Why "Single Ladies" is so cool | Q+A

hey everybody my name is Adam Neely this is question and answer time I'm here answering all of your questions about bass and music in general so let's get started [Music] before we begin I want to give a shout out to Geronimo Capelli because for one of his music classes he analyzed my band son gazers tune drunk I am very flattered by that if anybody else wants to analyze my band's music that would be awesome send it to me so anyway let's get started language Pepe writes the science and this is cool bro but if you listen to pop music now it is actually bad go listen to that Beyonce song about putting a ring on it when that was on the radio all the time it drove me crazy that song equals simple beat that I don't ever recall changing some strings that aren't very melodic Mario jumping if you like it then you should put on a ring on it times a thousand okay so this really isn't a question but I'm just gonna use this as an excuse to talk about single ladies because for whatever reason when people talk about how bad pop music is they single out single ladies and I find that kind of strange because the song itself is rather strange if you need a refresher on what Beyonce's single ladies sounds like this is the chorus melody it's a fairly simple emajor melody descending stepwise from B to F sharp but what makes it really strange is its context in the chorus this is what it sounds like of course this is a mini recreation because we don't want to anger the monetization gods [Applause] but there is a lot of stuff going on there and not all of it says E major a lot of it contradicts the E major nests of the melody that signature flute arpeggio sample that plays throughout the entire track as a pretty prominent D natural in the presence of this D natural and this flute sample thing kind of reminds me of the technique of overblowing woodwind instruments which is when you cycle through upper harmonics of a fundamental by I guess like blowing really hard against the flute I'm not a flautist but I've seen them do it if you analyze the arpeggio this way it's like you're over blowing an E natural fundamental at a sixth harmonic the seventh harmonic the eighth harmonic the ninth harmonic and then the tenth harmonic it's giving the eleventh harmonic and going to the twelfth harmonic the effectiveness is that the flute sample is kind of halfway in between this Tamara texture that floats on top of all the rest of the harmony and also very much a part of the rest of the harmony that D natural in the harmonic series ends up being the minor seventh or lowered seventh in the key of E major technically speaking the seventh harmonic is also a little bit flat from there twelve-tone equal temperament we'll ignore that for right now the notes which are really strange though and kind of conflict with the e major melody are in the bass we start the bass line out basically by hitting a big ol C natural betsy natural creates a pretty spicy Augmented fifth interval with the G sharp in the melody if you were going to assign a chord symbol it would be probably C major seven sharp five which is a very strange chord to begin the chorus of a number one pop song now you could say that this chorus is an example of pali modality the melody is an E major but then the bassline is kind of like in E minor C natural would come from the e natural minor scale but that would kind of be ignoring the flute arpeggios role in this harmonic tapestry because the flute arpeggio has a D natural and a G sharp so it would almost be like it's from E mixolydian my interpretation of the chorus to single ladies is that it's actually in mixolydian flat six the fifth mode of the melodic minor emacs alidium flat six would have the notes e F sharp G sharp a B the natural and d-natural all of which are present in various strata of the chorus of single ladies mixolydian flat six is honestly one of my favorite modes because it starts out sounding very bright at the beginning of the scale but then start sounding darker and darker as you go up it also happens to invert to itself if you take the intervallic content of the scale and build it downwards instead of upwards you get mixolydian flats X as well it's one of only two seven notes scales that don't have consecutive half steps that can do this the other scale by the way in case you're interested in taking notes at home is durian anyway I think it's really cool that the chorus of single ladies is in mixolydian flat six it's the only example of that I can think of and pop music and it's not the only weird thing about single ladies for example did you know that it starts with a measure of 3/4 it also has a random measure of 3/4 out of the bridge and speaking of the end of the bridge the bridge ends with five measures of b7 b7 is the five seven on the key of E is the dominant chord and we might call this in classical music theory dominant prolongation dominant prolongation is a technique that's occasionally used at the end of the development section of the Sonata Allegro form basically the five chord just keeps repeating over and over again as melodic material develops that propels us from the end of the development section into the beginning of the recapitulation this is what happens in single aids we build tension at the end of the bridge by developing melodic material over a long five chord which propels us forward into the next section as far as I know there's really not a whole lot in the way of dominant prolongation in pop music from the past 20 or 30 years although please if anybody has any examples let me know anyway I think these compositional quirks of single ladies are super cool because they really distinguish the song from other pop songs and they're interesting but when most people think about the song or analyze the song they're analyzing of course the music video or maybe analyzing things like the lyrics but the most subtle things can sometimes elude us so if you ever have a knee-jerk reaction to a pop song that you hate try and figure out exactly why you hate it try and analyze it a little bit because you might be kind of surprised to see what actually went into it robe Cherokee rights Adam love your videos I'm curious do you think that playing video games like guitar hero could improve your technical skills on a real instrument like finger speed movement around the neck etc I think it would be kind of similar to the method of practicing on your forearm thanks all right so the value of practicing on your forearm does not come from developing feeder dexterity or whatever it comes from creating a mental map of your instrument you're really not doing that in any meaningful way if you're playing guitar hero the mental mapping is different the task is different my very first bass student was a guitar hero master and he thought that he could take the skills of guitar arrow and apply it on a real instrument he was very sadly mistaken he lasted for only two lessons and then quit although to be honest I was also new at teaching so maybe I just sucked at teaching who knows I guess an analogy here would be