Summer Synths, Fluteception, and "The Diablo Chord"
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A low-frequency oscillator, or LFO, is a signal generator used by synth players to add depth or motion to a given synth tone. LFOs can easily modulate a given sound, but should not be confused with UFOs, which are more about modulating a given brain. Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and I'm so glad that you joined me to talk about music made with LFOs, music made on UFOs, music made by LFOs aboard UFOs, and by UFOs made out of LFOs.

You are listening to a 100% independent podcast created by me for all of you with no one in between. It's a pretty cool thing. And if you would like to be a part of it, go to patreon.com slash strong songs to sign up and support the show. Thanks so much to everyone who does.

We are nearing the end of season six, which means it's time to open up the listener mailbag and answer a bunch of your most interesting musical questions. On this episode, we've got questions about sax and flute techniques, synth portamentos, solo transcribing, video game guitar chords, cover song arrangements, and more. ♪

So here we are, just me, you, and this mailbag overflowing with listener questions, all of which I would love to answer. We're going to dive right in, but before we do, just a reminder that you can send questions for future Q&A episodes to listeners at strongsongspodcast.com. I get more questions than I can answer, but I appreciate and read every single one that I get. I also think I might do two mailbag episodes in season seven instead of just the one, which should allow me...

to answer a few more questions next season. Anyway, listeners, at StrongSongsPodcast.com, that's where to send emails. I love to hear from listeners, so feel free to write, even if you don't have a question. Let's get into it. Our first question comes from Elias, and it's about a guitar chord that I played on the show this season. Two guitar chords, actually.

Elias writes, I just heard two of your episodes in a row and I have something I need to ask you. First, I listened to your episode on Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun. At one point, toward the two-thirds mark into the episode, if I recall correctly, you played a chord that you said was Lydian? I think it was Lydian. When I heard that chord, I immediately heard the Tristram theme from Diablo. ♪

Then I listened to Strong Covers, Volume 3. When you were talking about Dolly Parton's Jolene, you played a chord that you said you thought of as the Diablo chord. But while I could recognize that it was similar to the Tristram theme from Diablo, it wasn't nearly as similar to me as the Lydian chord from the Black Hole Sun episode. Am I crazy? Did I misunderstand what you meant by Diablo chord? Or was I onto something?

So Elias, this is a fun question for reasons that I will explain as we go. So the chord that I said I think of as the Diablo chord, which is an A sus 2. It's the opening chord from the figure from Dolly Parton's Jolene. It's basically an A minor chord where you pick up your index finger and let the B string ring instead of making it a C.

So that's what I said I think of as the Diablo chord. Now, that one you just heard was actually in C sharp minor, because if you recall, Jolene is played with the capo to put it up a third from standard tuning. So if you take the capo off and play the same chord, you get that same sus9 chord in A. That sounds like this.

So that's the chord that I described as the Diablo chord. Now the chord that plays during the odd meter bridge on Black Hole Sun, that's an F major 7 sharp 4. It's basically an F major bar chord with the bar lifted so that the B and E strings ring out on top. That makes for a Lydian sound, as I explained on that episode, since B is the sharp 4 in the key of F major and E is the major 7, so a major 7 sharp 4 is a Lydian sound. Okay, so we've got this chord...

And this chord. They're both kind of defined by the E and the B strings ringing, but they are slightly different. So now let's listen to the first chord of the Tristram theme from the first Diablo game, written by Matt Ullman, and at this point burned into the pages of video game soundtrack history. Oh man, it really takes you back. So that first chord, along with that lovely delay effect that they've put on it, that chord defines Diablo to me. And that chord is...

An A sus9 chord. So yeah, that's the Diablo chord to me. So if there's going to be a single Diablo chord, to me it's A sus9. However, don't worry, Elias, you are not crazy, because Lydian, that sharp 4 Lydian sound, plays a crucial role in the Tristram theme. Let's listen to that first chord again, but this time let's let the piece keep playing. Oh, what's this? Well, here's that sus9 chord again, but then...

So the opening of the tristrum theme actually moves between two different chords. First there's an A sus9, but then it shifts to basically just a tritone. It's a sharp four in octaves, which gives a dense Lydian sound.

So while it's not that F major 7th sharp 4 shape that featured in Black Hole Sun, there is indeed a sharp 4 Lydian sound in that iconic Tristram theme, and that Black Hole Sun chord kind of combines the first two chords of Diablo into a hybrid that, like, it doesn't actually feature in the game's score, but it works as an amalgam of the first two chords. ♪

So there we go, Elias, you win the Good Ears Award for trusting that you were hearing Lydian even if you weren't exactly sure how or where you were hearing it.

Evan writes, I came across this instrumental metal song recently that features a saxophone soloist. At the end of the song, the saxophonist is left to play some riffs by himself. He produces a kind of squawking or screeching tone on some of the notes. And I was wondering if there's a technical term for this style of playing, or is this just a distorted way of playing the instrument? The song in question is called Blast Inc., featuring Jorgen Muncheby.

by Haunted Shores, and that is Jörgen Munchaby playing the tenor saxophone. All right, well, let's listen and see if we can tell Evan what it is that he's hearing. All right, so here comes the sax. Munchaby is not just some hired gun jazz player. He's a metal musician, and he is playing some pretty heavy metal sax here. So the rhythm section fades out, and the saxophone is left honking and shrieking and wailing away.

