I got some mail today about SheStory.tv. SheStory is “a new online magazine inspired to cover stories of women in history and women working today who are the embodiment of spirit and passion”. We think that’s cool. What’s especially cool is that they’ve used some sounds that I uploaded and made as the theme for their video casts. Their recent story about jewelry maker and entrepreneur Kate Pokorny uses samples from my song The Missing Beat. How fun!

I love seeing Splice music used in video. Rig has done really well with this, having had his samples used in several stories at Ibrido.tv, some cool photo retouching videos by fellow Splicer bressane, and there’s even a website using The Happiest Song Ever as it’s theme music on every single page. (I can’t find the link for that one now… perhaps Rig can enlighten me when he comes online today.)

I was reading gurdonark’s blog this morning and learned that his song Mourning Pluto was featured in matzumotto’s film called Time Sees and Hears, which was recently featured in the Kosmorama Film Stunt competition. (You can watch it here on YouTube.) The film also features music from kasda.

I love seeing so much creativity happening involving Splice. If you’re using music from Splice in your project, I want to hear about it! It’s my favorite thing to blog about and I’m always happy to plug your site or project if you’re working with our users to make it sound good.

Wendell just sent me this little gem. Who would have thought that adding a clown costume could do so much for a classic piece of music….

Rig sent me an interesting video from Dick Dale, The King of Surf Guitar.

He has an excellent point about remaining independant. Any musician will tell you that when you write a song, it comes from your heart and your guts - an audible reflection of your own experiences and emotions. It’s astounding how many artists can’t even play their own music without getting the OK from someone in a suit first. I had the exquisite pleasure of sitting front row center at a Joni Mitchell concert a few years back, and at one point, she started to tell us the story of how she didn’t even own the rights for Blue. I remember watching her literally choking back tears as she recounted tales of music just for the sake of contractual obligation. Other artists have made similiar statements; I remember John Mellencamp’s Rough Harvest album, which completed his contract with Mercury, had a big stamp on the disc itself which I believe said “fulfilled.” And who can forget how Prince used to write Slave on his face at all his shows? It was his way of pointing out that because he doesn’t own any of the rights to his own music, he was really more like the slave machine in a studio, which creates copies of songs from the master recordings.

The battle between artists and their labels has been very interesting to watch as the internet gives musicians more and more venues to promote themselves without going through a label. I don’t know a band that doesn’t have a MySpace page these days, and with good reason: MySpace has more users than Mexico has people. It’s like having an entirely new country to market to - the 11th biggest on earth if it actually existed.

We think Creative Commons licensing takes this one step further, by easily allowing artists to control what rights they keep and what rights they share, for all of their works. I think that in music it’s especially important to share - think how many people have covered just the songs of Robert Johnson, or how many recordings there are of Joni’s “River”. Think of all the samples that make it into your favorite hip hop songs. There are entire genres of music spawned out of single samples. Creative Commons licenses make it possible for artists to allow this kind of positive re-use of their music, without giving up the originals.

For a long time now, Splice has supported the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows people to re-use your music however they would like, as long as they are crediting you on their final product. The feedback we’ve been getting from artists and Splicers alike is that while you love this feature, you would sometimes like to be slightly more restrictive in how people can use your music, particularly in it’s allowed uses commercially. We want everyone - even professional musicians - to feel comfortable sharing their work in this venue. Splice is a great place to promote your band and let your fans get involved in your music. We’re aiming to keep it that way. We took this under careful consideration while planning the new version of Splice. Coming soon to a computer near you will be more choices in how to share your music with others, so that you can do it with confidence.

That’s just how we roll.

Someone just sent me this AMAZING performance by KT Tunstall at Taratata, and I had to share it with you. If you watch what she’s doing, you’ll see that she starts out by creating loops of sound live on stage, which she then keeps playing continuously underneath her while she sings. I really love making music this way myself - I usually just hit the loop region on my program and sing over myself again and again until I have a musical painting that appeals to me. But live on stage?? Punk rock.

