Rock music
Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the early 1950s, developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and particularly in the United Kingdom and in the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, a style which drew on the genres of blues and blues, from country music. Rock music drew on a number of other genres such as electric blues and folk, incorporated influences from jazz and other musical styles. Musically, rock has centered on the electric guitar as part of a rock group with electric bass and one or more singers. Rock is song-based music with a 4/4 time signature using a verse–chorus form, but the genre has become diverse. Like pop music, lyrics stress romantic love but address a wide variety of other themes that are social or political. By the late 1960s "classic rock" period, a number of distinct rock music subgenres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, southern rock, raga rock, jazz-rock, many of which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock, influenced by the countercultural psychedelic and hippie scene.
New genres that emerged included progressive rock. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down, energetic social and political critiques. Punk was an influence in the 1980s on new wave, post-punk and alternative rock. From the 1990s alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break into the mainstream in the form of grunge and indie rock. Further fusion subgenres have since emerged, including pop punk, electronic rock, rap rock, rap metal, as well as conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock/post-punk and techno-pop revivals at the beginning of the 2000s. Rock music has embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major subcultures including mods and rockers in the UK and the hippie counterculture that spread out from San Francisco in the US in the 1960s. 1970s punk culture spawned the goth and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism as well as changes in social attitudes to race and drug use, is seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult consumerism and conformity.
The sound of rock is traditionally centered on the amplified electric guitar, which emerged in its modern form in the 1950s with the popularity of rock and roll. It was influenced by the sounds of electric blues guitarists; the sound of an electric guitar in rock music is supported by an electric bass guitar, which pioneered in jazz music in the same era, percussion produced from a drum kit that combines drums and cymbals. This trio of instruments has been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments keyboards such as the piano, the Hammond organ, the synthesizer; the basic rock instrumentation was derived from the basic blues band instrumentation. A group of musicians performing rock music is termed as a rock group. Furthermore, it consists of between three and five members. Classically, a rock band takes the form of a quartet whose members cover one or more roles, including vocalist, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, bass guitarist and keyboard player or other instrumentalist. Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple unsyncopated rhythms in a 4/4 meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four.
Melodies originate from older musical modes such as the Dorian and Mixolydian, as well as major and minor modes. Harmonies range from the common triad to parallel perfect fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Since the late 1950s and from the mid 1960s onwards, rock music used the verse-chorus structure derived from blues and folk music, but there has been considerable variation from this model. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock; because of its complex history and its tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that "it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition." Unlike many earlier styles of popular music, rock lyrics have dealt with a wide range of themes, including romantic love, rebellion against "The Establishment", social concerns, life styles. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources such as the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music, rhythm and blues.
Music journalist Robert Christgau characterizes rock lyrics as a "cool medium" with simple diction and repeated refrains, asserts that rock's primary "function" "pertains to music, or, more noise." The predominance of white and middle class musicians in rock music has been noted, rock has been seen as an appropriation of black musical forms for a young and male audience. As a result, it has been seen to articulate the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, "rock and roll implies an identification of male sexuality and aggression". Since the term "rock" started being used in preference to "rock and roll" from the late-1960s, it has been contrasted with pop music, with which it has shared many characteristics, but from wh
Sign o' the Times (film)
Sign o' the Times is a 1987 American concert film written and directed by Prince. In 1987, to capitalize on his growing success in Europe, Prince toured extensively to promote the album of the same name and sales increased accordingly. However, the United States remained resistant to his latest album, sales began to drop. Featuring the band that accompanied Prince on his 1987 Sign o' the Times Tour, including dancer Cat Glover, keyboardist Boni Boyer, bassist Levi Seacer, Jr. guitarist Miko Weaver, drummer Sheila E. and former member of The Revolution keyboardist Dr. Fink, the film sees the group perform live on stage; the film was intended to consist of live material filmed in the Ahoy in Rotterdam, Netherlands on June 26-28 and in the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium on June 29. However, the footage from these concerts was deemed unsatisfactory due to the film being grainy and unusable, but because Prince was not satisfied with the sound. Sound engineer Michiel Hoogenboezem stated in Dutch newspaper De_Volkskrant that the recording itself was good.