Now we get to what I think Evan is asking about. So a lot of this is just loud, aggressive tenor sax playing, but at various points he does go into something a bit more particular. Those shrieks and screams where it sounds like the saxophone is breaking under the pressure.

I guess I would call that overblowing or maybe an overblown scream. I think that if I said that, most saxophone players would know what I was talking about. So the saxophone is a reed instrument, which means that while it has all those shiny brass keys and that big bell...

that curving neck, none of those things actually make any sound. The sound all comes from a small reed on a small mouthpiece at the top of the horn. It's a little bit of filed cane that vibrates against a small mouthpiece, usually made of metal or hard rubber, and that creates the raw buzzing tones that are then shaped by the horn itself, which keys you're pressing, etc. For example, this is what it sounds like when I take my tenor saxophone mouthpiece off the horn.

So all the sound is coming from a relatively small apparatus. It's this tiny opening between a thin bit of cane and the tip of a mouthpiece. And as powerful as the saxophone can be, and as much air as it requires in a certain way, it's actually really easy to use too much air. I'm sure some of you out there who have learned saxophone, or some of you I know who have been learning saxophone recently have found this, where you're actually blowing too hard and the horn kind of closes up.

that tiny opening closes as the reed pushes up against the top of the mouthpiece and your sound kind of pinches off. A

A lot of the sounds that beginning saxophonists wind up making are actually at the root of various non-traditional techniques. They just don't have the fundamentals in place yet to go back to those mistakes and learn how to do them right. So it's possible for someone with really good air control and support to overblow the horn in a way that produces this really intense and kind of

ugly but desired result. It's usually a combination of air pressure and embouchure pressure, embouchure being the word for your lips and your jaw. So you're blowing really intensely and you're also producing a lot of bite pressure on the reed, pinching it near close while forcing really high air pressure through it, and that can create some unpredictable and pretty wild sounds.

Moonkubi may be literally biting his reed with his bottom teeth. I'm not sure about that. But basically, he's blowing with so much pressure that it overblows the reed. And he's also biting down. And it causes this kind of explosive malfunction in the tone producing apparatus of the saxophone.

That causes the note to split and break. It leaps up super high. It creates this blatty, ugly sound. But once you learn how to control it, it can lead to the kinds of incredibly intense, uncontrolled shrieks that you hear at various points in this outro solo. ♪

This style of saxophone playing rose to prominence in the 1960s during the free jazz movement. Tenor players like Archie Shep, Pharoah Sanders, and of course John Coltrane were all experimenting with a style of free jazz dubbed at the time the new thing. It involved non-harmonic sounds and intense excursions into primal screams and other extra musical effects. Here's Train in 1965 on the tune One Down, One Up.

This was recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival and released as part of a now-famous record called New Thing at Newport. So, you know, seems safe to say this is a record that Jorgen Runkeby has heard. ♪

I doubt that Train and the rest of the New Thing players of the 1960s ever would have guessed that their sound would still be ringing out 60 years later as a Norwegian heavy metal saxophonist sat in with a band called Haunted Shores. But that's a great example of how the threads of music that bind us all together don't care about geography or genre labels or anything else. All they care about is the music we hear, love, emulate, and make our own. ♪

Erasmus writes with a question about the recreations that I make for the show, particularly the more involved ones that I've been doing for season six. He writes, how do you approach doing a cover versus a recreation? What, if any, steps are common to the two processes? And where do you start diverging when making a cover?

I think he was specifically asking about the recreations I made of Blondie's Heart of Glass since I basically recreated the whole song and added vocals recorded by the Shook Twins.

Now, for that recreation, I tried to get everything to sound as close to the original as possible because that process helps me understand a lot about what it's like to play the song, how it works, and why the folks who wrote and recorded it may have made the decisions that they did, which then helps me explain it better on the show.

If I were doing a cover of Heart of Glass to perform for an audience, the last thing I would do is try to perfectly recreate every part of the song. I'd take the core elements of the song, the melody, the lyrics, maybe that lead guitar part or any other riffs that are well known, and I'd turn those into something completely different, more in line with my own musical style.

It's actually something I'd love to do as part of a Strong Songs live show in the future to perform covers of a lot of these songs that I've talked about with some kind of amazing band that currently just exists in my imagination that would reinterpret the songs and play them in a much more distinct style rather than going for a direct recreation.

For this song, the most famous cover of Heart of Glass is likely the one recorded by Miley Cyrus in 2020. It doesn't stray too far from the original, but it opens it up significantly, adds more distortion to the guitars, and turns the whole thing into this powerful rock vocal showcase.

With a good cover, like all of the covers that I've talked about on the three volumes of Strong Covers that I've made, the cover artist has a strong musical voice of their own, and that allows them to turn the source song into something very different. Many of the covers that I've talked about on Strong Covers, Jeff Buckley's cover of Hallelujah, Aretha doing Respect,

Earth, Wind & Fire's Gotta Get You Into My Life, Jimmy doing All Along the Watchtower. Those covers are so distinct and well done that a lot of people think of them as the definitive versions of the song. ♪

There's something interesting going on here that goes back to jazz in the first half of the 20th century. It's something that I want to explore in season seven. In jazz music, this kind of reinterpretation was so common that it wasn't even really considered noteworthy. Jerome Kern wrote the song All the Things You Are for a musical in 1939.

