In our GCSE music lessons, we've been studying dance music of the 1970s, and preparing to look at a song by Moby, which is one of the Set Works. The current student teacher has been taking these lessons, to give the other 2 teachers a break as they prepare for the annual concert.

He keeps mentioning words like '4 to the floor', 'flanger', 'sweep filtering', and assuming that because it's 'modern music' vocab, we'll know already what he's talking about On the rare occasions that he stops and says 'does everyone understand this?', I don't want to say anything because I'm worried I'll look like an idiot.

We've been given a list of vocabulary to define for next lesson...which happens to be tomorrow... anyway I don't have a clue what they mean, and most of them have different meanings which come up when I put them into Google.

Please help if you can...

^

I can't help with most of these, I'm afraid, but I think someone needs to disabuse your teacher of his notion that you and other people in your class recognise these terms as they apply to "modern" music. It's his job to give you proper explanations, and you shouldn't have to resort to asking people on an internet forum.

Don't worry, I'm quite sure you won't be the only one to be feeling confuddled.

He's a student teacher, so he is still learning, and he needs to learn that he can't assume that people know things!

Can you do your class a favour, be brave, and be the one to tell him?

Not sure I get this. Moby's music career started in the 1990s...




Many of these I don't know. Pitch bending you get in clarinet music, and it involves smoothly changing the pitch of a note up and/or down, without a break in the note. You can arguably say that the glissando at the start of the clarinet solo in Rhapsody in Blue is an extreme pitch bend. Scratching is that sound you get when you stop/move a vinyl record a la hip hop music. A lick you also get in jazz, and it's a short melodic phrase. Velocities I guess (and it is only a guess) has something to do with tempo. The rest, I don't know, sorry

We started this set work last week too, but haven't come across any of these terms yet. I would offer to tell you if we find out in our lesson on Tuesday, but seeing as you have a lesson tomorrow, you'll probably find out then anyway!

Are you the only one in your music group who doesn't understand the phrases, because if there's lots of you, then it's probably just as well to tell the teacher that you don't understand.

Given that the internet is probably the only source that you might be assumed to have at your disposal for the research of such terms - I can't see them being in a standard dictionary - the fact that you have tried to find out what these terms mean but have met with conflicting definitions which seem to make no sense, ought to be acceptable.

I know that dance is music was never my thing, but I was a teenager in the '70s and barely recognise anything on your list. As a classroom teacher with 23 years' experience behind me (albeit mathematics rather than music), I would suggest that they could form the foundation for a fruitful discussion. Surely the terms came about as a sort of shorthand and so it would be interesting to see how close to his definitions you can come merely by applying general knowledge and common sense. For example, pitch bend - how might that apply to an acoustic instrument? Might it apply more to an electronically-produced sound?

Rather than castigate you for failing to come up with a set of definitions, he should work with you to some degree, to close that knowledge-divide. But you simply must see a way to admit that, no, you don't all understand, but nevertheless you're interested in finding out.

Either pluck up courage yourself or see if you can drum up a supportive posse of friends to 'break the news' to him. I hope it works out favourably for you, but simply to provide a list of definitions for you, if I knew any myself, would only perpetuate the problem.

string pad - a pad is a sustained note/ chord that is used a background for a track. It can have a strings or a synth or vocal sound. they tend to be synthesised rather than real strings though. And is demonstrated here

A few more are in wiki....

url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sound modules

url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_(music)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratching

In terms of mixed definitions, that maybe the point.....and could be deliberate to form part of a dicussion at the lesson, if people have come up with different ones.

Decay - for example when you hit a note on the piano the sound doesn't disappear straight away, it fades away. The fading is the decay i.e the decay of the sound. You can adjust this electronically to have a short decay so the sound disappears very quickly, or a long decay where the sound takes a while to fade away.

I think the hook/lick is the bit of a song that "grabs" you - the chorus or something like that which keeps repeating and is intended to be the catchy part of the song that you remember easily - like a tasty bit of bait on the end of a hook to catch the fish - it hooks you in.

I think I understand quanitzation but can't find the words to explain it.

