What makes a great cyclic riff? You know the kind - you can't stop playing it, singing it, dancing to it...it's addictive. I've taken three great examples and had a look at what makes them tick. 1. Q-Tip 'Gettin' Up' (sample of Black Ivory You and I) This is an interesting one. The instrumental riff is 3 bars long, and there's a competing tension between the feeling of it being 3 bars of 4/4 or 2 bars of 6/4. Harmony says one thing, then drums and words say other: This dichot

"sounds good.....maybe too good....?" Here are two statements that paraphrase views about jazz recordings I've heard quite a lot over the years; 1) I just listen a lot more to the older jazz records - I like the sound of them 2) ECM records have too much reverb These opinions make me think about fidelity. Fidelity is a measure of how closely the recorded (and transmitted) sound represents the sound of the source in the environment it was recorded. It is possible to record a s

Grape varieties are a lot like musicians (stay with me). They have distinct characters which people like or dislike. Sometimes they're good in a band, sometimes they're solo artists. They can change their character simply by being put in a new environment. There are tens of thousands milling about, but very few that are widely known. Some suffer prejudice or are considered 'commercial' by the press. Some are world famous but considered a little boring by those in the know. Le