So funny Shawn! I suppose my fear of nightmares has hindered my progress with this kind of stuff, at least so far. Lol. The final result in the video did sound great though, to my ears. David, it looks like you are might be writing this out by ear at the end of your video. That would be something deep if true, quite a few leaps beyond assembling stuff you discover by manipulating a computer program! I've done the latter with relatively short pieces, just using a combination of a kind of ball-park hearing plus using the visual grid to get a sense of the ebb and flow of density.
The most impressive part of Yogev's performance isn't even the technical skill, it's that he could add interpretation and musicality on top of that technical skill. Very cool all around
Definitely some very exciting rhythmic ideas! A couple of things, I'd like to hear it slowed down significantly. A lot of those rhythms fly by so quickly, and if it were quite a bit slower, I feel like there would be more of a chance to bask in the tension of those truncated tuplets. I'd also like to hear it against a hi hat pulse like the Black Page #1. Looking forward to The Blacker Page #2, The Easy Teenage New York Version.
@@Vossst Another point of Zappa's more complicated compositions was that "statistically dense" rhythms usually aren't that interesting if they don't have a steady pulse to act against.
Yogev made that look easy. So exciting to see a collab between two of my favorite music youtubers, about a topic so close to my own heart. Great work, everyone!
Q: So electronic media have really freed you to get closer to your ideal, to what you're hearing. FZ: "It's really made that possible. The next question is whether anybody in the audience wants to hear it. That's the big problem, because the further out I get with these timbral combinations and the unusual rhythms, the further away it gets from any possibility of radio play. And without radio play or some kind of advertising for the album, nobody's even going to know it's there, let alone pick it up. Some people, when they hear it, they absolutely don't like it just on principle because it doesn't have that boom, boom, boom on the floor all the time. I'm delighted that I have the opportunity to go wandering around out in the zones of this thing. I would like it if I had some company out there." Doerschuk, R. L., & Aikin, J. (1987). Sample This! Keyboard, (February, 1987).
@@xander1052 In some ways yes. It's about pursuing the sound no matter what and having a brain to understand, question, and push the boundaries of what is musical. Which is why this video is so spot on! (Also, Jacob Collier is Zappa if Zappa played with music software instead of mercury as a kid and was raised right).
It’s really cool! It would be nice to, keeping in the spirit of the original BP, to have the performer keep quarters on the hi-hat with the foot. This is what makes the original so devilishly tricky. It would also be cool to hear it a second time through orchestrated with some sort of unison playing ensemble (or midi realization), which is also what the BP does. I’m loving all the blackness of the page!
I hadn't focussed on this compositionally before but you're right, the fact the hi-hat keeps going is part of what makes it convincing as a performance- you can hear the clock ticking. I shall impart this joyful news to Yogev :-)
@@mjears But that's the beauty of it - you'd hear the steady pulse occasionally skip/jolt. It would make it much more obvious what's going on. Not just "I'm hearing something that sounds rubato but is actually notated". The listener would be experiencing the rhythms much more similarly to the way the performer is experiencing them and the composer conceived of them.
When I saw that I thought about the beginning of Stravinsky's Petrushka, which has to be the earliest piece to rock back-and-forth between 7- and 5-tuplets.
Yeah! I prefer more regular rhythm and the 5/7 is the easiest to feel. (At least compared to the other brutal nested tuplets.) Even with the nested triplet, I'd totally listen to a tame, only 5 and 7 tuplet piece.
As far as "what is the point?" is concerned: inventing new musical difficulties for their own sake is like inventing new technology. Once you have it, you can evaluate what higher-level goals it can be applied in service of. I've always found the music of Paganini a bit stiff, but no doubt the violin scoring of Paganini laid the groundwork for the violin scoring of, say, Richard Strauss.
This reminds me of Glenn Gould, the genius pianist who in his later years would sit in restaurants and listen to the interweaving rhythms--and melodies, too--of the conversations happening around him.
The title of the video made my skepticism kick into high gear, so seeing a well made video that actually appreciates and informs not just about technical analysis but also about Zappa's compositional and play styles (even if I have heard much of it before) is a well-appreciated surprise. Way too many people have the barely-skimming-the-surface level "haha, ugly man makes drug music" take on Zappa. It's also interesting to see that many of the best Zappa analysis videos have come out in the last 10 months...dare I hope we're approaching a Freak Renaissance?
You could have added a touch of sadism with a rest at about the seventh note into the first 13thlet, a short accent on the 2nd note of the 2nd 13thlet followed by a legato on the 5th note of that 13thlet, with a rest on the 6th note of the same 13thlet.
