I just received word that I am a recipient of the 2012 ASCAP Young Jazz Composer’s Award, which is quite exciting! A lot of the heavy-weights in big band writing right now started their careers winning this award, and it’s a real honor and privilege to be among the award winners. Basically, it’s validation that I’m doing at least something right with all my jazz metal dubstep tinkerings.
Anyway, in other news, I recently spent a weekend recording with the Bloodline in a studio in Roxbury, MA in contribution to the new album. It was a pretty enlightening experience, simply because I myself haven’t done all too much recording, and every time I go into the studio I feel almost over my head. It’s so different from the groove you get into in live performance, but you have to bring the A game regardless. Fortunately, I was fairly well rehearsed on the material and I think it will all turn out really well since I could go balls out on stuff and not worry. I’m going in to the studio again in a few weeks to record with Justina Soto and the Salvation Armband, so stay tuned for that!
February is nice and busy with school and whatnot, including gigs with the Bloodline and the Whiskey Boys up in Boston, but I’m also doing some theater stuff, including Who’s Your Baghdaddy? at Joe’s Pub (winner of the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival Best Show) and Are You There Ann Margaret? It’s Me! I’m excited for both of these because I get to work with some really top notch up-and-coming music directors (Zak Sandler and Daniel Lincoln) that I’ve worked with in the past. Fun!
First, I updated the Performances page again. Because of school and starting teaching at Guitar New York, I haven’t had much chance to play out, but that’s changing with the start of the New Year. First up, another date at the Mercury Lounge with Jessica Pomerantz on 1/9.
Second, another reason why I’ve been out of the performing game for a month or two is that I’ve been recording! I went up to Boston a couple times to record a few tracks off the upcoming Whiskey Boys album, Crescent Moon, with Shawn Crowder. The mixes I’ve heard sound badass! Expect it to come out by March. I also played a gig with them a few weeks ago where I sat in with them being interviewed on UConn’s college radio station, WHUS 91.7 promoting the gig and the album. I’m famous!
Also, I just joined the power trio, the Bloodline, and will be travelling to Boston to contribute bass and background vocals tracks for the upcoming album in about a week. I’m really excited to play with them live, too, since it’s really high-energy, tightly arranged rock stuff.
Dubstep as a whole phenomenon is fascinating. The entire idea of dubstep is polarizing musicians and non-musicians alike, and everybody I know has some sort of opinion one way or another on the thing. A lot of musicians I know (myself included) have embraced the idea with various degrees of enthusiasm, latching on to the fact that it’s a new and cutting edge dance style the same way that Jojo Mayer and Nerve latched on to Jungle/Drum and Bass 10 years ago (Nerve, of course, has kept up with the times and is now doing electro and dubstep with a vengeance, check out this video if you don’t believe me) It’s interesting to note that dubstep is the first truly instrumental popular style of music since the death of the big bands in the early 40′s.
Of course, there’s plenty of backlash too. The abrasive, over-the-top wobble bass sounds bring to mind, as one friend put it so eloquently, “robots farting.” There’s a tendency for a lot of producers to make “brostep,” (see here, for example), where hilarious, over-the-top , multiband distorted, formant-filtered, wobble basslines take precedent over everything else. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it does appeal to a certain demographic over others.
Gloriously Douchey
Of course, all of this is all produced music, and it isn’t until relatively recently when musicians, particularly bass players, have started looking into the technology to replicate this stuff live. I first saw this Nathan Navarro video when a friend of his shared it on Facebook when it had about 1,000 views. It now has 350,000. That little thing he has on his finger is called a Hot Hand (by Source Audio), which is an accelerometer that controls a low pass filter, which creates all those nice wobbly sounds (in this case he’s pairing it with the Boss SYB-5, a bass synth pedal). A month or so later Nathan teamed up with Pinn Panelle to play on this now viral video of them covering Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.
