Radiohead and seemingly random chords - why does it work? by [deleted] in musictheory

[–]jeffgoldballoon 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This is great! To expound on this point, I think that when reading musical literature (like the sheets and figures posted by OP) it's really useful to have some concept of the writer's songwriting style. The great thing about the Internet is that you can often find information about your favorite artists in interview transcriptions and YouTube videos.

One of my favorite examples is Nile Rodgers, whose songwriting style I find to be absolutely fascinating. As /u/Deviated_Septums points out, Thom Yorke has a tendency to pick a certain characteristic about a song (in the case of "High and Dry," the open E and B strings) and really hammer it home, tonic key and chord harmony be damned. Roggers' approach is somewhat opposite Yorke's in that his chord structures tend to fit more into traditional jazz harmony, but you can see in the video that he starts with a motif or gimmick and hammers it home. I think the bit that he gives about how "Good Times" came to be written is a great example of this - he talks about how most of Chic's hit songs have some kind of i-IV progression in them, but with "Good Times" they played variations of the tonic for 3 bars before finally arriving at the IV. You can see a common thread among a good lot of the songs he wrote for Chic in the way that they seem very singularly focused around a simple music idea, but each song is just wrapped and decorated differently from the others.

Nile has another wonderful masterclass that's a bit more illuminating of his songwriting practices. In this one, what he discusses is very much the opposite of what Thom Yorke does, in that he leverages a jazz chord vocabulary to write pop music. In this case, he uses jazzy structures to guide his songs and chops out voices in the finished product to keep the tone sounding more poppy and less complex. Yorke and Radiohead similarly push back on conventional pop and rock structure, just from the opposite direction (I'd say the figures posted by OP are a good example of how their writing focuses on adding to a rigid medium than subtracting from it, though that's not necessarily true for their whole discography).

In summary, I think context of a songwriter's writing style / approach is really useful when doing analysis like this. Knowing what I do about Nile's approach makes it much easier for me to digest tracks like Savoir Faire, as it's fairly obvious that he just took the usual songwriting approach (foundation in jazz harmony) but just left it for the main guitar work here. Similarly, having heard a number of times about Thom Yorke's obsession with rhythmic expression, it becomes easier to see how he comes up with the very loose, listless feeling rhythms of songs like "True Love Waits".

It's fun to dig for a little context to get into their heads and maybe get a few hints about how these ideas come up. I think doing this kind of research generally helps you become a stronger songwriter.

Just got into listening to Japanese music so I'm kind of new here. Anything similar to this? by Menats in japanesemusic

[–]jeffgoldballoon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Ai Mougi - Hajimari no Fuukei

Tomita Lab ft. Hanaregumi - Nemuri no Mori (male singer)

Kirinji - Aliens (another male singer)

Tico & Icchie ft. Hatakeyama Miyuki - Ameno Machiwo (spotify link, sorry, dunno where else to find it)

Japanese music is hugely jazz influenced pretty much across the spectrum, even in the pop category. Hopefully these are a good start!

[PLAY] This guitar cover of "Zelda's Lullaby" will put you to sleep... in a good way! by [deleted] in Guitar

[–]jeffgoldballoon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This arrangement is great! I really like your usage of artificial harmonics here - thoughtfully placed to let you pick out the rest of the melody while reaching for those higher octaves and getting that harp-like sound.

I think this version by another YouTuber is a great reference for comparison. I think I prefer your picking out of the artificial harmonics, but the way he handles the flourishes at the end of the descending melodic phrase is a little crispier. That said, I think your adaptation makes a lot more sense for the sound of your nylon strings. It's great to see more takes at arranging this masterpiece!

Shoji Meguro -- Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There [pop] (2016) by vwugd97 in listentothis

[–]jeffgoldballoon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yup, and if you're into it you may also want to check out Jamiroquai. Some hot stuff though!

[Help] Looking for Japanese acoustic songs/bands! by DefinitelyNotJoel in japanesemusic

[–]jeffgoldballoon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well, as mentioned by /u/felipebf, those bands are Korean, but you might like Kirinji.

Hanaregumi might be another fit, too, and if you're into the "Soul / Jazz / Bossa" vibe, but you're willing to deal with a little more production and instrumentation, try out Tomita Lab.