The promised kiss of springtime. But in the 80-plus years since then, the song has been recorded by countless jazz musicians in countless styles, and I don't think you'd call any of those a cover. It's more central to the way that jazz operates than that. Like, here's Brad Meldow's trio playing All the Things You Are 60 years after it was written in 1999. ♪

I would never call this a cover. I would just call this Brad Meldow Trio playing All the Things You Are.

Jazz arose in the early 20th century alongside the rise of recorded music, and as a result, jazz carried over folk traditions that predated the existence of recorded music. And I do kind of think of the cover as we know it as something more modern. It's an artifact of this modern era of recorded music. A jazz group might play an entire set of music composed by other musicians, but you would never call them a cover band.

a cover band is a modern creation. Cover bands tend to strive to recreate famous songs live, and they tend to perform those songs as close to the original recording as possible. So maybe there's just a difference between an artistic cover, better thought of as just...

another interpretation or a reinterpretation, and a cover band style cover. And that's no disrespect to cover bands. I've played in plenty of cover bands and they're awesome. And the recreations that I'm making on Strong Songs are pretty close to what a cover band strives to do.

But if I'm going to do a cover like under my own name, it'll be much closer to that jazz tradition. I'll treat the song not as a definitive recording, but more like sheet music. It's a collection of chords and melodic figures on a page that I can take and tweak and rearrange and interpret however I want. The more different, the better. After all, the original already exists. Why not put my own spin on it? In between the lines

Our next question comes from Helen, who incidentally is the singer who wrote in a while back about how she sang on that beautiful choral version of the succession theme that played during the final season of that show. And she was the only one in the choir who realized what it was that they were singing. Hi, Helen. Helen writes, not with a question, but just with a cool key change that she wanted to share. She writes,

Are you familiar with the Little River Band's Reminiscing? It modulates down a semitone during the intro. I grew up hearing that song, and I always thought there was this start key change up in the middle of the song. Only later, when I sat down to work it out, I realized that it's actually just a reprise of the start. So it starts up, modulates down, and then modulates back up in the middle of the song. ♪

So I was actually not familiar with this song. It's very cool, and I thought I'd just share it here since it is indeed neat. It's a very hip song, Little River Band, a very hip band from the 70s and 80s. And since this is cool and it is kind of unusual for a song to modulate down since most pop modulations go up, I thought I'd share it. So here's the intro to Reminiscing by Little River Band from 1978. All right, so we're in the key of E-flat major here.

Okay. Uh-huh. And now here we are in the key of D major, down a half step. Adams laid off.

So this is a very hip, very, I don't want to say it's a jazzy chord progression, though it's the kind of chord progression you might see in a jazz tune and the kind of chord progression that jazz musicians would be very familiar with. It's more songbook-y, really, like a lot of music in the 70s style. This progression wouldn't be out of place in a tune from Tin Pan Alley in the 30s and 40s. Actually, a tune like All the Things You Are, the song we were just listening to. You do not really see chord progressions like this and chord movement like this in a jazz tune.

in most modern pop songs, so it's refreshing to hear it. So what is going on here? All right, let's break it down. We start squarely in E-flat major with a 2-5-1 back to E-flat. And then the second time after they return to E-flat, they do this fun and fairly common little extended progression that goes around the circle of fourth.

Abm9 to Db major, Gbm9 to B major, Em9 to A/E, which naturally resolves to D major. So you started somewhere that was pretty close to Eb major, the four chord Abm9, but by moving around the circle, if you move around the circle far enough, you get very far from where you started,

pretty quickly, and by moving around the cycle the way they did, they wind up getting to D major pretty naturally to where it feels like it totally made sense how you got there, even though you're quite a distance from where you started. So let's just talk through those chords. Here's E flat major to A flat minor, D flat major, G flat minor, B major, E minor, A major, D major.

The rest of the tune has equally complex harmony. It's pretty nice, some of these chord changes. Very tasty. It stays mostly in the key of D though, moving to G here for the verse and going back to D for the choruses. But then a little bit later in the song, just as Helen says, they go back and reprise the intro. They play this little guitar riff and then they just drop right back at the start of that intro chord cycle on an E-flat major chord.

There's this thing that jazz musicians do whenever a song goes to an unexpected chord or a piano player kind of goes out or plays some interesting tension where you raise your eyebrows and you kind of go, oh, and your head tilts to the side. I feel like this reprise of the intro is designed to make musicians do that exact head movement. ♪

Anyway, what fun. I wasn't super aware of Little River Band. They're an Australian band who had a few hits in the 70s, and they generally played in this style. They're clearly huge nerds, and I am very down with that. This song is off of their 1978 record Sleeper Catcher, and I will definitely be spending some more time with it after I finish this episode. Thanks for writing in with that, Helen. Hope the singing is going well. ♪

Amy writes in with a question on behalf of her whole family. She writes, we have a question for you about Flute Loop by the Beastie Boys. Amy writes, I play the flute and my kids and I have been having fun playing this song on flute, drums, and piano.