Jazz fusion guys, like myself, were immediately “hells yes,” to this whole idea of controlling a low pass filter with hand movements. NYC bassist Evan Marien released a video featuring Dana Hawkins on drums just last week that had some more subdued wobbles in it (and some very amusing and cheesy video effects to go along with the wobbles)
Stepping back a second, for all my musician friends who might not be savvy to what exactly makes a bassline wobble, wobbles are generally produced by applying a low-pass filter (a filter that removes higher frequencies) to a signal, and controlling the frequency of the filter by way of an LFO, or low-frequency oscillator. The net effect is that of pulses or “wobbles” as the frequency goes up and down. The LFO can be tempo synced to a click, and also can be set to a variety of different subdivisions within the pulse (eighth notes, dotted eighths, triplets, whatever)
There’s a fairly significant problem in live application of this, though. Part of the aesthetic of the dubstep wobble is the fact that producers slide in and out of different LFO speeds and subdivisions fairly frequently, and often use two or more separate LFO’s controlling parameters other than just frequency (resonance, pitch, etc). Replicating this live is kind of a nightmare, because although LFO speed can be adjusted by tap tempo controls on a stomp box or an expression pedal, getting it to lock in solid with a live drummer is pretty nightmarish. The easy way to do it is to sync the LFO’s to a MIDI clock with a laptop Ableton Live setup like this one that Arkell and Hargreaves came up with. John Arkell, the bassist, slides in an out of patches, LFO’s and parameters effortlessly with his M9 and MoogerFooger setup with expression pedals, never having to worry if his LFO’s will get out of sync. Between two people they get an insanely convincing club sound going in a live environment.
The downside to this, I think, is that it ends up sounding too close to the produced basslines to the point where it doesn’t even sound like a live setup anymore. The MIDI sync effectively quantizes all the rhythm, which can make it feel a little lifeless, in my humble opinion. Of course, this isn’t to say what Arkell and Hargreaves is lifeless, far from it, but it does put a fairly significant limit on the whole idea.
The Hot Hand removes this obstacle quite effectively. Instead of relying on an LFO to modulate the frequency, your hand movements become the modulation source, and just by moving your hand in time you get a very effective LFO-like sound. The advantage here is that you can switch speeds and subdivisions super easily, and even get into subdivisions that are more-or-less impossible to create with a MIDI-synced setup (quintuplets FTW!) Theoretically, before the Hot Hand technology came out a couple years ago, you could have done all this with a foot-controlled expression pedal, but it’s impossible to control the filter frequency with anywhere near the same precision and speed and musicality that the Hot Hand technology affords.
There are a few other ideas out there for appropriating the sound for live use, and the two current hotbeds of discussion is the Facebook group, Organic Bass Wobble, and the TalkBass.com Effects Forum, particularly the Source Audio Dubstep thread.
Why am I interested in all of this? As a jazz composer (presumably), it seems a little odd for me to go off and really get into an electronic music tangent (or the Djent tangent that I will likely enumerate on a later blog, stay tuned!) However, it really seems like that’s the direction that music is headed, particularly live music, and it only seems natural that I jump on the zeitgeist and ask questions about the ramifications later. Last year a very preliminary exposure to the music lead me to write my “Angry Music for Jazz Orchestra Vol. III – Revenge and Variations,” and recently I’ve written a couple things for medium ensemble and studio orchestra (“Lamentations and a Dance Macabre”, and “Conservation of Ninjitsu” respectively) that I’m going to throw up here in a few weeks that take all those ideas and crank em up a notch. Its an odd fusion of music, large ensemble modern jazz and electronic dance music, but because both styles of music are really under my skin, I think I’ll eventually figure it out.
Of course, dubstep fusions can go horribly, hilariously awry (or hilariously right?). Consider, of course, Korn’s recent collaborations with Skrillex, Get Up.