I was surprised to hear such a musical piece at the end! As complex as it may be, it actually sounded like a fun groove, the fact you were able to explore new and difficult musical concepts and composing an enjoyable piece for the listeners is just thrice as awesome!
Thank GOD it took Terry a week or two to learn this tune. Sometimes you picture Zappa’s guns as being these computers who could crank out anything within the span of a rehearsal....
I love that feeling you get when you stumble across a new explanation for some music concept you couldnt put into words before. It's like being given an even bigger box of crayons.
Great video, Dave! Just pointing this out as a curiosity, the "guitar" solo on Chunga's Revenge is actually an electric alto sax through a wah pedal (that's right, you heard right) played by the magnificient Ian Underwood!
Hypothetical Next Zappa Piece: the most black page! Introducing for the first time, Vantablack invented by MIT on a sheet of music. 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐜 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐥𝐞𝐟𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐭
Im BLOWN AWAY. You just keep making golden content like its easy! Honestly man, I feel like this is really inspiring. makes you want to play with those weird time signatures and rhythms. Im waiting for sequoia (I hope im writing that right) to play it :)
You should get Charles Berthoud to play it on electric bass. He's undertaken some very difficult conversions from Paganini and others. And you missed the Spinal Tap joke about "none more black."
Being familiar with the original Zappa versions, it was a delight to hear it emerge. To me it was identifiable at the beginning. I look forward to hearing the piano version, I am curious how the original will peak through.
Great video David! It is one thing to make something complex...but to make it musical, that is another level. Hats off to you and Yogev for making it complicated, but also making it musical. Very inspirational :-)
I love your style and the charming and embracing way of treating these complicated things so easily - thank you so much for your very entertaining educational TV, David! ❤️ so much passion, so much work - I‘m deeply impressed and touched.
When I was in college I was introduced to a time signature system that did away with the bottom number, replacing it with the note that represents the beat. So a 4/4 would become 4/♩ (i.e. "4 by quarter note"), which becomes even more interesting when you replace, say, a 12/8 by a 4/♩. (i.e. "4 by dotted quarter note"). This makes so much more sense to me, but, unfortunately, it's rare to find something using this notation. One such example, though, is Carl Orff's fabulous "Tanz" from "Carmina Burana": en.schott-music.com/shop/media/catalog/product/cache/6/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/e/d/ed_6950-2.jpg
This is a good title-thumbnail combination, drove my click right in. Good job on that David! Great editing and very intuitive for non-musicians too. Good stuff!!!
Ah, so that's why your nested tuplet excerpt showed up in Music Engraving Tips recently...! ;) Shawn Crowder also brilliantly transcribed a drum and bass piece called "Polyriddim", which is also worth looking up!
At about 13 minutes I was starting to think it just ends up sounding like a lot of short tempo changes. Like someone dropped that FL studio glitch effect onto a lofi track and hit randomize. Then David goes into the scoring software and goes, well I can't write it in traditional methods, so I'm going to do short tempo changes to replicate the rhythm pattern timings. Love it.
What an awesome video. For ableton users interested in tuplets: You can make tuplets in ableton by selecting multiple notes on the grid and dragging their size down to even parts that fit within the grid, use the arrows at the top of the piano roll that appear around the selected notes to squash notes into a space
Simply amazing great job composting and also playing this crazy but advanced Innovative rythems very cool. This is the next level of understanding rythem .
I fooled around with this last year and I still love it. For anyone curious, watch my version here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8FrrZOLDbqo.html
Dear David, incredible video. I recommend looking at what Mono Neon has been doing with his videos where he playes over clips of people talking. Very much in the vein of this topic. :)
I can't say i understood how all the mathematical formulas translate into rhythm, but I found the part about translating speech cadences into rhythmic and melodic lines especially fascinating. Thank you David וכל הכבוד ליוגב, דור וטלי 🌺
Fantastic! I liked this video, it clarified a lot about rhythm. One quibble though: Steve Vai, in e.g. The Dangerous Kitchen, transcribed Zappa's speech-singing, which he was able to do with fairly conventional notation. I guess your piece does in some way approximate this too. I like it!
Amazing! Is Yogev playing to a click that's in the earphones? If I remember rightly, The Black Page had the hihat keeping a constant meter that everything was played against and this was audible for us mere mortals to tap our feet along to :)
For rhythmically challenging Zappa pieces, "Mo 'n Herb's Vacation" outpaces "The Black Page." Then, some of the synclavier compositions outpace that (to the point of being nigh-impossible to perform accurately by human hands [and feet]). All that being so, whilst I enjoy David's videos -- and pushing the envelope -- a big thing about "The Black Page," a vital thing, is that it wasn't *just* about creating a challenging piece of music, but also creating a beautiful piece of music. "The Black Page," much like Paganini's caprices, is a piece of music that challenges musicians, that helps expand what is technically possible -- but it's also a legitimately beautiful piece of music and not just a lark or technical exercise. "The Blacker Page" was good. It does outdo "The Black Page" rhythmically. But as a piece of music? I'm not sure it out Zappa's Zappa. Which was a large challenge and likely just clickbait. Even so, I'm curious to hear how the piece develops for piano.