The thing is, I hear the main loop of the song starting on an A, A-F-D-A, while they hear it starting on a D, D-F-D-A. No matter how many times we listen, I hear the initial note very much as an A, although if I try, I can sometimes hear a D, but much less dominant, whereas my husband can only hear it starting on a D. ♪

One of our kids hears it alternating between the A and the D as the initial note. Looking at the sheet music out there, it seems that most people agree with my husband that the loop starts on a D. Are there somehow two tones resonating in there? What am I hearing? Is there something wrong with my ears? ♪

This is a fun one, and it gets at the heart of what's so cool about the flute. So first, a little background. Flute Loop, off of the Beastie Boys' 1994 record Ill Communication, relies heavily on samples from a 1966 song by The Blues Project called Flute Thing. That original recording is a sort of funky 60s instrumental sort of thing built around Andy Kuhlberg's flute playing. ♪

Mike D actually used samples from a couple parts of this song for Flute Loop. He samples this part you're hearing right now later, but this opening loop happens during a breakdown later in the recording that the Blues Project made, and it includes the drums, the flute, and the guitar. ♪

It's a really well-chosen sample and just a reminder of what a specific skill this kind of sample-heavy hip-hop production is. It requires a distinct mix of musicianship, taste, and historical knowledge to be able to find and arrange samples in order to build something new, and that was particularly true in the 90s.

before streaming services made it so much easier to find albums. You had to have a really diverse record collection and constantly be searching out new things that you might want to sample in order to be making new and exciting music. That's something that Mike D was really good at. It really works. It's a well-chosen sample.

Okay, so on to that flute part and Amy's question. Logic, the recording software that I use to make strong songs, just released a new update that has a built-in stem splitter right in the edit window, so you can pull out drums and bass and vocals and other instruments just right there with a click of the mouse. There's lots of software that does this. I actually just bought another piece of software that does this in a standalone window, so of course Logic releases this as an update like two days after I bought it. Anyways,

That's the way it goes. Using that tool, I was able to easily isolate the flute part from the Blues Project recording. You already heard that isolated part running on a loop a little bit earlier, but let's listen again and this time pay close attention to that first flute note. Alright, so let's get back to the question. Amy is hearing an A for that first note. She didn't specify which A, lower or higher, so either this A or this A.

I'm going to assume that it's that high A for reasons that will become clear. And the rest of her family is hearing a D, which sounds like this on the flute.

So I know what I think it is, but let's just go a little bit deeper. Let's drop that isolated flute part into an audio transcription app called Audio Stretch, a discontinued app. Sorry if you want to use it. There's a lot of apps that do this, and a lot of them are probably better than this one, but it gets the job done. I use this for transcribing solos, and it can slow down a track and let you sit on a single musical moment. A

chord or a note and it'll just stretch it out to infinity so you can hear every frequency resonating in this somewhat nightmarish but often helpful drone. So let's drop that first note and just hold it out and see what we hear. Just lovely. Makes you want to kick your feet back and relax.

Okay, so it's a D, all right? But here's the thing. If you're hearing a high A above that D, that's because there is a high A in there above that D. If I were teaching this to a flute student, I would tell them to play a D as that first note. And when I play it on flute, I would play it like this.

But it's worth noting that I'm doing something that Kuhlberg is also doing on the original recording, which is overblowing and splitting the note for stylistic effect. It's a technique that isn't entirely dissimilar from the saxophone technique that I demonstrated earlier. It's very easy to overblow a flute, particularly if you're, say, a sax player like me who hasn't super developed his flute embouchure and especially lately hasn't been keeping his flute chops up.

you can just kind of blow over the head joint all willy-nilly and get a pretty big, complicated sound. I don't mean complicated in a good or bad way, and this is just totally a stylistic thing. It can be something that you want or something that you want to avoid.

The flute relies on carefully directed air from the flutist, since unlike a saxophone or a clarinet, there's no register or octave key. You finger the low octave, mostly the same as the second octave, and the difference is entirely in your embouchure and air support. If you hear someone like, say, Sir James Galway playing flute in his upper register, he gets these incredibly pure, resonant notes.

That's because his breath control is just immaculate. But if you play with a thicker or wider sound by relaxing your embouchure a little bit, you can get a really different tone. And Gaue can do this too. He has total control over his sound and there's a place for that style of playing even in the kind of orchestral music that he plays. But it is something that you hear pretty commonly in jazz music and particularly from doublers, saxophonists who also play the flute.

you can get these sounds where the upper harmonics of the pitch are audible within the pitch. Like, clearly audible. Obviously the upper harmonics are always within the pitch, but you can make it so that they stick out a little bit. The sound is just a little bit thicker. And that opening D on flute loop definitely is a pretty thick note. So let's go deeper. Let's do a little bit more studio surgery so I can isolate the tones of that multifonic so that we can get at that high A that, Amy, I think that you're hearing. ♪

Okay, so we're back to that isolated pitch, and now I'm gonna drop a tight band EQ boost to 1200 Hz, which is right around that D. It's a little sharper than it would be at A440, but that's where we're at on the recording. Listen, and you'll hear that D really begin to pop out at you. However, looking at the frequency response graph on this note, there's a very clear second overtone popping out right around 1700 Hz.

So if I slide up to like 1680 hertz, hey, there's that high A that you're hearing. Taking away the boost, we're back to that D and you can really clearly hear the D. Putting the boost back on and there it is. All right, I think that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has things all set up in the Zero Gravity Hotel. So it's time for the kick. Let's bring things back.

So there we have it. Thanks to the distinct way that the flute works, the answer is that Andy Kuhlberg actually played both a D and an A on that opening note sampled later by the BC boys. He was fingering a D, but the notes are both in there, so in a very real way, your entire family is right. So I hope that's helpful, and thanks for writing in. It's very cool that you and your family are having these kinds of musical debates, and if you ever want someone to weigh in on another one down the road, you know where to find me.