The live performance was reshot at Prince's Paisley Park Studios. According to saxophonist Eric Leeds, around 80% of the final film was drawn from the Paisley Park reshoot. Most of the songs are linked by a themed narrative and many film critics were quick to praise Prince as being a better actor live than in the previous year's unsuccessful romantic comedy Under the Cherry Moon. In total, 13 songs appear on the video - 11 from Sign o' the Times and two others - a brief piano version of "Little Red Corvette" and a cover version of Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time". There had been plans to include the full concert which featured many other non-Sign o' the Times songs but these songs were dropped. In the musical coda for "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man", the horn section, Eric Leeds, trumpeter Atlanta Bliss lifts a section from "Rockhard In a Funky Place", a Camille track on the Crystal Ball track listing, but lost when the 3-LP set was trimmed down, it would be heard on The Black Album.
Set list"Sign o' the Times" "Play in the Sunshine" "Little Red Corvette"/"Housequake" "Slow Love" "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" "Hot Thing" "Now's the Time" Drum solo by Sheila E. "U Got the Look" "If I Was Your Girlfriend" "Forever in My Life"/"It" "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night" "The Cross" Sign o' the Times premiered in Detroit on October 29, 1987, was released nationwide in 234 key locations on November 20. Despite critical praise for Prince as a live performer, the film did not perform well commercially and slipped out of theaters. Nonetheless, when the film was released on VHS the following year, it became popular and received positive reviews in the United Kingdom. Q magazine gave it four stars, whilst SKY Magazine suggested that it "was the greatest concert movie made"; the film holds an 85% rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 13 critics, with an average rating of 6/10. The film was released in early 2005 on DVD in Canada by Alliance Atlantis, although the cut songs still failed to appear with the rest of the footage.
The Blu-ray version was released in Australia by Via Vision Entertainment and Madman Entertainment on May 9, 2012. The film has yet to be released on DVD and/or Blu-ray in the United States and has been out of print in the US since 1991. In 2017, Showtime began airing the film on their premium cable channel. Sign o' the Times on IMDb Sign o' the Times at Box Office Mojo Sign o' the Times at Rotten Tomatoes
Twelve-inch single
The twelve-inch single is a type of gramophone record that has wider groove spacing and shorter playing time compared to LPs. This allows for louder levels to be cut on the disc by the mastering engineer, which in turn gives a wider dynamic range, thus better sound quality; this record type is used in disco and dance music genres, where DJs use them to play in clubs. They are played at either 45 rpm. Twelve-inch singles have much shorter playing time than full-length LPs, thus require fewer grooves per inch; this extra space permits a broader dynamic range or louder recording level as the grooves' excursions can be much greater in amplitude in the bass frequencies important for dance music. Many record companies began producing 12-inch singles at 33 1⁄3 rpm, although 45 rpm gives better treble response and was used on many twelve-inch singles in the UK; the gramophone records cut for dance-floor DJs came into existence with the advent of recorded Jamaican mento music in the 1950s. By at least 1956 it was standard practice by Jamaican sound systems owners to give their "selecter" DJs acetate or flexi disc dubs of exclusive mento and Jamaican rhythm and blues recordings before they were issued commercially.
Songs such as Theophilus Beckford's "Easy Snappin'" were played as exclusives by Sir Coxson's Downbeat sound system for years before they were released in 1959 – only to become major local hits pressed in the UK by Island Records and Blue Beat Records as early as 1960. As the 1960s creativity bloomed along, with the development of multitrack recording facilities, special mixes of rocksteady and early reggae tunes were given as exclusives to dancehall DJs and selecters. With the 1967 Jamaican invention of remix, called dub on the island, those "specials" became valuable items sold to allied sound system DJs, who could draw crowds with their exclusive hits; the popularity of remix sound engineer King Tubby, who singlehandedly invented and perfected dub remixes from as early as 1967, led to more exclusive dub plates being cut. By 10-inch records were used to cut those dubs. By 1971, most reggae singles issued in Jamaica included on their B-side a dub remix of the A-side, many of them first tested as exclusive "dub plates" on dances.