When The Black Page first came out it was impossible. Now it's standard repertoire for any High School Jazz Band. The term Nested Tuplet didn't exist until computer notation software appeared. Before that it was called Compound Rhythms.
I believe there's no room for discussion here, Mr. Bruce, but you're *the* single _coolest_ music youtuber right now. You just take everything that's being done out there in the wild and make it 20% cooler. I believe this spirit of one-upmanship and debauchery is completely in like with who Frank Zappa was, so making this piece is simultaneous an "up yours!" and a high praise of him. And it's always important to bring people like Zappa to the attention of people. There are way too many kids who think Tool and Dream Theater have THE most "complicated" music out there. "Lateralus uses the Fibonacci sequence, man! That's *SO* complex!". Hah, get a load of this, kids.
Great video, as always. I also think that guy's suggestion of trying to write the world's easiest to play piece of music would be an interesting video. Although, I guess 4'33 already exists, so I can't imagine a piece easier than that to play. Maybe not writing the EASIEST piece, but rather just writing a piece which is designed to be incredibly easy. Maybe a piece that could be played by people who can't play instruments and only have an hour to rehearse, or something like that.
Have you ever read or heard about the Harry Partch book Genesis Of A Music, or its introductory essay "Corporeal Versus Abstract Music"? The intro essay is relevant to the discussion of using speech rhythms in music, and Partch frames music along two poles-- with Bach, Wagner, and Mahler on the abstract side, making music into language-- and Monteverdi, Berlioz, and Mussorgsky on the corporeal side, making language into music. The rest of the book is a very detailed outline of how he thinks about microtonality, and is quite a bit over my head, but I imagine you could get quite a lot out of it.
Never expected to see Richard Devine name-dropped in a David Bruce video, although I probably should have. Regardless. This rocks. Thank you, David and Yogev. :3
@9:00 you mentioned solos on Chunga's Revenge, but I can't believe you missed the opportunity to mention The Dangerous Kitchen and The Jazz Discharge Party Hats from The Man from Utopia featuring Steve Vai's guitar overdubbing to match Zappa's improvised vocal parts. Crazy rhythms! Seemed to fit in perfectly with the discussion.
It got a bit better when you explained what the hell it is, but the shock when i saw the second measure at 11:00 was immesurable, holly sh*t, this video just blew my mind hard!!!!
Mention of Nestup is very useful. It will work with several notation systems and DAWs. Takes a little bit of figuring out - try the Presets first maybe. A little bit of arithmetic helps, and pasting straight into most DAWs will almost certainly give something in 4/4. If that's not what's required, make sure the total number of segments in Nestup is a related multiple of what you want, then change the time signature in the target software package. Each Nestup segment seems to correspond to a crotchet = quarter note, so if you create a rhythm with 9 segments it can be imported in as a 9/4 rhythm. Import the same in 9/8 and it will create two bars each with eighth note beats. Import into a 3/8 notation and notes will very likely be tied across bar lines. Fairly easy - when you know how. Go figure.
