Are you looking to buy a digital piano? I get asked for my recommendations a lot, so I wrote this guide to point people towards what I think are the best instruments under $500.
Yesterday, a jury awarded $2.78 Million to Marcus Gray, a Christian rapper who sued Katy Perry, her producer, co-writers, and record company for copyright infringement related to Perry’s 2013 hit Dark Horse. According to reports, the claim centered around the underlying “beat” of the song, which Mr. Gray claims was lifted from his 2009 song Joyful Noise. […]
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Why Giant Steps is not 12-tone
This is a strange thing to write about, but an interview with Quincy Jones was published yesterday in which Quincy Jones repeatedly referred to Giant Steps, and at least one other John Coltrane recording, as being “12-tone.”
A couple weeks before the Blurred Lines verdict, I wrote a short analysis of a powerpoint slide used by Gayes’ musicologists regarding the similarity between specific melodic material in Blurred Lines and Got To Give It Up. The analysis showed that not only was the melodic material in question not novel, but it is basically the same melodic material that was […]
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Analyzing the case against “Blurred Lines”
Update (Mar 13 9:15 AM): This article is now somewhat out of date; after the verdict, I received access to most of the media used by the Gaye family’s legal team. These melodies were not the only things compared at trial, so this is an incomplete article. Stay tuned. In the mean time, this analysis […]
Last August, Robin Thicke sued the estate of Marvin Gaye, who had been harassing him regarding the similarities between his hit Blurred Lines and Gaye’s 1977 record Got To Give It Up. The lawsuit accused Gaye’s family of making an invalid copyright claim because the similarities that do exist between the two recordings fall outside of what can legally be […]
By now we are all aware that the chorus of Sam Smith’s Grammy-winning song “Stay With Me” is melodically identical to the verse of Tom Petty’s 1989 hit “I Won’t Back Down,” with the exception of the third phrases. In case you’ve missed this story, here is the Youtube video that lays it all out: […]
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It’s time to get rid of your Real Book.
Some exposition, briefly: The Real Book is a fake book that was most likely compiled by anonymous Berklee students in the 1970s. It contains lead sheets for over a thousand songs across three handwritten volumes that went through 5 bootleg revisions before being legitimized as the “Sixth Edition” by Hal Leonard in 2003. Despite being 40 years old […]
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Spotify? Not much better than piracy.
Spotify claims that it is better than piracy and that it generates revenue for recording artists. But is it? And does it?
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Pro Wrestling and the Individual Mandate
What do Hulk Hogan, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have in common? It has something to do with Obamacare.