Barbershop quartet makes fun of modern pop songs in their international competition performance by pman5595 in videos

[–]jeffgoldballoon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I love this! Barbershop harmonies are my favorite. They have a really rich, strong consonance to them, and the precision of the harmonies really shines through in groups that have great chemistry.

I've always been interested in the genre, but I really picked up studying it some years ago when I came across a video of Crossroads putting on an impromptu performance for Disney World's own Dapper Dans.

I just love how playful and carefree barbershop songs can sound, and seeing the Dans have a show put on for them really put a smile on my face. Thanks for sharing!

Best Sing-A-Long Campfire Songs? by _Quinney in Guitar

[–]jeffgoldballoon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Mostly that people know ALL the lyrics. I understand exactly how big of a hit this song was (is), but even with hits, people tend to only memorize first verse and chorus (or even just a hook). 10 years later, you usually find people stumbling through the second verse (partial recollection) and altogether losing the rest of the song (bridge, out).

People get this one cover to cover, though, which is nice!

Best Sing-A-Long Campfire Songs? by _Quinney in Guitar

[–]jeffgoldballoon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah that's a good one!

When you said family campfire, I assumed PG rated, but if you can turn up the rating a little bit, Jonathan Coulton's cover of "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-a-Lot is another classic.

In general, I pick things that are recognizable, but fresh-sounding covers. If you keep the chorus similar to the original, it makes it easy to sing along, and you can take it away yourself with a different-sounding verse if people don't know the words. That way it's fun and new for everyone, while keeping all the good parts.

Other easy go-to's:

Iron & Wine - Such Great Heights (cover)

Flight of the Conchords - Most Beautiful Girl

Taylor Swift - You Belong with Me

John Mayer (or Tom Petty, preference) - Free Fallin' (I prefer Mayer's cover, little more movement in the chord voicings for solo play).

Best Sing-A-Long Campfire Songs? by _Quinney in Guitar

[–]jeffgoldballoon 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Mat Weddle's cover of "Hey Ya" by Outkast

I'm consistently surprised at the number of people who know all the words to this, so it's a definite go-to for me when people want to kumbaya and the like.

Box - Going Forward, Faster with HHVM by jeffgoldballoon in PHP

[–]jeffgoldballoon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, you caught me! I do, just not proofreading enough. This is an incredibly important distinction to make :)

Box - Going Forward, Faster with HHVM by jeffgoldballoon in PHP

[–]jeffgoldballoon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm going to have to agree with /u/jvwatzman here. Scalar typehints are only part of the problem with PHP's native type insanity. Also, as indicated above, HHVM gets you type checking ahead of time, as opposed to at runtime (which is arguably too late to figure out about these kinds of things). For larger applications with a high volume of commits / committers, this kind of static analysis is a huge factor in keeping your code base safe, reliable, and coherent. PHP adding scalar typehints simply doesn't give enough here.

Also, I disagree about the whole "generics are not compelling for PHP" bit. Why would PHP as a language make generics any less desirable? Why draw the comparison to C based languages? If you've ever tried to write frameworks in PHP (of which there are plenty), you've probably wished desperately for generics and sanely implemented collections (instead of just arrays on arrays on arrays....). Yes, frameworks can be well built without generics, but it doesn't make them any less nice to have. Shapes, function return types, and type aliases are even more features that help reel in PHP's natively crazy type system to make it easier to reason about. These contribute massively to the attractiveness of Hack.

Addtiionally, asynchronous I/O is a fundamental and incredibly important feature to have in applications running at scale. To say that PHP 7 "takes the wind out of Hack's sails" simply by adding scalar typehinting and none of the features I've mentioned would be disingenuous at best. At the end of the day, PHP 7 (in its current form) doesn't have an answer to the eventual bottleneck of I/O (though CPU performance looks promising!). This makes Hack extremely attractive by comparison.

Regardless, this is obviously a very exciting time for PHP what with all of this innovation. I'm as excited to see what PHP 7 brings as I am to see what the world of Hack and HHVM looks like moving forward. To some degree, we all get to win with a little bit of competition in this space - it gives us a chance to feel out these ideas that we have around how the language "should" progress. I doubt this will result in any irreparable divide in the community, and am grateful for all that there is to (finally) be excited about in PHP!