Thanks for writing pieces that are impossible to transcribe! But seriously, does anyone have any software that lets you fit arbitrary grids onto audio to have easier time transcribing arbitrarily nested tuplets and so on? Or tricks for doing that? Now for the rest of the comment... At 12:35 guy talks about triplets being faster eight notes and that they can be "incomplete". And at 13:55 you talk about issues in entering crazy tuplets in sibelius. I'd like to talk about both of those. First of all, there is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) called LilyPond and Frescobaldi that allows you to write music as text, for example `\tuplet 3/2 { f''8 g a }` would be triplet of eighths in it. It being text I think makes it much easier to do a lot of stuff than in programs like Sibelius, MuseScore, etc, including entering crazy tuplets. It doesn't complain about "incomplete" tuplets, tuplets can go over barline, you can nest tuplets, and so on. Moreover, it doesn't even complain about tuplets that have "a ton" of notes in it. For example, 5 notes in a "triplet"? That's fine! It also generates both midi output and pdf. Second, I'd like to talk about the math part of tuplet. Text below should explain exactly how tuplets work out, and as bonus it gives definitive explantation on BEAMING RULES in tuplets. [ Warning: A lot of text, but it's just simple math with many examples ] 1. Note value basics. 1.1. "Note Value" indicates relative duration of note, that can be converted to "Real Time" given BPM. 1.2. A quarter note has "Note Value" of 1/4, eighth note has "Note Value" of 1/8, and so on (division by 2). Whote note of course having value of 1. 1.3. These common values can be added to get more other possible values. E.g. dotted eight = 1/8 + 1/16 = 3/16. Other additions are of course possible, and any addition can be done with a "tie". 1.4. Such additions can actually approximate pretty much any number. Howerver, there is no way to get real, exact "1/3" like this. Using this example, 1/3 would of course be longer than 1/4, shorter than 1/2. Just for fun, we can approximate it as 1/4 + 1/16 = 5/16. The error of approximation is 1/3 - 5/16 = 1/48. So the error is actually 1.5 times smaller than 32th note, nice. 1.5. However fun approximations are, we want exact 1/3, and tuplets allow us to do it. 2. Introducing tuplet notation 2.1. Every tuplet has a number value. You could think the value is "3" for triplet, but no, its typically 3/2, and is usually written as just 3 for simplicity/laziness/cleanliness reasons. 2.2. The value denotes speedup. This is exactly why in the video you can see changing BPM tempo at 13:55 in sibelius, trying to work "against" program. This is also what the guy at 12:35 mentions, calling the triplet eights "faster eights". 2.3. Using triplet (3/2) as example, speed up of it is 3/2, it means everything you put in it is 3/2 or 1.5 times faster. For example, if you put THE WHOLE piece of music in 60 bpm into a 3/2 triplet you will get same music but at 60*3/2 = 90 bpm (playing 1.5 times faster). Another, yet similar, example: if you play quarter notes at 90 bpm, then switch to 60 bpm and play quarter notes in triplets, you play exact same rhythm, with exact same real time distance. 2.4. Now we are ready to talk about Note Values inside tuplets. Let's think about quarter note (1/4) inside a triplet (3/2). The note is 3/2 times faster, it means its *duration* (note value) is 2/3 times *shorter*. That makes it a 1/4 * 2/3 = 1/6 note value. If you understood everything above, then you pretty much understood everything there is to tuplets on math side. Now let's see some cases. Nested tuplets: every tuplet is a speedup still, they multiply together. E.g. 3/2 inside 7/4 speed up effect is 3/2 * 7/4 = 21/8. Duration (note value) of 1/4 inside there would then be 1/4 * 8/21 = 2/21. Tuplets whose values is less than 1: for example duplets are 2/3. That would make a 1/8 note have value 1/8 * 3/2 = 3/16, and then 2 of 1/8 would have together note value of 3/16 * 2 = 3/8. This lets you fit 2 notes in the space of 3 (eights). Beaming rules: I did say that this will allow you to understand beaming in tuplets definitely. Basically, beaming denotes some Note Value then tuplets modify it further. If you understood text so far, you should understand that you can find "true Note Value" of a note that is inside however many tuplets. Let's do simplest example: fitting 3 equally spaced notes inside of a 1/4 duration. That is a triplet (3/2) then you can see that note values inside it are modified by 2/3 factor. Then 3 quarter notes inside it would last 3 * 1/4 * 2/3 = 1/2 note values, but we wanted inside 1/4 so we of course have to choose 1/8 notes: 3 * 1/8 * 2/3 = 1/4. This way you can verify any beaming. Now let's talk about common tuplet values. 3 commonly denotes 3/2, 5 commonly denotes 5/4, 6 denotes 6/4, 7 denotes 7/4, 9 denotes 9/8. Notice how the denominator here is the largest power of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ...) smaller than nominator. This keeps the tuplet value close to 1 which allows for more or less consistent beaming. You *can* make a tuplet with value 5/1, which will speed up notes 5 times, which will make whole notes be 1 * 1/5 = 1/5 note values, but it's awfully short compared to whole note, and closer to 1/4. Using 5/4 tuplet value makes it more balanced, whole note inside is then 1 * 4/5 = 4/5 note values, and you can notice that it is 4 times larger than 1/5, which also means that 1/4 would actually be 1/5: 1/4 * 4/5 = 1/5. So raw, pre-modified note value by tuplet here is much closer than if you used 5:1 tuplet. And that's how you can get any rational number for a note value. Feel free to respond and ask me questions anyone, hopefully youtube will notify me if that happens.
The Law of the Internet dictates that Adam Neely must now compose The BlackEST Page. Absolutely loved this video. The end result reminds me of a Neil Peart drum solo. Stellar work!
If you want to make the page even blacker, try adding in sticking for certain passages 😁. Playing paraddidles or even double stroke rolls over certain areas would add to the hell.
