Why does Taylor Swift write so many one-note melodies? Media playback is unsupported on your device It's easy to get distracted by her celebrity, but Taylor Swift is a once-in-a-generation songwriter. From the very beginning, she's displayed a knack for melody and storytelling that most artists never master. Take, for example, her first US number one, Our Song. Written for a high school talent show, it's a fairly typical tale of teenage romance until the final lines: "I grabbed a pen / And an old napkin / And I wrote down our song." That's smart, self-assured songwriting for someone who wasn't old enough to vote. But Our Song also establishes another of Taylor's trademarks: The one-note melody. These static vocal lines, where she sings at one pitch for a sustained period, crop up on all of her her albums - and increase in frequency when she switches lanes from country to pop. You can hear it on all four songs she's released ahead of her new record, Reputation, which comes out this Friday. Image copyright Getty Images
New Products for Songwriters and Musicians featuring what's new from our sponsors and more. SoundCloud adds new recording and editing features to Android and iPhone apps SoundCloud has released new versions of its mobile apps that expand the recording and editing powers on Android phones and Apple iOS devices. SoundCloud now supports record and trim features that allow users to record as much audio as their device can handle, then change the start and end points later. Both the iPhone and Android versions of the app support the new recording features, but there are a couple of features not yet available universally. New app features include:~Pause & resume recording -- ideal for taking voice notes, recording song ideas, or splicing together longer audio segments. The current version of Mixcraft is version 6, made by Acoustica. Mixcraft 6 is a powerful multitrack recording application for Windows. It comes packed with thousands of music loops and dozens of audio effects and virtual instruments. iRig PRE iRig MIC Cast AmpliTube iRig
Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley to receive MPG's Award for Outstanding Contribution to UK Music Langer and Winstanley have credits on many classic albums, from Elvis Costello’s Punch The Clock, to Dexys Midnight Runners’ Too-Rye-Ay and Bush’s best-selling album Sixteen Stone. Production duo Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley are to receive the top accolade at the 2018 Music Producers Guild Awards - the PPL Presents The MPG Award For Outstanding Contribution To UK Music in recognition of their music production work over the last 40 years. Their first venture into co-production was for Madness and resulted in the band’s 1979 debut album One Step Beyond, which was recorded and mixed in less than four weeks and spent over a year in the UK album charts. This inaugurated a partnership that has resulted in numerous hit records for artists such as David Bowie (for whom the pair produced the Live Aid single Dancing In the Street), Morrissey, The Teardrop Explodes, Catatonia, They Might Be Giants and Hot House Flowers. www.mpg.org.uk
10 WordPress Plugins For Publishing Your Own Magazine | zach is blog WordPress plugins With its growing popularity around the globe, WordPress has offered its bloggers who have configured their sites as magazines several new innovative features and plugins to promote their articles. Apart from good content, WordPress feels that proper distribution of content on the internet is necessary for articles to reach the right people who need information and who want to follow these magazines. Read More: Why WordPress Is Better Than Joomla These are the 10 plug-ins or features I feel that every WordPress magazine should have. Issuu – This plug-in helps you display all your articles and makes it easy for you to share them with your potential audience. These 10 plug-ins are what I feel a magazine site on wordpress should have. WordPress Security Measures That Cannot Be Overlooked The blogging industry enjoying more title="WordPress"than a million steady readers is nothing less than magic.
'Stranger Things': Meet the Band Behind Show's Creepy, Nostalgic Score No part of acclaimed miniseries Stranger Things activates the nostalgia circuits like its soundtrack of eerie, droning analog synths – an alien transmission from the VHS era to the Netflix generation. The score comes courtesy of Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, two of the four members of Austin soundscapists Survive, who are set to release their second album, RR7349, on Relapse Records in September. Survive currently ranks as Austin's most visible group in a scene full of retro-leaning synth acts like Troller, Ssleeperhold, Flatliner and Xander Harris. Austin synth store Switched On opened in 2010, and has become a community hub for this explosion of local dark-ambient mood-mushers who tinker with patch cords and resistors instead of guitars and turntables. Stein has counted himself as one of its employees – no doubt an excellent opportunity for dibs. When did you first get into analog synths? Do you still use that thing for your music? Does he have a name?
Music Theory: Chord Progressions The number of ways chords can go together to produce new and interesting sounds is nearly infinite. Musicians use their intuition and experience to arrange chords in ways that move the music along. This notion of movement is important to understanding how to compose and improvise a piece of music. Harmonic Movement Usually the interplay between chords in a piece of music creates the feeling of movement and change. Most pieces of music tend to first establish a feeling of stability, depart from it, create tension, then return to the feeling of stability. Progression Formulas The way chords are placed one after the other in a piece of music is called a chord progression. Roman numerals are used to indicate the chords in a progression. The diagram below shows the formulas of the more common chord progressions in major and minor keys. The Roman numerals in a chord progression formula signify the triad form of the chord. It's not uncommon for a rehearsal conversation to go like this:
White Heaven Embodied Japan's Twisted Vision Of Psychedelic Music White Heaven "transcends the genre to create a unique sense of presence and originality," read Tokyo Flashback's original liner notes. Courtesy of Black Editions hide caption toggle caption Courtesy of Black Editions White Heaven "transcends the genre to create a unique sense of presence and originality," read Tokyo Flashback's original liner notes. Modern Music was a small independent record shop located in the Meidaimae neighborhood of Tokyo, where from 1980 through its closure in 2014, a revolution against mainstream music was mounted. Ikeezumi quickly recognized the listening habits of his clientele, and tied it to his support of Tokyo's fringe scenes of underground music from local and regional artists. "[Given] the overwhelming amount of information in our society ... we are forced to make fine distinctions between music that fits and music that does not," read the liner notes to P.S.F.' P.S.F. releases were a core part of my own developing notions of what music could be.
ArtistLink As DIY music scene grows, rising star Jay Som talks about making it on her own The do-it-yourself movement in music has been on the rise since the inception of social media. Back in 2007, David Byrne pointed out that “an album can be made on the same laptop you check your email.” Years before, in 2003, MySpace offered a platform for unknown artists to upload their music to the masses; pop star Lily Allen was one of its successes. YouTube, meanwhile, gave rise to a small-town Canadian artist named Justin Bieber. Today, D.I.Y. artists — who make music cheaply and largely on their own — are increasingly able to profit from their music. Among the artists who have seen success from this model is Melina Duterte, who performs under the stage name “Jay Som.” But through Bandcamp the album reached the ears of Chad Heiman, an agent at Salty Artist Management, which represented rising singer-songwriter Mitski. Video by PolyvinylRecords Despite that success, Jay Som says she is sticking with the small label, at least for now. DAYANA MORALES GOMEZ: You sold out this venue.