I cringe at the video quality on this, but I was surfung around looking for a Prince guitar solo to show you guys when I ran across this excellent video of Prince playing live with Larry Graham in 1998 in New York. It made me want to break out my own guitar and try to learn again, so I thought I’d share. Try to sit still while you watch it - it’s impossible.

Sir Nigel Tufnel shows us around his room full of guitars:

Naturally, as easily as you can sample classical music and crank it up into a techno song, you can do the reverse, as shown here in this funny video, where a student writes a fugue based off the theme from Britney Spears’ Oops, I did it again. If you can get past the talking, the payoff is worth it.

I had a few people who didn’t know the song I “sampled” for the contest this week, so I went looking for video. Guess what I found? This really cool animation that shows you what the piano roll looks like! When you learn to play an instrument, they spend much of that time teaching you patterns. You learn the patterns of a major scale, or a minor scale, or in a chord progression… even forming chords happens in patterns. But then you learn more about patterns - how you can move them up and suddenly, they turn your song into another key, with a different mood, or how you can put three or four patterns in a row to form a bassline.

Again, people have been doing this literally for centuries now… but these days, we have software that helps with it. If you make music in a program like FL Studio or something like it, you create something called a piano roll, where you tell the computer which notes go where, and how long they last for. This is actually just like an old player piano, or a music box, which basically work the same way. If you were to put Toccata and Fugue in D minor into one of these piano rolls (like I did for this little tiny section we’re remixing this week), it looks like this video I’ve found. I think it’s fascinating to watch how often the same pattern gets used over and over - just sometimes in a different place, or maybe even flipped upside down. Watch it and see if you can spot our sample, which comes in about 1:20 or so:

And THAT is just cool. He has a few more in there, so be sure to check them out.

Johann Sebastian Bach

I played piano for 23 years and am an often confessed classical music dork, so I am happy to announce that this year is probably the 300th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. (We might have missed it by a couple of years.. nobody really knows, but we’re close.) To celebrate this momentous occasion, this week’s contest is to Rock the Bach.

Oh, you think I’m joking.

Well, I’m not. For one, making a loop like this is something I am good at and Splice is about sharing your talents. For two, sampling classical music has a LONG history in pop… I mean, who can forget Peter Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven, featured so prominently in Saturday Night Fever? And Sting had a song called Russians in the 80s that was based off themes from a Prokofiev composition. Not enough? How about Tubthumbing from Ye Olde Chumbawamba, which quotes Jeremiah Clarke’s Prince of Denmark’s March.? And of course, Nas uses a sample from Beethoven’s ever-so-popular Fur Elise in his song I can.

The point is that we’ve been sampling each other’s music for a long time. Maybe they just do it because Bach’s been dead for 250 years and can’t sue them for the distribution rights, but I like to think that it’s because the music written then still holds meaning for us now. I have a lot to say about this, so come see me again this week, but for now, I present to you our contest. Here is a Bach sample from the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, that I’ve made you, deeded to the Creative Commons and is ready for the remix rumpus:

Hard to believe that good ol’ Johann wrote it almost THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO. So step right up and let’s show the old-timers how it works these days, and with any luck we’ll have good old JSB turning at a steady 500RPM in his grave.

The Rules:
1. Make any song you like, in any style, doing whatever it is that makes you happiest and you’re best at.
2. Your song must use this loop.
3. Your song has to be sequenced in the Splice sequencer - don’t upload entire MP3s!!
4. Tag your song with ROCKTHEBACH to be automatically entered to win the impossibly thin and magically delicious IM500 portable speaker system from Altec Lansing.

So now that you’re all fired up and want to beatbox just like good old MJ there, you might be wondering where to start. I found some great beatbox tutorials over at beatbox.tv. I had actually seen them ages ago and have been looking everywhere for them so I could share them with you.

Some Splicers have recommended some others that they like, such as HumanBeatBox.com, Beatboxing.com, and GotSpit.com (which seems to be a bit outdated but has a lot of good tips in it.)

Got tricks of your own? Share them! You can post here or in the forum and help out the people in your virtual neighborhood here. We’ve got some good beatboxing going on already - I found tons on the site tonight. Good work!