Our next question comes from Sean who writes,

The idea of transcribing as the path to learning makes me want to cry, and if I'd heard it earlier in my learning process, it could have led me to just give up. What, if anything, is wrong with learning a solo by ear without ever writing anything down? So, first of all, when I talk about transcribing solos, like I just did actually, talking about that app that I use to help with transcription, I do in fact mean something a little bit more colloquial than the dictionary definition of transcription, i.e. hearing something and writing it down.

The way that I use the word, and I think the way that it's generally used by a lot of musicians, is to refer to the act of working out a piece of music off of a recording and learning to play it. You can write it out, sure, but you don't have to. I guess saying you transcribed a solo does imply some level of precision or completeness beyond simply saying that you learned a solo off of a record, but that's a pretty fine distinction if it even exists.

As it happens, I didn't write out most of the guitar solos that I've transcribed over the past few years, so it is totally fine to learn solos entirely on the instrument without getting musical notation involved, be it standard notation or tablature. So let's get that out of the way. To any young Shons out there, please don't get discouraged and quit playing. As long as you're learning cool music that you like on the instrument that you play, you're fine. You're great. Keep doing that.

Now, with that being said, I do actually think that it's helpful to write out the solos that you learn. I have books of saxophone transcriptions from back when I was in music school, and I find that the act of writing a solo out helps me internalize it and better understand it than if I just did it by ear and learned it on my instrument. That's just me, but I think that's probably true for a lot of people.

Music notation has tons of problems. I know it can be a real barrier that can stop people who want to learn music from learning music, but music notation, as flawed as it is, it's kind of the best we've got, and it's a helpful way to record your work for future reference and to convert it into a format that allows for a different kind of analysis and understanding.

At my guitar teacher's urging, I wrote out my transcription of Larry Carlton's solo on Kid Charlemagne, which is actually one of the solos that I talked about in the episode that Sean wrote in about. And by write it out, I mean write it out in standard notation, not in tablature. I'm actually not very good at reading or writing tablature, but I am fluent in standard music notation. ♪

I actually want to get better at reading and writing tablature, and I know guitarists who only read and write tab. I think it's a really good way to ground one's conceptualization of the fretboard, and I currently see it as a weakness of mine as a guitarist that I'm not that good at tab. Not an insurmountable one, but something that I do personally want to work on. Best part of the solo right here. Yeah.

So while I'd learned to play the solo on the guitar, I was very familiar with it on the instrument. By writing it out, along with the chord changes for the song above the notes from Larry's solo, that really helped me see how the solo was constructed, to understand what the shapes under my fingers looked like on the page, and to see some of the ways that the guitar can move through harmony and melody, and how it works differently from the saxophone and the piano, the two other instruments that I play well enough to think of in terms of music notation.

So while I would never suggest that writing a solo out is the only way to learn a solo, and I do get how hearing the word transcribe, as it's generally used by trained musicians and music students, could lead you to assume that, I do think that it's good to write out solos in other music that you learn, both because it makes it possible to understand the music in a new way, and because...

Well, it makes it easier to refer back to things that you transcribed months or years in the past. I like having these books of chicken scratchings that I wrote out decades ago since it means I can just pop one open, pick out a solo that I learned a long time back, and use the written notes to prod my muscle memory into remembering where my fingers should go. ♪

So I hope that answers your question, Sean. And most of all, I hope I've reassured you and anyone else out there who wants to learn solos without writing them out. That's totally fine. Meet it wherever you are. And anytime in the future that I talk about transcribing a solo, I'm really just talking about learning the solo, even though to most fully learn a solo, I do actually recommend writing it out if you're able.

Our next question comes from Alexandra who writes, Hi, Kirk Hamilton. Hi, Alexandra. I don't know your last name, but I appreciate your using mine. Alexandra writes, I'm hoping you can help me with something. My boyfriend is a big fan of your podcast and he said to ask you about this. First, if you haven't heard of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, run, don't walk, and listen to anything they've put out.

Don't worry, Alexandra, rest assured. I have heard about King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard from many of my listeners, though it was Strong Songs listeners who initially put me onto the band several years ago. I've listened to a ton of their records. They're a really amazing band. Okay, on with Alexandra's question. She writes, I am trying to figure out the time signature to supercell off of...

Petrodragonic Apocalypse or Dawn of Eternal Night colon Annihilation of Planet Earth in the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, which is the name of a 2023 King Gizzard album.

Alexandra says her boyfriend thinks the main time signatures are 5-4 and 3-4, but, quote, clearly something else is going on, unquote. She says she personally thinks the verses are 5-4, but she feels like triplets are being used and she's not sure of anything. So, Alexandra and Alexandra's boyfriend, I am here to help. Let's listen to the verse in question. This is from Supercell by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard off their album Petra... You know what? Never mind. I'm not even... You know what album it's off of. All right, let's listen.

Okay, so the first time I listened to this, I counted it in five, and I think because I was focusing on the vocals, I heard the snare on the downbeat. So at first blush, I was hearing it like chugga-dugga-chugga-dugga-chugga-dugga-chugga-dugga with the snare on the downbeat. Chugga-dugga-chugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-dugg

And that works okay for that verse, counting it that way lines up pretty well with the phrasing on the vocal part, but then they get to the chorus, and the chorus, which is in three, is the other way around. One, two, three.

And that would mean that they're flipping the beat from the verse to the chorus, moving the snare from the downbeat to the backbeat. And that reminded me of the last time that I said a band was doing that on Strong Songs and how a bunch of drummers wrote in to tell me I was overcomplicating things. They were nice about it, but they were right. I was overcomplicating things.