like if you thought that swinging a baseball bat would improve your golf swing I mean yeah technically the movements might be similar but they are radically different in terms of conceptions so I strongly doubt that being good at guitar hero will make you a better guitarist or bass player I just don't see it Carl inquest rates it sounds good it's good it's freaking art that's very true however music is both a craft and an art form and if you showed up to a lesson with somebody saying like if it sounds good it's good you'd probably want your money back if you go to a guitar teacher you would expect them to show you scales and patterns and chords and how to apply them you'd expect them to teach you practice right and things that they personally did to get better at their craft art is obviously the end goal but it's facilitated by the craft it's facilitated by those technical details that you can only get from somebody saying you're doing it wrong here's how to do it better if nobody worked on their craft we wouldn't get art so yes if it sounds good it is good but the question is how do you get it to sound good Denny Crane writes I can see where Damian came from jazz ensemble and hi is a different story there is a hierarchy there often multiple drummers that will trade off on songs versus being an alternate understudy and there are lots of competitions and festivals him telling a caricature of his high school experience from the point of view of a collegiate ensemble certainly didn't translate well okay so part of the reason why I was annoyed about whiplash is because writer director Damien Chazelle said his story in my world the world of New York City jazz specifically in higher education it's a small world with a very specific culture and is the only representation of that world in popular media and he got it very very very very wrong however I got this interesting email from somebody who was in the Princeton High School studio band the same band that Damien Chazelle was part of and based whiplash on they mentioned that being in the studio band felt very much like being on a sports team and that the music culture was obsessed with competitions and influenced how the players related to music this of course was a big problem I had with whiplash the relationship between person and art just felt so wrong to me the email goes on to mention that the original short film whiplash was set in a high school but upon adapting it for the big screen they insisted that no one would believe that this was happening at a high school all of this clarifies a lot of stuff for me to be honest but it's still super frustrating with seeing music rather poorly characterized in the big screen great movie though Ryan Martin writes a question for your next Q&A what are your thoughts on YouTube videos as valid academic sources you obviously use references in your videos and like other youtubers who have grown in popularity in the last year or two your videos are clearly well researched obviously there's no peer review process but as far as I'm aware the authors have books only answer to their publishers and editors anyway right should youtube videos be considered grey literature I mean as much as I value the work that I've done the big thing here is that there really isn't any editorial review I mean I put a lot of work trying to make things right but it's really just up to me I research my videos I write my scripts I edit them and I upload them with no middleman I mean even something like wikipedia has editorial review right you have a bunch of people working to get the truest version of the article there was an interesting thread on Twitter where the Society for music theory was accepting nominations for the publication Awards and it got brought up that you know video essays might be a kind of publication that should be considered and I'm hesitant on that I don't really think that my videos fit exactly within the academic framework they're closed but it's something different Marrs croucher writes what about Thundercats based soul and flying lotuses never catch me okay so I meant as a video about why I felt that in most circumstances besos were not compositionally ideal for the song and of course tons of people leave comments like well what about this Basu this example of a bass hello however is not that Thundercats bass solo uh-huh never catch me is just awesome it explodes out of Kendrick Lamar's verse in a way that just like it's so good it feels so right I love this song so much so definitely check out never catch me if you want an example of a really awesome bass solo Pauline zahle writes you have a really weird way of pronouncing leg yeah so I have a Maryland accent you heard that correctly Marylyn accent it's not really how its portrayed in 30 rock oh that was before I got rid of my Maryland accent that hack fence idiotic and also I don't really say things like Ballmer or Washington DC but I will say the word leg as leg or the egg I also say the word them as them and for the longest time I didn't really think that I had an accent and then somebody pointed those things out I was like oh yeah I definitely do that that's a little silly Bo diddly rights are you sure it was originally Scotch snaps or is it called Scotch snaps because there's far less research done on African heritage and someone only had research on Scottish music at the time and they called it that one thing that happens in America is that we base our history on European culture completely ignoring the thousands of years of various African cultures that pre-existed those European cultures so I really wanted to emphasize in my last video that the rhythm was coming from the language and the way that we speak in contemporary American English including African American vernacular English we speak using those Scottish snaps this of course brings up the interesting point what would the correlation be between African languages like Yoruba or Swahili or Zulu or any of them and African music and of course there isn't that research yet there were some great and super informative comments that left some academic research on - African language prosody which might be useful in understanding some of this stuff but I think this is a field of research that is super exciting and nobody has done yet so the relationship between African languages and African music that would be the next step and I really want somebody to pick that up somebody more qualified than me to pick that up but once you publish that paper let me know because I will I would love to make a video about it Robert Roberts writes is there a reason that Berkeley hasn't offered you a teaching position yet I don't know I wouldn't mind teaching at Berkeley so if you're in charge of hiring at Berkeley you know give me a call because I do know that your teachers use my videos in the classroom already and quite frequently - you're welcome by the way [Music]

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 695,457

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: 0rRKBXQotnA

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2019