Those dubs included drum and bass-oriented remixes used by sound system selecters. The 10-inch acetate "specials" would remain popular until at least the 2000s in Jamaica. Several Jamaican DJs such as DJ Kool Herc exported much of the hip hop dance culture from Jamaica to the Bronx in the early 1970s, including the common Jamaican practice of DJs rapping over instrumental dub remixes of hit songs leading to the advent of rap culture in the United States. Most the widespread use of exclusive dub acetates in Jamaica led American DJs to do the same. In the United States, the twelve-inch single gramophone record came into popularity with the advent of disco music in the 1970s after earlier market experiments. In early 1970, Cycle/Ampex Records test-marketed a twelve-inch single by Buddy Fite, featuring "Glad Rag Doll" backed with "For Once in My Life"; the experiment aimed to energize the struggling singles market, offering a new option for consumers who had stopped buying traditional singles. The record was pressed at 33 rpm, with identical run times to the seven-inch 45 rpm pressing of the single.
Several hundred copies were made available for sale for 98 cents each at two Tower Records stores. Another early twelve-inch single was released in 1973 by soul/R&B musician/songwriter/producer Jerry Williams, Jr. a.k.a. Swamp Dogg. Twelve-inch promotional copies of "Straight From My Heart" were released on his own Swamp Dogg Presents label, with distribution by Jamie/Guyden Distribution Corporation, it was manufactured by Jamie Record Co. of Pennsylvania. The B-side of the record is blank; the first large-format single made for DJs was a ten-inch acetate used by a mix engineer in need of a Friday-night test copy for famed disco mixer Tom Moulton. The song was; as no 7-inch acetates could be found, a 10–inch blank was used. Upon completion, found that such a large disc with only a couple of inches worth of grooves on it made him feel silly wasting all that space, he asked Rodríguez to re-cut it so that the grooves looked more spread out and ran to the normal center of the disc. Rodriguez told him.
Because of the wider spacing of the grooves, not only was a louder sound possible but a wider overall dynamic range as well. This was noticed to give a more favorable sound for discothèque play. Moulton's position as the premiere mixer and "fix it man" for pop singles ensured that this fortunate accident would become industry practice; this would have been a natural evolution: as dance tracks became much longer than had been the average for a pop song, the DJ in the club wanted sufficient dynamic range, the format would have enlarged from the seven-inch single eventually. The broad visual spacing of the grooves on the twelve-inch made it easy for the DJ in locating the approximate area of the "breaks" on the disc's surface in dim club light. A quick study of any DJs favorite discs will reveal mild wear in
Warner Bros. Records
Warner Bros. Records Inc. is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group and headquartered in Burbank, California. It was founded in 1958 as the recorded music division of the American film studio Warner Bros. and was one of a group of labels owned and operated by larger parent corporations for much of its existence. The sequence of companies that controlled Warner Bros. and its allied labels evolved through a convoluted series of corporate mergers and acquisitions from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. Over this period, Warner Bros. Records grew from a struggling minor player in the music industry to one of the top record labels in the world. In 2004, these music assets were divested by their owner Time Warner and purchased by a private equity group; this independent company traded as the Warner Music Group and was the world's last publicly traded major music company before being bought and privatized by Access Industries in 2011. Warner Music Group is the smallest of the three major international music conglomerates that include Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.
Max Lousada oversees recorded music operations of the company. Notable artists signed to Warner Bros. Records have included Prince, Kylie Minogue, Goo Goo Dolls, Sheryl Crow, Lil Pump, Green Day, Adam Lambert, Bette Midler, Duran Duran, Fleetwood Mac, Liam Gallagher, Fleet Foxes, Jason Derulo, Lily Allen and Sara, Dua Lipa, Linkin Park, Nile Rodgers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Black Keys, My Chemical Romance, Mr. Bungle, Regina Spektor, Van Halen. At the end of the silent movie period, Warner Bros. Pictures decided to expand into publishing and recording so that it could access low-cost music content for its films. In 1928, the studio acquired several smaller music publishing firms which included M. Witmark & Sons, Harms Inc. and a partial interest in New World Music Corp. and merged them to form the Music Publishers Holding Company. This new group controlled valuable copyrights on standards by George and Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern and the new division was soon earning solid profits of up to US$2 million every year.