The short answer is that they're playing 5/4 on the verse and 3/4 on the chorus. But the groove is actually consistent throughout. The way that they're moving between those two time signatures is interesting. And I think the drummer is actually playing something pretty consistent throughout this song. I had a suspicion that the vocal part was distracting me from what the rhythm section was doing, and then realized I had this helpful new tool that I could use to let me see if that was the case. So I split out the stems. Let's mute those vocals.

Let's actually take out the bass and the guitar too so we can just hear the drums on the verse. Without those vocals and guitar riffs on top, the drums are actually really straightforward. Just a steady backbeat, double kick drum, metal groove.

I guess we can call that a dugga chugga, dugga chugga, dugga chugga, dugga chugga, dugga chugga, which, to be fair, could also be a chugga dugga, chugga dugga, chugga dugga, chugga dugga, depending on where you're putting the downbeat, so it doesn't totally get us out of the woods. But if you listen to the chorus groove, Michael Cavanaugh, the drummer for this band, is clearly putting the snare on the backbeat, dugga chugga, dugga chugga, dugga chugga, dugga chugga, under a clear riff in 3-4 time. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3.

So on the verse, you can actually keep that same groove in your head and just count in five. The guitar riff makes it easy to do that because there's an open chord on one of each bar of five. And once you remove the vocals, it gets easier to do that. I have a feeling that that is how Cavanaugh at least is counting it as the drummer.

The reason I think that is because of how seamlessly the groove transitions into the 3/4 groove on the chorus. Check it out. Now that's just the rhythm section without the vocals. If you add the vocals back in, it gets a little bit harder for me at least to decide where I want to feel the downbeat.

I go back to how I was hearing it the first time that I heard it, like this. Not a way.

You know, I kind of hear the downbeats a little bit more like they're upbeats. I mean, it's kind of academic at a certain point. It may well be that the vocalist is conceiving of this groove a little bit differently than other members of the band. That's totally possible. I've been in bands where the drummer felt something one way and I felt it another way. And the only thing that really mattered was that we were both playing the right notes at the right time.

But thanks to Logic's fun little tool, we can actually get more of a drummer's eye view of this song, which gives, I think, a more complete sense of how it all fits together and lets you decide how you want to count it. So a longer and more in-depth answer than was strictly required, but it's always fun to go a little bit deeper than necessary, particularly with a band that rocks as hard as King is. ♪ And I'm sure Carousel Raisin' had a super set ♪

Our next question comes from Emily, who writes that she has been recently enjoying listening to Twenty One Pilots' fifth album, Trench, which she says is a fantastic album. Emily writes, "...the sounds and the overall feeling of this album just totally transport me to a different world. One of my favorite tracks on Trench is called Morph. I think the groove of this song is just killer, and I love the synth sounds that the producers, Tyler Joseph and Paul Meany, used."

During the chorus, you can hear a synth note that continually rises up in octaves as the chorus progresses.

Emily continues, I kept racking my brain as to where I had heard that kind of sound before, and then I realized it sounded just like the synth sound on DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's 90s song, Summertime. Yeah.

Of course, that song samples Summer Madness by Kool and the Gang. So here's my question. What kind of synthesizer was used on that original Kool and the Gang recording, and how in the world did they manipulate it so that it slid so smoothly up the octave? I hope you can shed some light on this. Thanks so much.

Man, what a groove on that Cool and the Gang song. I can see why DJ Jazzy Jeff would decide to sample it. According to the always invaluable database whosample.com, that song has been sampled in 256 songs. Though that Jazzy Jeff sample in 1991 is definitely one of, if not the most well-known.

So what is the synth, and why does it sound that way? This synth was played, I'm pretty sure, by Cool in the Gang's Rick Westfield, and he played it on one of the most famous synthesizers of the 1970s, the ARP 2600. The ARP 2600 is a semi-modular synth that was originally made by ARP, and now you can actually still buy one. It's made by the Korg Corporation. ♪

So I am not a synth head. I own one physical synthesizer, a Korg Minilogue, which is plenty for me. I've so far avoided the deep dive into synthesis that would allow me to deeply understand each of the classic synths that I talk about so often on the show. But I do own a bunch of software recreations of the classic synths, including what you're hearing right now, Arturia's ARP 2600 Recreation. I

I called the 2600 a semi-modular synth. That means that it has a lot of the flexibility and functionality of a modular synthesizer without actually requiring you to arrange and install modules. So if you picture a synthesizer, you might picture a few different things because there are a few different kinds of synthesizers.