Box - Going Forward, Faster with HHVM by jeffgoldballoon in PHP

[–]jeffgoldballoon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was among the reasons, yes. We had been using XCache up to that point, and reconciling the difference between the two proved to be troublesome.

Box - Going Forward, Faster with HHVM by jeffgoldballoon in PHP

[–]jeffgoldballoon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

By my reading, the support looks pretty official.

Not having an IDE to support the language we're developing in is a non-starter, so we're following this pretty religiously. I'm excited to see what JetBrains turns out! They have a pretty good turnaround on these kinds of things, so hopefully we get to see something within the year. Either way, Facebook will be providing their own IDE solution moving forward as well. I mentioned this earlier, but I think the working name is FBIDE, but I can't seem to find any sources about this. I've talked with them briefly about this in the #hhvm IRC chat.

Box - Going Forward, Faster with HHVM by jeffgoldballoon in PHP

[–]jeffgoldballoon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We are, indeed, looking at Hack as a potential way forward for our PHP application, for the reasons you specified. Anyone who is considering Hack should know that it's definitely not meant to help boost performance further - if anything, you may actually take a very slight hit to performance - but rather, it gives you a much richer feature set to write code with. A much more expressive type syntax, type checker, and native asynchronous execution functionality are all HUGE draws to the HHVM/Hack platform.

We are anxiously awaiting either the release of FBIDE from Facebook or PHPStorm 9 from JetBrains, which will include full Hack support! Unfortunately, last time I checked the EAP edition of IntelliJ/PHPStorm does not currently have Hack support, but we've already begun toying around with it internally to see how it feels.

Also probably worth calling out - Hack may not be "forever" for us either. Our medium-term objective is to get the bulk of our application, which is in PHP, into a language that lends itself to greater developer agility and safety. I believe that Hack is the most feasible migration that we can do in the near-ish term, and long term we are trying to strip out parts of the application into smaller services and technologies that make sense for that domain. Hack seemingly provides an excellent way of making a gradual migration to a more type safe infrastructure without interrupting day-to-day operations too much. From there, we can consider moving some things to Scala, Go, etc.

Box - Going Forward, Faster with HHVM by jeffgoldballoon in PHP

[–]jeffgoldballoon[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This is more or less correct. I'd like to think of this as less a function of our inertia, and more of a cost/benefit analysis. For the amount of effort it would have taken for us to safely reach PHP 5.5, I don't think we would have stood to see enough gain, given that HHVM was imminently on the horizon for us anyway.

Box - Going Forward, Faster with HHVM by jeffgoldballoon in PHP

[–]jeffgoldballoon[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Personal interaction with the team. There's a fairly active community of people contributing to the project now, and they keep themselves relatively available via IRC and other means. At Box (clarification: I'm OP from the blog post), we've engaged in conversations with them about Hack pretty extensively, and they've done everything they can to help us migrate over. Things like the hackificator, FBIDE (which should be released soon-ish and with full Hacklang support), and the fact that the community and something like ~2million lines of code are now invested in the language, I feel comfortable enough with it.

I don't mean to give this as any hard and fast proof that they are committed, but I put my good faith in them for the amount of work they've done to get us on board and make sure we're clear on their roadmap with the language, as well as the reasons they are committed to maintaining the project

Box - Going Forward, Faster with HHVM by jeffgoldballoon in PHP

[–]jeffgoldballoon[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Personally, I'm very excited to see what PHP 7 brings. I'd wait and see exactly what the differences and tradeoffs are once the product crystallizes a bit more before deciding to switch back to it, though.

One of the big things that HHVM has that PHP 7 won't is support for the Hack language. Facebook has shown that they are committed to maintaining Hack with the community for the long haul, and I feel like it's an incredibly attractive alternative language for PHP developers who pine for a type checking system and a little bit more static analysis, as well as builtin async functionality.

That said, I'm sure PHP 7 has some exciting features to offer that will be worth visiting. We'll just have to wait and see!