It’s been a while since I’ve updated my Performances page, mainly since I haven’t been gigging as much in the past month as I have been in the past year because of the pressures of school and work. However, I do have a couple of exciting upcoming gigs including one tomorrow November 21 headlining at the Mercury Lounge with Jessica Pomerantz, and a recital on November 30th up at school of original music, where I’ll be premiering a piece of mine for medium-sized ensemble. Hope you can check them out!
New developments in the wonderful wily world of Adam Neely:
I am very proud to mention my fellow theory-buff Jeff Brent’s book out on Hal Leonard, which is entitled “Modalogy.” Jeff and I had a very interesting and fruitful correspondance about a year ago that yielded a very wide spectrum of subjects, some of which are covered in this tome of highly advanced (yet highly practical!) knowledge. I fully recommend it! It starts where Berklee’s modal thing ends, and goes way further.
I’ve started slowly (and somewhat painstakingly) uploading lesson videos dealing with playing chords on bass guitar, a performance subject that remains near and dear to my heart. If anybody is interested in this sort of thing, be sure to check out these lessons below…
I’ve spent the past couple weeks between here (my totally sweet bottom floor apartment in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn) and Boston recording tracks for the Whiskey Boy’s upcoming album, Crescent Moon. Trust me when I say that their stuff is new, exciting, and totally original. I’m not quite sure how to categorize the material we recorded (folk rock? contemporary bluegrass?! pop traditional??!! uh…) but I do know that its music that I really enjoy recorded with people I enjoy just as much. Plus it’s ballsy! What more could you ever want in music? Be sure to check it out come March 2012. Be sure to check out my gang vox contribution also!
Besides all of this, my world has been kept busy by school (my graduate studies in Jazz Composition at Manhattan School of Music) and work (teaching at Guitar New York). I’ve learned a lot from both, the trick is of course I’m getting paid for my teaching, and I have to pay for MSM! Haha.
Anyway….
My first couple months of tenure at Guitar New York have been quite eye-opening in a lot of ways. When I have taught bass guitar in the past, I have mainly taught people who have know me personally through my jazz bass playing, or through watching my lessons on YouTube (via my “HaVIC5″ youtube channel) This has afforded me an absolutely exceptional, if very limited clientele, of people who want to learn nothing by the most extreme forms of jazz playing, or otherwise want to focus exclusively on my own personal idiosyncratic understanding of theory as outlined in my videos. This was awesome, of course, because I could deal with the headspace that I was utterly familiar with, and people wanted solely to get there, and nowhere else.
Guitar New York got me thinking in an entirely different headspace, and IT WAS JUST AS AWESOME. This is how I know, by the way, that I have destined to be a teacher if music if my lineage didn’t prescribe it anyway (my dad’s family are all teachers, my mom’s family are all musicians…you do the math…)
What I mean is, getting inside the head of the beginning student and understanding what they want to accomplish on the conscious and subconscious levels is insanely rewarding, especially when you are there to witness a lightbulb moment on a concept that you yourself remembered having way back in the day. I get to work with young and middle-age professionals pretty much exclusively (no children yet…), and so there is an amazing reward when you see people who are very genuinely doing music for the curiosity and for the amateur love of the thing rather than “my parents are making me do it,” or whathave you. They have no pretense of fame or career or cynical competition with others, they simply are doing it because they like doing it, and why the f*** not? Is there no better thing than that?
On top of that, teaching energizes me, which is proof positive that it is what I’m supposed to be doing. In the Meyers-Briggs test, you are judged to be either an introver or an extrovert. Introverts are supposed to drain energy from interactions from other people, and extroverts are supposed to rely on interactions with other people for energy. I’ve always tested introverted as hell, but as soon as somebody wants to know something that I can explain, look out! I turn into the most extroverted of the extroverted. I get so pumped by a person wanting to learn from me. I have a 14-hour schedule some weekdays, and I always come home ready to conquer the world. This is in stark contrast to regular interactions with other people, which generally leave my cold, unless I know them fairly well.
