Music cliches

I am getting ready to start a new job where I work with 3-5 graders to produce music, and it is supposed to be hip-hop oriented. I'm pretty ignorant about hiphop, but I am pretty good at making music. we'll be using abelton; I'm about half way through the CSi tutorials, and I start next week..... anyway, I'm sure I'll be in with some questions.

But I've been looking around for a website I once saw posted here where you could downlaod a bunch of breakbeats, and there was a little text about the origins of differnt loops.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I think it came up during a discussion of the amen break.

Anyhow, I found this site, and I though it was cool so I'd share. it is a bunch of musical cliche's compete with samples:

http://www.synthmania.com/Famous%20Sounds.htm

Hello,

What the children get from the course will be a product of what you bring to the table. If you bring largely preconceptions (or misconceptions) of the artform, thats what will be passed on to

the youngsters.

Good sample-based hip-hop is far more than just digitally grabbed cliches looped into a song.

Collage is a visual art in which an artist utilizes fragments from magazines, book pages, or other visual media as elements in the construction of a picture thats more than the sum of the fragments themselves.

Skilled sample-based hip-hop artists do the same thing, taking

digitally-recorded pieces of sound and building them layer-by layer into a collage of sound onto a skeleton of live rhythm or loop-based drums. Further, the sound collage itself has to groove,

or swing. Further still, it forms the basis over which sung vocals,

spoken word, or live instrumentation can be performed.

The whole process requires good ears and a great deal of skill,

if done well.

I am a bit of an old-school synth head myself and dabble in sampling from time to time, and find it difficult to do well even in it's more rudimentary forms.

You may want to dig a bit into the history and methods of this aspect of hip-hop.

One starting point is Joseph Schloss's book, "Making Beats".

Check here:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upne/0-8195-6695-0.html

Regards,

Lawrence

allow me to add my own,

snare on 2 and 4

I think it's the insight into the essence of hip-hop. Drag anything into your classroom, and let students freely create a true hip-hop.

Moderator of this forum is the owner. A great guy.

Well, might I add being a teacher is a big responibility that I think should be a higher paid position.

Anyways, I've heard quite a bit about teaching from my girlfriend who teaches youngens also. I've learned a lot from her about kids. Mainly, I think the most important thing you could remember is to LET the kids do Art their own way. One thing that can be most frusterating is when a teacher tells a kid who is painting and wants to paint a flower, and then the teacher shows the kid and the kid copies it. You can't show a kid how to paint it, you have to let the kid construct it in their mind and do what they envision.

But I think possibly in your position, you might have to show them how to do it, kind of like math, or else they won't figure out the equation. But still, giving them the tools and seeing what they come up with, I bet that will be quite an interesting job.

Good Luck with that

Wow, I'm really glad about the kinds of things that you are writing, because that is exactly how the program is set up: basically, I am supposed to let the kids do whatever.

By profession I teach at a university, and this will be my first time working with kids that age, other than my own; it is a part-time thing, but it looked really interesting and lined up well with my other skill sets.

The only reason I bring up this thread is that I believe mastering cliches is a good learning tool, becasue the reason things become cliches is that they are easy to use and very familier.

So my plan is, since the lab will have abelton and a 3 or 4 octave midi controller with a couple dozen sliders and knobs, is to just map a bunch of stuff to the controller and let the kids have-at.

I have a lot of respect for collagists and sample manipulatiors, but one problem I am facing is that these are 3-5th graders and they don't have access to this technology outside of the classroom, which they are in 1 hour a day; since there is basically only one daw and one set of CDplayers W/mixer, even the kids who are very interested in high-level manipulaitons of the music might not have enough time to become technically familier with the workflow.

I'm pretty confident about the ableton setup, as I'll just get some masking tape and mark up the controller (i.e. drum pattern octive, bassline pattern octave, lead synth octive, sound fx octive, each mixer channel gets a slider, and then get creative with knob assigns).

So what I would still find usefull, would be some recomendations about what types of mp3s I might burn to CDrs to run in the Cd/DJ setup... I asked this in the DJ forum, but it is all ghost-towny. I was thinking that I might burn a couple of minuites of several different breaks at different BPMs to one CD, and then just put a bunch of odd stuff on the other....

...but I know exactly jack about beat matching.... any help on what the kids could do with two dennon DN-S100s and a DJ mixer?

Since most kids can't read or write or do simple arithmetic, this may be too advanced.

Teaching hip-hop creation to 8 to 10 year olds? What P.H.D. came up with this? I'll bet it's a public school.

Interesting that some think there are immutable laws for making hip-hop. I thought it was supposed to have no laws. At least that's what the gangstas say.

Originally posted by Prog Teaching hip-hop creation to 8 to 10 year olds? What P.H.D. came up with this? I'll bet it's a public school.

Is there something wrong with public school education?

A person who is working on a PhD in instructional technology.

I don't think he believes that making music has immutible laws; I believe that he is gathering data about his hypothesis that children learn by completing projects rather than by collecting objective information about essential elements.

How is this any different than teaching them to sing in a chorale or (since this was piloted at an arts magnet) having them learn in a piano lab?

By the way, this is a voluntary afterschool program...

You have to ask?

Just look at some of the posts of "adults" on this forum. That should tell you plenty. Way too many people (most attend public schools) can't express a simple thought in simple English.

Voluntary afterschool is an appropriate implementation of something like this. Perhaps time signatures, counting, measures, and rhythmic subdivision will force some arithmetic knowledge using a specific application. Fractions would be an obvious concept.

I do a bunch of teaching kids electronic gear. Once you get a few kids together, no matter how selected they are, you're going to quickly identify the one, usually a boy, who can press a button so hard and with so little care that it will make you immediately upset.

If you own any of the gear, start with a solid twenty minutes about how to treat and handle equipment. Everything from plugging it in, what order things get powered up, being patient and taking turns. Saves a lot of sudden hurt feelings later.

Originally posted by Prog Teaching hip-hop creation to 8 to 10 year olds? What P.H.D. came up with this? I'll bet it's a public school.

As the product of an elite private school education, you should know that it is Ph.D., not P.H.D.

Originally posted by pgunders As the product of an elite private school education, you should know that it is Ph.D., not P.H.D.

That's all ya gots? Thanks for coming down to my level. I admit I don't take too much care in this forum. I consider the audience.

Originally posted by Prog That's all ya gots? Thanks for coming down to my level. I admit I don't take too much care in this forum. I consider the audience.

Sorry to have embarrassed you.

Originally posted by pgunders Sorry to have embarrassed you.

That isn't possible on a web forum.

Originally posted by Prog That isn't possible on a web forum.

Probably not. It takes a sense of personal worth to be embarrassed.