“When you learn music, you’re trained to think [in terms of a] “right way” and a “wrong way.” - Jacob Collier, from TFA<p>Only if you have a lousy teacher. The best teachers are, in a sense, history professors. Their job is to show you how to imitate the masters. In that sense, Collier might be right, given one can objectively measure whether you're close to, or far from, emulating a given artist. But imitation is only a means to an end. You learn to imitate the masters so that you can stand on their shoulders and invent something new. I suspect that's what J Dilla was up to.<p>"Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate" - Clark Terry, paraphrased.
Related: Jojo Mayer's "The distance between 0 and 1" TED Talk [0]<p>Being a prospect of a drummer for more than 20 years (and still without an own drum set...) I've struggled with timing in general. The fluctuations on tempo, playing precise (in like don't playing flams unintentionally when playing two notes at unison with different limbs) and subdivisions.<p>And as said in this thing, mainstream music nowadays uses all sorts of things to "perfect" things - most notably autotune and the "quantized" rythm thing. Their effects are subtle but I am almost sure even the most untrained ear can feel modern music records just sound different than at least a couple of decades ago.<p>All in all it made me realize that while mastering time keeping is the main task of a drummer, another is the ability to play loose (I recall one video from the 'youtuber' "the 80/20 drummer" about that) and all that's between those two ways to play time.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RMVRLhAyhQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RMVRLhAyhQ</a>
This is brilliant - the idea and the execution. Love it.<p>I encountered a slight bug. When I first scrolled through it, the 'outside the club background ambience' sound never stopped and I found it quite distracting, especially when listening to the examples.<p>After I had scrolled up to the beginning and then down again it stopped - so I assume first time was a glitch. If you encounter it too, I suppose it is not intentional.
Really cool page. I'm not musical at all but find the theory very interesting and this breaks it down in a very accessible way. I have to say I struggled to follow some of the later examples in my head, as it was difficult for me to tell the component pieces apart while also following the timing, but if I tried hard I could pick it up.<p>Kind of a different topic, but this reminded me of when I first read <i>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</i> by Haruki Murakami. It really opened my eyes to how literature (and art in general) didn't need to follow a set formula or be tied to any structure or reality to be enjoyable. It helped me appreciate other surrealist and magic realist art which I enjoy for, seemingly, a lot of the same reasons as people enjoy J Dilla's work.
Very interesting but swing is so difficult to hear in real tracks. Also I noted that in the "swing" example, if I enable swing on bass and hi-hats then kick and snare (which are supposed to be straight) start to sound slightly off beat.