Anyway, I hope that gave a little insight into my life right now. Au revoir!
It’s another update! Hooray! Life for the Fall is looking nice and busy, so i thought I’d share.
First, I got a teaching gig at Guitar New York, a relatively new and really cool studio located in midtown Manhattan. I would be remiss if I didn’t do some advertising for them, so be sure to check out today’s featured groupon, where you can get 2, 4 or 6 lessons with me for half-off. Dig it.
Second, the L Train finished it’s Sunday night residency at Spike Hill, but we still have a bunch more dates on the horizon where you can catch us rocking out. Check out a “best of” video here.
Third, this doesn’t have anything to do with me, but I’m a fan of good music, and I think you all should check out Bent Knee, a project run by a couple of musicians I knew from Berklee. Their album just came out, and it’s killer stuff. Their version of Since I’ve Been Loving You is a crazy cool track. Czech it out!
Fourth, I’ve started doing some serious writing, and I’m looking to put together a big band project for the Spring. If any of you people out there want to play ish like this, 1) God help you and 2) hit me up.
It’s been a month or so, so it’s nigh time I write a new article to throw up here for the adoring masses who read my blog. This time the subject is memorizing music, and why it might be a good idea to learn the song.
You know, just in case you need to play it.
In the past year or so I’ve played with a large number of different original artists and bands, and the big struggle has been learning and memorizing new music constantly. It’s a tradeoff, you can’t afford large amounts of time to learning new sets for new artists, but at the same time, you can’t afford to look unprofessional by not being completely prepared on the gig. What’s a working musician to do?
Like anything, the way to get good at memorizing music is to do it. A lot. Constant practice really forces you to get into the mental state where you can absorb large amounts of information at a time and “chunk it” down to simpler building blocks. Like words in written language, you should never be thinking note-by-note (like we don’t think letter-by-letter), but rather thinking in the context of how notes are grouped, and the musical logic behind how they are grouped. Like how language is grouped into letters-words-phrases-sentences-paragraphs-chapters-etc, music is grouped into similar structures (notes, chords, phrases, progressions, sections, songs), and someone who is skilled at memorizing music parses all information they are listening to/reading into these categories. While always impressive, it takes no protegy to memorize and play back a song they have heard upon only one listen. Skilled memorizers are able to construct what they’re listening to into a logical musical story and recall it all back in the moment.
After all, as a working stiff once said to me, “you know, all songs are basically the same, anyway.” For most pop rock songs, this is true, relying heavily on variations on verse-chorus-bridge form. Same thing with small ensemble jazz, which is extremely beholden to tune form and variations thereof. Once you really get the gist of a certain musical style’s formal customs, it becomes extremely easy to understand what might seem to the others as a large amount of information.
What helps in any of these situations is the quality of music you are memorizing. I wont name names, but there are some artists I’ve worked for where the music I was playing was on simple and straight forward enough, but was extremely difficult to memorize because it simply wasn’t memorable enough for my brain to latch onto easily. I had to listen to the music far more times than I cared to in order to memorize what should have been a straightforward assignment. In contrast, I’ve worked with some artists who’s music is very complicated and arranged, and haven’t had the slightest bit of trouble memorizing the tunes by the second or third pass just because they were so well constructed and so memorable. Give and take.
Anyway, in the past couple months, my views have rather hardened against having music in front of me while I’m performing for a crowd. My number one rule is now no charts on the gig. If you know whats going to be played ahead of time, learn the music! Why? Live performance in rock/pop/small ensemble jazz/whathaveyou is almost like a play where the actors on the stage just happen to be playing music instead of speaking lines. The audience is watching as much as listening, and every physical gesture and movement on stage is scrutinized by the audience as much as the music they are listening to. Playing onstage with music is like acting with a screenplay being held in front of you. Yes, a capable actor could deliver a lot even if they were reading from a screenplay, even from the first read-through. But there would be a lot missing, and the same goes for people who are attached to charts.