You may picture a keyboard with a bunch of knobs above it. A lot of synthesizers look like that. A lot of synths that I've talked about on the show, like the Oberheim OBX, the Sequential Circuits Prophet, the Roland Juno, the Yamaha DX7, those are all famous synthesizers, and they all create their sounds in slightly different ways, but they all look about like that. A keyboard with a bunch of knobs above the keyboard that you use to adjust all of the settings.

modular synthesis is something kind of different. If you've ever seen one of those terrifying synth walls where someone has actual walls covered in knobs and dials and using the synth involves plugging and unplugging patch cords like an old-fashioned telephone operator, that's modular synthesis. You're installing your own synth modules in whatever order you want so you can create this kind of customized synth

Frankenstein sequence of analog and digital oscillators, filters, LFOs, and the like to create something very customizable but also incredibly complicated and often pretty finicky. A semi-modular synth like the ARP 2600 works somewhat similarly. You get a pretty big wall on the synth with lots of knobs and faders and you create your signal chain by plugging and unplugging patch cords from one module to the next, but the modules are all pre-arranged and self-contained.

guitarists out there can think of it as kind of similar to the difference between a complex pedal board that you build yourself that's a modular synth and a multi-effects pedal that has everything in one package it's not the exact same but it's kind of similar okay so that's the arp 2600 let's talk about that summer madness sound i found this fun video by the youtube channel dr mix where he demonstrates how to get a 2600 to make this sound

And I recommend checking that video out if you want to actually see the ARP in action, because as a semi-modular synth, it's pretty cool to look at what the actual device looks like and how it works. Considering the near limitless possibilities for tone design that the ARP 2600 offers, the synth is actually extremely simple on this song. It's just a saw wave with the portamento slider almost all the way up.

So if I play a G two octaves apart on the ARP 2600 with the portamento fader all the way down to minimum, it sounds like this.

Portamento isn't on every synthesizer, but it is on a lot of them. And that setting causes the synth to slide through the spaces between notes. And that's a reason that that setting is now often referred to by the more straightforward term glide, which is what portamento means. Like in sheet music, in music notation, portamento means sliding between notes. But glide is a little more straightforward and more people presumably know that word. Here's that same two octave jump with the portamento turned up.

It's a familiar sound, right? A portamento synth turns up on a lot of different songs. Always think of that synth that Quincy Jones used on his theme song from the late 60s TV show Ironside, which Quentin Tarantino reused so perfectly in his movie Kill Bill. Just wouldn't be the same if the synth didn't have that siren-like slide.

And of course, a gliding monosynth, often a Moog, is the source of the iconic West Coast whistle that helped define the sound of Los Angeles rap in the 90s. This is nothing but a G-thang from The Chronic, but I'm pretty sure the last time I talked about a synth portamento, it was in reference to another tune from this era. It's like that and like this and like this.

So there you have it, Emily. The synth used on Kool and the Gang's Summer Madness and then sampled by DJ Jazzy Jeff on Summertime and which likely inspired the sound on the Chorus of 21 Pilots Morph is an ARP 2600 with the portamento turned up. A classic synth sound that will doubtless continue to ring out for decades to come. Charles writes, I'm an indie music producer, mostly self-taught, and I find strong songs to be invaluable in filling in some of the blind spots I didn't realize I had.

One question that has been bothering me for a while is about percussion and drum tuning. For context, I recall a friend of mine saying that the timpani player in an orchestra is one of the most difficult roles because they need to have perfect pitch to be effective. And outside of the orchestra, if you check out drum tuning videos online, they usually suggest tuning the drums to one another so that the intervals all relate to one another, so that toms could maybe play a simple tune like "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

But those same videos rarely talk about the pitch of the sound in relation to the song that the drums are supporting. I've struggled with recording live drums because they sound kinda meh compared to drum samples. Drum machines like the Roland 808 have certain kick drum tone that you can adjust.

So my question is, for drums to work on a particular recording, do they need to be tuned to the same key as the other instruments? And if so, how do music producers accomplish this? So let's start with the timpani, which most orchestras have in a set. The timpani is an orchestral drum that sits in a small group in the back of the ensemble. It's usually played by one percussionist. Each of the timpani drums can be retuned on the fly using foot pedals that adjust the tension of the drum head.

A lot of pieces specify the required tuning so that the percussionist can get the drum set ahead of time, but some pieces require retuning the drums in the middle of a piece or even in the middle of hitting the drum. You can do that by quietly finding the pitch in between sections to get the drum to the pitch that you'll need for the next part of the piece.

I'm not sure if that's correct that a timpani player needs to have perfect pitch to be effective. I'm sure it can help, but it seems perfectly possible to be an effective timpanist without perfect pitch, but you definitely have to have a good ear. One of my favorite timpani parts is on the fourth and final movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in D minor. ♪

Two timpani at the start there are tuned to a D, the fundamental, and an A, the fifth, allowing the instrument to create this pounding, urgent melody that's somewhere between a drum part and a bass line. The timpani returns for this movement's absolutely stunning finale. It's a whole thing, this mix of grand brass and tragic screaming violins.

I'm not sure if I'm the guy to do an episode on Shostakovich's Fifth, but it is an incredible piece of music. And the timpani part rules. Okay, where were we? Drum-tuning.

So yeah, most modern styles of music don't use drum tuning quite as directly as orchestral composers use the timpani, though of course there are exceptions. And as far as I can tell, each producer will have a totally different opinion on the question you're asking. It really just depends on what you want, which isn't a satisfying answer, but that's only because there really is no one answer to this question.

As I just discussed in my episode on XTC's Easter Theater, Andy Partridge said that over the course of his career, he came to like re-tuning the drums on the drum set to match with the key of the song. But plenty of other people will just get the drums sounding good with one another, like you said, finding pitches that allow the drum set to sound like it's been assembled to work as a single instrument and just leave it at that.

It's also good to keep in mind that most of what we're talking about here is more of a studio consideration than a live one. It's very rare for a drum set player to retune their toms on stage from song to song, since most toms aren't really designed to be retuned on the fly the same way that a timpani is. Some specialized drums, like the Roto-Tom, actually are designed to be retuned really quickly. You'll remember we heard Roto-Toms on Pink Floyd's "Time" off of "The Dark Side of the Moon."