Edit: just looked up on Wikipedia and it is what I thought it was - here's the link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_(music)

^

I'll have a go, but I'm hungover so I may not make much sense... And I'll ignore what's already been explained.

Sequencing: Best example is something like CuBase, where you record or program "events" to control the playback of audio segments, MIDI or Virtual Instruments.

Quantitisation: This is a feature in most music software which will move events to the nearest desired beat (this is used in almost all dance music as things being slightly off beat tend not to sound so good). If you recorded a melody in when playing from your keyboard, you'd probably quantitise it afterwards, perhaps to the nearest 16th note beat to get it 100% in time with the beat.

Digital Effects: This would probably mean effects added to the sound either by hardware or a PC, like filters, reverb, distortion, echo, feedback...

String Pad: Has already been explained. I can record some examples if you like from one of my synths.

Breakbeats: Hard to explain, but think of the beat for FireStarter by the Prodigy. That's a breakbeat. Very syncopated and not simple like a dance beat (typically strict on-beat 4/4). Quite often is a result of 2 or more drum patterns being combined.

Pan: This will refer to the channel balance of the audio, so you can pan left, pan right... pretty simple.

Velocities: If this is referring to MIDI then you have 255 possible velocities, if I remember rightly. It's a reference to how hard the note has been struck and therefore how loud the sample/sound will play.

Sound Modules: Typically refers to pieces of MIDI-capable hardware that produces sounds either from samples or by synthesis (sometimes both). So, you could have a controller keyboard (that doesn't make any sound) plugged into a sound module, when you hit a key on the controller, the module senses this input and plays the sound.

Decay: Pretty simple... the time and/or fashion in which a sound fades away. Eg: A bass drum has an almost instant decay, whereas a harp has a long decay.

Gating: IIRC, MIDI speak for a waveform generator that's typically used to trigger other events (eg: volume). Best to google this one I think for explanations. You could gate the volume on/off on a single note to create gaps in the sound, creating a trance like |.|.|...|.|.|

Rasping hi-hat: I think they must be talking about a hi-hat that's been sampled and filtered to give the sound that you hear in a lot of dance tracks?

Stab: I think this must refer to a sound that has a very fast attack and quick decay... the sound comes in and out quickly, like a "stab".

Like I say, I can record some examples of sounds like stabs, pads, hits etc if you like

HTH

Thanks everyone for your replies.
Yes, but we were looking at earlier dance music to sort of 'lead up to' the 90s. I think.

Thanks. It turns out that almost nobody had done the homework, even some of the Music Tech students. He has said that we should do as many as we can and then we'll go through the sheet together on Wednesday.

Solari - thanks for all the definitions! I ended up writing "Pan: a shallow metal dish used for cooking" and "Decay: what happens to dead organisms e.g. plants" - will now change them!!

Hey mb..

this is a pad: http://solari.adsl24.co.uk/pad.mp3 (you can hear a sweep filter of sorts towards the end)
this is a hit: http://solari.adsl24.co.uk/hit.mp3
this is a patch with panning: http://solari.adsl24.co.uk/pan.mp3
here's a string pad: http://solari.adsl24.co.uk/stringpad.mp3

Hope that helps! (excuse pants out of time playing, it's late and I'm knackered)

It's quite easy to knock up a dancey type tune with a few repetetive ideas... Something silly with OTT filters/mods like this takes literally 5 minutes: http://solari.adsl24.co.uk/Chinese.mp3

We did pitch bending today (on guitars anyway) and its when you pluck the string and then push it upwards which changes the tone of the sound because the string is longer. Not sure if that makes sense. We had it demonstrated to us on a guitar.

Close, but actually the pitch changes because you change the tension in the string.

"Pan" is in my Chambers dictionary. In the twenties it meant to swing a film camera side to side, so as to give a panoramic view. Stereo music adopted it. It also has "pan" meaning a generic instrument in a steel band.

On most keyboards (i.e. synthesizers or sequencers) you can do pitch bend by rolling a sprung wheel with a knurled edge. There is a controller (i.e. a code sequence) for it in MIDI.

Ah right, I think I get you : you I guess were probably looking at disco-y stuff like Chic/Brass Construction/Tavares/Freeez/McFadden and Whitehead and comparing...