Easy Music Guides

<!– –> <!– –> The Jay-Z-produced soundtrack to The Great Gatsby is getting a release worthy of the Jazz Age. Today, Jack White‘s Third Man Records announced that they will produce the much-anticipated film’s music on vinyl as well as digitally. The label will also be releasing seven-inch singles of key tracks, including the boss’s [...]

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The horn stabs that kick off the soundtrack for The Great Gatsby are straight out of the Jazz Age but, in a flash, they’re taken over by the futuristic huskiness of Will.i.am’s voice. It’s just one example of the pervasive decade-hopping that ties together the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s [...]

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<!– –> <!– –> On a hot summer day in New York last year, Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett recorded a flirty cover of Rodgers and Hart’s “The Lady is a Tramp” for Bennett’s 2011 Duets II LP, and Gaga was so nervous, she downed whiskey throughout the day. “Did all the girls used to have [...]

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<!– –> <!– –> Listen to ‘The Dark Knight Rises: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack’: Before Christopher Nolan shot the first scene of The Dark Knight Rises, composer Hans Zimmer, who scored the first two films in the director’s Batman trilogy, was hard at work creating the music for its final installment. It was a new [...]

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<!– –> Click to Enlarge <!– –> Earlier this year, the cult-classic Disney movie Newsies debuted as a Broadway musical – 20 years after the film, about a turn-of-the-century newsboy strike, first hit theaters, and six months after a successful out-of-town tryout proved to be a bona fide stage hit. Jeremy Jordan, a Texas native [...]

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Perhaps you’ve heard of “counterpoint”. It’s a style of music in which you have multiple voices (or instruments) doing different things at the same time, and it all adds up to something bigger than its parts. In this series, I’m going to explore that aspect of music. In some ways it’s highly technical; in other [...]

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Exotic scales After the pentatonic, major, and common minor scales and the modes, everything else – with one exception – can be considered an exotic scale; these won’t be used very often, but they’re still pretty cool, and each has its own sound. The one exception is the chromatic scale. The word “chromatic” comes from [...]

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<!– –> <!– –> Taylor Swift gave her fans an early Christmas present last night by tweeting a link to “Safe and Sound,” a new song she recorded for the Hunger Games soundtrack with folk duo the Civil Wars. The song, a dark ballad featuring harmony vocals from Joy Williams and John Paul White, features [...]

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The Allman Brothers Band and Diana Ross will lead the next class of Special Merit Awards recipients at the Grammys. The Allmans, Ross, Glen Campbell, country music great George Jones, Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim, the late soul poet Gil Scott-Heron and the Memphis Horns are all set to receive Lifetime Achievement Awards.  In addition, [...]

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<!– –> <!– –> Pete Seeger took to the streets of New York’s Upper West Side late Friday night, marching more than 30 blocks from his concert at Symphony Space to Columbus Circle in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The 92-year-old folk singer was joined by his grandson, Tao Rodriguez Seeger, blues musician [...]

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