But okay, I want to actually play you an example of what Charles is talking about with the toms on a standard drum set. So here, I'll use my de facto sample library of a drum set. This is Native Instruments Studio Drummer, and I'm going to make a drum groove that relies pretty heavily on two toms. So the higher drum is tuned to a D, and the lower drum is tuned to an A. So we have a D and an A.

So with those notes in the drums, something in the key of D would probably sound good, right? It would match up with the D and the A in the drums. So let's use that same drum groove and get a little D thing going with some keys and some bass. It sounds great. I mean, the drums are in the same key as the keys and the bass, and they really do all fit together. Let's add some guitar. ♪

So let's continue the experiment. Let's tune those toms down to a B and an F sharp. And let's bring the other instruments back in. I mean, it doesn't sound bad. B and F sharp are still in the key of D, but less obviously so. And I mean... Yeah, man, I like this. I really like this.

So maybe that's too subtle. Let's tune them way up now. Top tom is going to be an A flat, and the lower tom is going to be an E flat, well outside of the key of D, and tuned higher so they're much more noticeable. Here we go. I mean, I still think this sounds okay. Everyone will feel differently about each of those three examples. I'm actually partial to this lower one.

I think it sounds nice and big and the higher tom comes through a little more clearly to me on a B as opposed to a D since it's a different note from what the bass is playing.

I mentioned in the XTC episode, I am not great at tuning drums. It's something that I still find kind of fiddly and mystifying. So, you know, take all of this with a grain of salt. I also haven't spent a ton of time tuning the drums on my kit, though when my studio is finished and I get it set back up, I'll probably have to. And it is something I'd like to learn a little bit more, especially if I get some different toms to try swapping in and out on my drum set.

It's common to tune your drums to around a B, E, A, that kind of a zone since a lot of guitar-based songs are in those keys. And it is worth keeping in mind that each drum will have a kind of sweet spot, an area where it sounds best. So with your own drum set, it's worth experimenting with each drum that you have just to find where it rings the best and where it sounds the richest.

And of course, if you just use drum samples, like you say, I mean, that is a lot easier. You can easily retune them with just a little knob. If you don't like how they sound after you've recorded them, you can just go back and change how they sound and tune them differently in a couple of seconds. So it's a lot easier. And, you know, it's just one more example of the agony and the ecstasy of acoustic instruments. A nicely tuned wah.

well-miked, and most importantly, well-played drum set can sound amazing, but it may well be easier for you as a producer to just use sample drums, and that's fine. The more you experiment with different tunings, the more you'll get a sense for what you like and what might work on a given song. ♪

Our last question comes from Peter, who writes,

For me, that is the best time. Let's embrace it. Sure, eventually you'll know the song intimately, but until then, it's open to all possibilities and interpretation. Maybe it's the same for all art.

I love this observation because I share Peter's love of this part of falling in love with a song. It's like falling in love with anything, really. You know it well enough to know that you like it, but you haven't mapped every single little bit of it. It still has some mystery. It still has the capacity to surprise you. It's actually something that I never really get to capture or replicate on Strong Songs, since in order to make the show, I have to learn each song that I'm talking about in great detail.

but it's something that I'm intimately familiar with, like I'm sure a lot of you out there are. Usually I know immediately if I really like a song, if it's a song that I'm probably going to love, and the next three or four times I listen to it are such exciting experiences because the song can still surprise me. It can still show me new parts of itself.

One recent time I felt this was with a Sufjan Stevens song called, sorry for the curse here, S*** Talk, off his 2023 album Javelin. It's an eight-minute song, this is just one part of it, and I was flattened by this song the first time I heard it. I mean, listen to this. Oh, oh, oh, sweet, oh, oh, the time

I was out on a walk and I stopped cold. I closed my eyes and I kept them closed. And the moment the song ended, I started it over and listened for a second and then a third time. Oh,

I still hear new things every time I listen to this song, but there was nothing quite like those first few joyful playthroughs, mapping the song in my mind while also just sitting in this state of relaxed openness, not quite remembering what was coming next, but happy to let the song take me where it would. Every great song will eventually become known to you.

So let this be a reminder to embrace those first few listens, fleeting as they may be, when you know you love a song, but you don't yet know all the reasons why. No, I don't wanna fight at all. Fight at all.

And that'll do it for this mailbag episode of Strong Songs. Thanks so much to everyone who has written in with a question. And just as a reminder, you can send questions, suggestions, or whatever you really want to listeners at strongsongspodcast.com. And I do think I'll probably do two Q&A episodes next season just so that I can get to a few more people's questions.

Thanks as always to Emily Williams for her production support this season and to all of the folks out there who support Strong Songs on Patreon. It continues to mean so much that I'm able to make this show the exact way that I want to make it and I really appreciate all of your support. I've been really proud of this season. I think you're all really going to like the season finale too. So if you like what I'm doing and you want to throw a few bucks my way, go to patreon.com slash strong songs.

I haven't been featuring outro soloists this season because it's been just one too many things for me to coordinate and stay on top of, but in between seasons I got a submission from a listener that I thought would work well on this season's mailbag. So, this episode's outro soloist is Evan Illouz. Evan is a clinical psychologist in Brooklyn, New York, and he's been playing guitar since high school. So stick around for Evan, and I'll see you in two weeks for the season six finale of Strong Songs. Until then...

Take care and keep listening.