A great video by the touring musician Adam Neely who brings out the pain and stress of having to give away a precious instrument to airline workers and just hope it'll come safe and sound to the destination. Neely gives advice on how to try and protect it, and how to talk to flight attendants in order to have the instrument treated as hand luggage.
Music theorist Adam Neely in his latest video is paying homage to jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who recently passed away. The YouTuber analyses his favorite shorter song 'Infant Eyes' and the style of "jazz impressionism" he hears there. Neely builds three pillars of Shorter's compositional style:
Impressionistic harmony that creates tonal ambiguity
Elegant melodic construction that invites improvisation
Deep use of the blues
A great new episode of How to Get Good at Music - Adam Neely and Elliott Klein discuss the legitimacy of writing your own solo. "Your ability to communicate an idea is based on your confidence in articulating it, and when you write stuff out ahead of time you fill a lot more confident... When you say things in your voice, you have to have your own way of saying things, and the way you develop that is by practicing and writing it out yourself" - Adam shares his advice. The two music experts also suggest you should sometimes fight to keep the imperfections in music.
Vibrato is that natural oscillation of pitch that singers often use when singing sustained notes - music theorist Adam Neely points out in his latest video. He gives examples like Schubert's 'Ave Maria', and Duke Ellington's 'Caravan', and how much they lose without using vibrato. YouTuber/musician also offers some advice on the approach to music - "Take music very seriously, but maybe don't take yourself so seriously as you do it", and about a career in music - "You should be passionate about what you do and you shouldn't make any decisions out of fear".
Music theorist Adam Neely takes a left turn in his latest video talking about musical gear. His band Sungazer had built a custom in-ear monitor system in order to avoid troubles with bad sound engineers. What also changed is the way they play. The Wednesday Night Titans drummer had told them - "You play like you can hear yourself".
"Music can be complicated" - music theorist Adam Neely explains in his latest video about notes C flat and B, which sound the same and are placed on the same note in a piano but serve a different purpose. It's simple, but it's complicated at the same time. Watch the video below.
Music theorist Adam Neely deals with music copyright and artists selling their music to investment firms in his latest video. He starts with a 1548 decision of French king Henry II which turned music from a communal cultural knowledge into private property that can be owned. The essential question Neely asks is: How do you own a musical idea and by whose authority?
"Why did the sound of an inflatable clown toy falling down the stairs so capture the musical zeitgeist of September 2022?" - that's the question the music theorist Adam Neely explains in his latest video. The "sound" is the song 'Cbat' by experimental hip-hop producer Hudson Mohawke, supposedly the perfect "sound" to have sex to.
YouTube music theorist Adam Neely wonders what we expect from AI and how might it replace human musicians. He thinks "it's clear that something going to change somehow and something might get lost... but a great deal of other stuff [will get] added".
Raymond Chen, Microsoft’s principal software engineer, has discovered that Janet Jackson's 1989 song 'Rhythm Nation' heads the power to destroy laptop hard-drives. Chen said it "contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used”. Music theorist Adam Neely was there to explain the heart of the issue.