Of course, there are traditionally accepted exceptions to this rule. Big band jazz, no matter how simply arranged, everybody including the rhythm section is on book. Significantly complicated arrangements in any style often allow for music on stage, especially if horn players are involved (horn players almost always are allowed music). All orchestral/symphonic music is invariably performed with music on the stands, and most chamber music is as well. Pit orchestras are always on book without exception.
Now, it certainly isn’t the level of complexity which keeps the musicians glued to the page. Concert pianists (and other instrumentalists) are required to put to memory an ungodly number of notes per performance, and they do it without complaining. The most complicated and fast and obnoxious Frank Zappa tunes in 11 time signatures at once were always memorized by his musicians.
Howdy everybody, Adam here with another update, it’s been about a month since the last one. Here’s what’s new and wild from the untamed wilds of Brooklyn, NY…
The L Train
From our humble beginnings playing on subway platforms to our current ongoing Sunday night residency at Spike Hill, the L Train is still going strong. The L Train is a rock/roots/country trio I run that is a nice laboratory for learning how to sing lead and background vocals as well as learning how to put on a kickass rock show. Recently we played at Spike Hill’s Americana Festival and much fun was had by all. Here is a video of us playing a hard rock version of Skip James’ Hard Time Killing Floor blues from that show.
Christine & the Bad News
I’ve been playing with Christine since moving to New York nearly a year ago, and finally things are taking off with her band. In addition to a spiffy new website (that I designed, yay!) we recently played a couple of awesome gigs, one at Fontana’s in the Lower East Side, and one at the Wonder Bar in Asbury Park, NJ, the sister bar to the Stone Pony. Really fun stuff. Here’s a rough stab at a new song “Scattered Ashes” recorded at Fontana’s featuring Ilana Friedman on background vocals.
Jessica Pomerantz
Jessica is another artist I’ve worked with since moving, and she’s been able to play and get gigs at some really awesome places in the city and elsewhere, which has been an absolute blast. We recently got to play at the Mercury Lounge, and have a second date booked at Mexicali Live coming up in August (we played there once before in February). Stay tuned for the videos from the Mercury Lounge!
The Rock Rebel Rising
I’ve been playing a couple gigs with this metal band, the Rock Rebel Rising, and it’s fun as hell! I get to flail around and bash the strings in drop C. Check out the unison headbang at 2:45 in this video. A friend calls the splitting neck pain you suffer the next from doing this sort of thing a “bangover.”
Fire Dean
Along with percussionist/drummer extraordinaire Shawn Crowder, I recently recorded bass for singer/songwriter Fire Dean’s upcoming album. He has quite a distinctive lyrical style, and it was really interesting and enlightening working with him to record the tracks. I got to even record a little bit of guitar, which was great fun as well.
The Whiskey Boys
The Whiskey Boys are hands down my favorite contemporary/traditional Irish/Bluegrass/Folk guitar/fiddle duo of all time, and I’ve gotten to play a couple more gigs with them in the past month both in Boston and in New York. I’m going up to Boston in early August to record their new album, Crescent Moon, (with Shawn also) and am super psyched for that.
Anyway, that’s a rap of the highlights of the past month or so, it was a busy June, and it’s only going to be a busier July (and thank God for that!) I updated my performance calendar recently along with artist links, so be sure to check that out to see where I’m playing next.
I haven’t been able to update my blog as much as I’d like recently, which is unfortunate. I’ve been busy with a lot of exciting projects, and I thought I’d share some of them right now with you all.
