4 minutes.

      1. The “short progression” - a classic Bowie trick (see under pressure, compare with all you need is love, money
      2. Start and end on the root note? No sir
      3. Four on the floor? No sir.

   7. Schwing! Why does a shuffle move us?

      1. how time signatures can give us a groove. Straight is white, syncopated is white (the indie drum riff, to swing is not white. It’s gypsy, African.
      2. How they differ:
         1. Boogie
         2. Shuffle
         3. Swing