In 1930, MPHC paid US$28 million to acquire Brunswick Records, whose roster included Duke Ellington, Red Nichols, Nick Lucas, Al Jolson, Earl Burtnett, Ethel Waters, Abe Lyman, Leroy Carr, Tampa Red and Memphis Minnie, soon after the sale to Warner Bros. the label signed rising radio and recording stars Bing Crosby, Mills Brothers, Boswell Sisters. For Warner Bros. the dual impact of the Great Depression and the introduction of broadcast radio harmed the recording industry—sales crashed, dropping by around 90% from more than 100 million records in 1927 to fewer than 10 million by 1932 and major companies were forced to halve the price of records from 75c to 35c. In December 1931, Warner Bros. offloaded Brunswick to the American Record Corporation for a fraction of its former value, in a lease arrangement which did not include Brunswick's pressing plants. Technically, Warner maintained actual ownership of Brunswick, which with the sale of ARC to CBS in 1939 and their decision to discontinue Brunswick in favor of reviving the Columbia label, reverted to Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. sold Brunswick a second time, this time along with the old Brunswick pressing plants Warner owned, to Decca Records in exchange for a financial interest in Decca. The studio stayed out of the record business for more than 25 years, during this period it licensed its film music to other companies for release as soundtrack albums. Warner Bros. returned to the record business in 1958 with the establishment of its own recording division, Warner Bros. Records. By this time, the established Hollywood studios were reeling from multiple challenges to their former dominance—the most notable being the introduction of television in the late 1940s. Legal changes had a major impact on their business—lawsuits brought by major stars had overthrown the old studio contract system by the late 1940s. Pictures sold off much of its film library in 1948 and, beginning in 1949, anti-trust suits brought by the US government forced the five major studios to divest their cinema chains. In 1956, Harry Warner and Albert Warner sold their interest in the studio and the board was joined by new members who favoured a renewed expansion into the music business—Charles Allen of the investment bank Charles Allen & Company, Serge Semenenko of the First National Bank of Boston and investor David Baird.
Semenenko in particular had a strong professional interest in the entertainment business and he began to push Jack Warner on the issue of setting up an'in-house' record label. With the record business booming - sales had topped US$500 million by 1958 - Semnenko argued that it was foolish for Warner Bros. to make deals with other companies to release its soundtracks when, for less than the cost of one motion picture, they could establish their own label, creating a new income stream that could continue indefinitely and provide an additional means of exploiting and promoting its contract actors. Another impetus for the label's creation was the brief music career of Warner Bros. actor Tab Hunter. Although Hunter was signed to an exclusive acting contract with the studio, it did not prevent him from signing a recording contract, which he did with Dot Records, owned at the time by Paramount Pictures. Hunter scored several hits for Dot, including the US #1 single, "Young Love", to Warner Bros.' chagrin, reporters were asking about the hit record, rather than
LinnDrum
The LinnDrum is a drum machine manufactured by Linn Electronics between 1982 and 1985. About 5,000 units were sold, its high-quality samples and affordability made the LinnDrum popular. Roger Linn re-used the moniker on the LinnDrum Midistudio and the Roger Linn Designs' LinnDrum II; the LinnDrum was used on many recordings throughout the 1980s, including international hits such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax", a-Ha's "Take on Me", Harold Faltermeyer's "Axel F", Tears for Fears' "Shout", Deniece Williams's "Let's Hear it for the Boy", Madonna's "Lucky Star". When Linn Electronics closed in 1986, Forat Electronics purchased its assets and offered service and modifications for the LinnDrum; the LinnDrum was pre-MIDI, using a DIN sync interface, but MIDI Retrofit Kits were offered by JL Cooper and Forat Electronics. The LinnDrum has fifteen 8-bit 28 kHz ~ 35 kHz digitally sampled drum sounds: bass drum, side-stick snare, hi-hat, crash cymbal, ride cymbal, three tom-toms, tambourine and low congas and hand-claps.
Like the LM-1, it provided a sequencer for programming rhythm patterns, a built-in mixer and individual output jacks for each sound. The LinnDrum improved on the LM-1 in many ways including: the addition of crash and ride cymbal samples, five external trigger inputs and the ability to replace built-in sounds with new sounds on EPROM chips; the LinnDrum sampled sounds from 28 to a 35 kHz sample rate. The LinnDrum was $2,000 less than the LM-1. While on the LinnDrum only the snare and conga samples can be tuned, the LM-1 allows every sound to be individually tuned. However, third-party modifications can be made to allow for everything to be tuned; the LinnDrum was designed by Roger Linn. According to Linn, his company started out as a one-product company, depending on the success of the LM-1, he was inspired to design a successor after a NAMM show where he met Roland Corporation founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, who encouraged him to "move beyond being a one-product company so that a slowdown of my one product does not take the company down".