First, Christine and the Bad News finally has a website and a demo. For those of you who don’t know, Christine and the Bad News is my pop/rock band lead by the amazingly talented Christine Gallagher. Check out the website and the demo of “Come and Go” here. For those of you who are used to my “normal” jazz fusiontastic music this stuff might seem a little different, but I’ve had a blast working out arrangements and playing with these guys, and as soon as lead guitarist/cowriter Michael Hazani returns from Israel we should be hitting some really awesome gigs this summer including ones at Hard Rock cafe in Philly and *fingers crossed* the Stony Pony in Ashbury Park, NJ. Sweet!
Speaking of Christine, in addition to being a talented pop singer, she’s also a phenomenal “torch” style jazz singer. Check out me playing with her at Shanghai Jazz in Madison, NJ jamming to Someone to Watch Over Me.
Other recent youtubez that I’m excited to share include this version of my variations on Chopin’s prelude no. 20. My bass needs to be intonated pretty badly, but otherwise I’m pretty proud of the music I was able to coax out of the beast. Enjoy!
Also, I’ve been gigging somewhat regularly with The L Train, a cover band of mine that I’m doing most of the “bandleading” (booking gigs, scheduling rehearsals, etc). It’s been a lot of fun, and we have a pretty regular stint on Sundays at Spike Hill in Brooklyn now through July. It’s mostly good ol’ fashioned rock and roll of the 50′s and 60′s variety, and it’s been a blast to play. Nothing quite like it. Check out some of the debauchery below.
Finally, I recently played a gig in Brooklyn with the Whiskey Boys, a truly badass traditional/irish fiddle/guitar duo from Boston that happens to contain a couple of good friends of mine from college. I’m going to be going up to Boston to record bass on their latest album, Crescent Moon, in August, and the material that they wrote is pretty damn awesome. The title track, Crescent Moon, has got to be the most awesome tune I’ve ever played, and I mean that without hyperbole. I can’t find any youtube videos of them playing that tune, but enjoy this almost as badass tune about the Whiskey Rebellion.
Anyway, wow! From traditional acoustic music to pop rock to torch jazz to rock and roll, to even some metal (grainy video of a gig with a metal band I played with recently) I’m keeping all my basses covered (GET IT!?1?!) This doesn’t even account for the crazy jazz stuff I’m writing and working on, haha, so I definitely am busy keeping all the plates spinning. More updates to follow!
Occasionally I get enough courage to google myself and see what other things are on the internet that mention my name, and I always get a kick out of what I find. Humbling (humiliating? haha) to say the least, but it’s actually a great joy to read about people who get inspired by what I teach on the HaVIC5 YouTube channel and what I play. It’s also great to find other miscellaneous things too, perhaps not music related. Here’s a few things I found on the googles…
An entire page devoted to me! Sorta, haha. This is just a collection of tagged posted from a guy who runs a really well-written blog about his self-study of bass. I can’t find anywhere on his blog to compliment him, but he really has some nice insights. He found a couple of my videos on ergonomics on youtube helpful and put them up there. Check out the non-Adam Neely-related parts of his blog too.
I remember finding this at one point in the past and now I came across it again…man…my chord solo chops have improved a lot since this. Oh well, still nice to have the web buzz.
More reposts of my videos from a bass blog, this stuff is cool just because I get called “ridiculoso.” Anytime the word “ridiculous” is part of a portmanteau, I approve.
So 4 years ago, me and a bunch of high school friends wrote, shot and edited a short film in 48 hours in Richmond as part of the “48 hour film festival” held every year. My name was attached to the producer role, even though all I did basically was write the music, but hey, I can take a compliment. We ended up winning the “Audience Award” that year by a landslide, and none of the judges awards. Screw them. Here’s the video.
Haha, this is a newspaper article about a senate hearing I participated in where I demonstrated Time Crisis in a Senate hearing on violence in video games when I was 13. I met a bunch of old white men that day including Joe Lieberman.
Playing tonight at the mercury lounge with jessica Pomerantz at 730 3 months ago
It's been a while since I've updated my Performances page, mainly since I haven't been gigging as much in the past mo… http://t.co/jxJe1LlL3 months ago
