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, it will looking 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. Major scale: Do re me is a tune set to the major scale, the main musical scale of Western music.
      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”.)

   2. 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.

   3. 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
   2. Arpeggiators

   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

4. 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.

5. 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