According to some, the LinnDrum sounds were sampled from real drums played for the machine by Los Angeles drummer Art Wood, a friend of Linn, who played with Linn and musicians including Peter Frampton, Gary Wright, Tina Turner, Bette Midler and James Brown. However, "The LM-1 was the first drum machine to use samples of a real drum kit, Roger Linn confirms that it was indeed Art Wood session drummer that played the majority of the sounds that he used. To further add to the mystery, an entry in the online museum of the Roger Linn Design company credits L. A. session drummer Art Wood with most of the samples." While the Roger Linn Designs Past Products Museum page credits Art Wood for "most" of the LM-1 sounds, there is no credit for the drummer who played the sounds for the LinnDrum. Roger Linn Design
Music video
A music video is a short film that integrates a song with imagery, is produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. There are cases where songs are used in tie-in marketing campaigns that allow them to become more than just a song. Tie-ins and merchandising can be used for food or other products. Although the origins of the music video date back to musical short films that first appeared in the 1920s, they again came into prominence in the 1980s when the channel MTV based their format around the medium. Prior to the 1980s, these kinds of videos were described by various terms including "illustrated song", "filmed insert", "promotional film", "promotional clip", "promotional video", "song video", "song clip" or "film clip". Music videos use a wide range of styles and contemporary video-making techniques, including animation, live action and non-narrative approaches such as abstract film.
Some music videos combine different styles with the music, such as animation and live action. Combining these styles and techniques has become more popular because of the variety for the audience. Many music videos interpret images and scenes from the song's lyrics, while others take a more thematic approach. Other music videos may not have any concept, being a filmed version of the song's live concert performance. In 1894, sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song "The Little Lost Child". Using a magic lantern, Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneous to live performances; this would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, the first step toward music video. In 1926, with the arrival of "talkies" many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts featured many bands and dancers. Animation artist Max Fleischer introduced a series of sing-along short cartoons called Screen Songs, which invited audiences to sing along to popular songs by "following the bouncing ball", similar to a modern karaoke machine.
Early 1930s cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on-camera in live-action segments during the cartoons. The early animated films by Walt Disney, such as the Silly Symphonies shorts and Fantasia, which featured several interpretations of classical pieces, were built around music; the Warner Bros. cartoons today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were fashioned around specific songs from upcoming Warner Bros. musical films. Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway, were distributed to theaters. Blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called St. Louis Blues featuring a dramatized performance of the hit song. Numerous other musicians appeared in short musical subjects during this period. Soundies and released from 1940 to 1947, were musical films that included short dance sequences, similar to music videos. In the mid-1940s, musician Louis Jordan made short films for his songs, some of which were spliced together into a feature film, Lookout Sister.
These films were, according to music historian Donald Clarke, the "ancestors" of music video. Musical films were another important precursor to music video, several well-known music videos have imitated the style of classic Hollywood musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s. One of the best-known examples is Madonna's 1985 video for "Material Girl", modelled on Jack Cole's staging of "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Several of Michael Jackson's videos show the unmistakable influence of the dance sequences in classic Hollywood musicals, including the landmark "Thriller" and the Martin Scorsese-directed "Bad", influenced by the stylised dance "fights" in the film version of West Side Story. According to the Internet Accuracy Project, disc jockey–singer J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson was the first to coin the phrase "music video", in 1959. In his autobiography, Tony Bennett claims to have created "...the first music video" when he was filmed walking along the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London in 1956, with the resulting clip being set to his recording of the song "Stranger in Paradise".
The clip was sent to UK and US television stations and aired on shows including Dick Clark's American Bandstand. The oldest example of a promotional music video with similarities to more abstract, modern videos seems to be the Czech "Dáme si do bytu" created in 1958 and directed by Ladislav Rychman. In the late 1950s the Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists, such as Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, Jacques Dutronc, the Belgian Jacques Brel to accompany their songs, its use spread to other countries, similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-Sonic in the USA were patented. In 1961, for the Canadian show Singalong Jubilee, Manny Pittson began pre-recording the music audio, went on-location and taped various visuals with the musicians lip-synching edited the audio and video together. Most music numbers were taped in-studio on stage, the location shoot "videos" were to add variety. In 1964, Kenneth Anger's experimental short film, Scorpio Rising used popular songs instead of dialog.
In 1964, The Moody Blues producer, Alex Murray, wanted to promote his version of "Go Now". The short film clip he produced and directed to promote the single has a striking visual style that predates Queen's similar "Bohemian Rhapsody" vid
Remix
A remix is a piece of media, altered from its original state by adding, and/or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, video, or photograph can all be remixes; the only characteristic of a remix is that it appropriates and changes other materials to create something new. Most remixes are a subset of audio mixing in music and song recordings. Songs may be remixed for a variety of reasons: to adapt or revise a song for radio or nightclub play to create a stereo or surround sound version of a song where none was available to improve the fidelity of an older song for which the original master has been lost or degraded to alter a song to suit a specific music genre or radio format to use some of the same materials, allowing the song to reach a different audience to alter a song for artistic purposes. To provide additional versions of a song for use as bonus tracks or for a B-side, for example, in times when a CD single might carry a total of 4 tracks to create a connection between a smaller artist and a more successful one, as was the case with Fatboy Slim's remix of "Brimful of Asha" by Cornershop to improve the first or demo mix of the song to ensure a professional product.
To provide an alternative version of a song to improve a song from its original stateRemixes should not be confused with edits, which involve shortening a final stereo master for marketing or broadcasting purposes. Another distinction should be made between a remix, which recombines audio pieces from a recording to create an altered version of a song, a cover: a re-recording of someone else's song like Mike D's remix of Moby's "Natural Blues". While audio mixing is one of the most popular and recognized forms of remixing, this is not the only media form, remixed in numerous examples. Literature, film and social systems can all be argued as a form of remix Since the beginnings of recorded sound in the late 19th century, technology has enabled people to rearrange the normal listening experience. With the advent of editable magnetic tape in the 1940s and 1950s and the subsequent development of multitrack recording, such alterations became more common. In those decades the experimental genre of musique concrète used tape manipulation to create sound compositions.
Less artistically lofty edits produced medleys or novelty recordings of various types. Modern remixing had its roots in the dance hall culture of late-1960s/early-1970s Jamaica; the fluid evolution of music that encompassed ska, rocksteady and dub was embraced by local music mixers who deconstructed and rebuilt tracks to suit the tastes of their audience. Producers and engineers like Ruddy Redwood, King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry popularized stripped-down instrumental mixes of reggae tunes. At first they dropped the vocal tracks, but soon more sophisticated effects were created, dropping separate instrumental tracks in and out of the mix and repeating hooks, adding various effects like echo and delay; the German krautrock band Neu! used other effects on side two of their album Neu! 2 by manipulating their released single Super/Neuschnee multiple ways, utilizing playback at different turntable speeds or mangling by using of a cassette recorder. From the mid-1970s, DJs in early discothèques were performing similar tricks with disco songs to get dancers on the floor and keep them there.
One noteworthy figure was Tom Moulton. Though not a DJ, Moulton had begun his career by making a homemade mix tape for a Fire Island dance club in the late 1960s, his tapes became popular and he came to the attention of the music industry in New York City. At first Moulton was called upon to improve the aesthetics of dance-oriented recordings before release, he moved from being a "fix it" man on pop records to specializing in remixes for the dance floor. Along the way, he invented the 12-inch single vinyl format. Walter Gibbons provided the dance version of the first commercial 12-inch single. Contrary to popular belief, Gibbons did not mix the record. In fact his version was a re-edit of the original mix. Moulton and their contemporaries at Salsoul Records proved to be the most influential group of remixers for the disco era; the Salsoul catalog is seen as being the "canon" for the disco mixer's art form. Pettibone is among a small number of remixers whose work transitioned from the disco to the House era.
His contemporaries included François Kevorkian. Contemporaneously to disco in the mid-1970s, the dub and disco remix cultures met through Jamaican immigrants to the Bronx, energizing both and helping to create hip-hop music. Key figures included Grandmaster Flash. Cutting and scratching became part of the culture, creating what Slate magazine called "real-time, live-action collage." One of the first mainstream successes of this style of remix was the 1983 track Rockit by Herbie Hancock, as remixed by Grand Mixer D. ST. Malcolm McLaren and the creative team behind ZTT Records would feature the "cut up" style of hip hop on such records as "Duck Rock". Early pop remixes were simple.
