Get 40% off an annual plan with Nebula: go.nebula.tv/12tone Watch the full version of this video: nebula.tv/videos/12tone-how-radiohead-writes-a-song Some additional thoughts/corrections: 1) Technically my lifetime overlaps with the existence of Nirvana, making them probably the most influential band of my lifetime, but I was only 4 when Cobain died so that feels like cheating. Radiohead has a good case for most influential band since I started forming long-term memories, but that doesn't sound as snappy. 2) I do really want to emphasize how much of this is drawn from Dr. Osborn's book. I tried to make that clear throughout the script, but I'll reiterate it here: He's the one who did the thorough corpus study of Radiohead's catalogue to establish these patterns. I just read about it. The presentation is mine, and some portions of the analysis are as well, but I want to make sure I'm giving proper credit because this video wouldn't have been possible without his work: I simply don't have the time to do a complete corpus study like this and still make videos at the rate I need to. Feel free to assume anything particularly insightful in this video is paraphrasing Dr. Osborn, you won't be too far off. (Anything incorrect or unhelpful is, of course, still entirely mine.) Normally the academics whose works I reference appreciate it and think it's cool, but since this is direct analysis rather than just describing a model it seems easier than normal to accidentally take credit for someone else's work and I want to make sure I'm not doing that. 3) I should also note that the How To Disappear Completely analysis isn't the only viable way to read it. I do think there's a solid argument for just calling it F# minor, or even saying it's not really in a key, but the bassline complicates those readings for me because it so clearly spells out a very A-centric chord loop, so I'm inclined to at least view Dr. Osborn's version as plausible. 4) To clarify, monothematic form is a kind of through-composition. I don't know if that was clear from how I worded it.
Evolution of Sound Manipulation since the '90s (They even came up with some new FX for Guitars too!): Portishead, Radiohead -> Autreche, Oval, Aphex Twin -> Richard Devine, Tipper, Sphongle, Ott, Beats Antique -> Spoonbill, SIXIS, Mr. Bill, Fine Cut Bodies, Mindex, Jlin, Au5
Hello, i just wrote a blogpost with a new theory of music, would you mind having a look? anewtheoryofmusic.blogspot.com/2024/09/a-new-theory-of-music.html
Good catch! If you watch carefully, he's very cognizant that left handers can more easily smudge the ink because English is written right-to-left. 12Tone therefore often starts on the right hand side of the page and works back to the left to avoid smudging the images with his left hand.
I remember reading an interview in Wire magazine with Radiohead years ago, where they said pretty much the conclusion of the video; yeah we write avant garde experimental stuff but at the end of the day we’re still a rock band writing 4 minute songs
One thing I've noticed with Radiohead is that the vocal melodies don't always start where you expect them to. It's often not at the same time as the guitar melody starts a new phrase. Thom has a very unique sense of phrasing that's hard to follow if you're singing along. It's noticeable in songs like Weird Fishes, All I Need, Where I end and you begin, and many others. Also, I made the very bad decision of trying to sing "Go to sleep" at karaoke once. I didn't realize even though I'd heard it dozens of times, that the first half is in 10/4 and then the rest is in 4/4, but the phrases in the 10/4 section don't start at the beginning of the measure always and it's more difficult than I realized. Also, side note, but on the bit about "interesting sounds" they've come up with; this is really something they've been building on at every new album, that culminates at their newest album. A Moon Shaped Pool rarely gets talked about as one of their best albums, although it is a great one. Where it really shines is in sound production. In my opinion, it blows everything they've done previously out of the water in terms of sound design. Where in earlier albums, even Kid A, they have a lot of interesting new "instrument sounds", each one feels like a discrete and separate instrument playing in a band. In AMSP, many songs, especially Daydreaming and Decks Dark feel like complete soundscapes, not a collection of instruments playing together, but rather an indivisible whole, if that makes sense.
Wow what you said about AMSP is interesting. It's def not my favourite album but songs like Decks dark, Daydreaming and Ful Stop sound like an orchestra is playing in your room and not like something made in a studio!
❤ I fought with my dad for Radiohead when I was a teenager. He always had to said the old adage that no music after the 1970s was worth listening. I grew up listening to my mum’s classical recordings and my father’s rock music from the 1960s and 1970s but when Ok Computer came out I finally had something new to listen that was so engaging to me like no other contemporary music was. Finally something I could talk about with people my age. I went to see Radiohead live many times. With this video of yours I understand better why they manage to keep me hooked so deeply.
This is pretty universal across generations. My Dad was born in the early ‘50’s, and I sold him on Radiohead by describing it as my generation’s Pink Floyd, and after hearing it, he agreed. Musicians seem to be less inclined to let their music tastes calcify after their 20’s-30’s, but it’s natural to hold the greats from one’s formative years as more significant or transformative than contemporary artists. It’s untrue, of course, and follows pretty simple logical fallacies like survivorship bias (the shittier music gets lost to time, while the Pink Floyds remain celebrated). New music still excites me as I round the corner on 40yo. I expect it always will. Here’s hoping, anyway.
Yeah, I was a little jelly first time I heard The Smile, because I've been doing a Radiohead/TOOL thing for a while now & then they went & did it themselves.
not really a critique of the video, just a digression: The Bends doesn’t get enough credit for its interesting composition imo. Planet Talex opens the album with really odd, mostly nonfunctional chord progressions, and then immediately the title track also goes some pretty unusual places. Just is built around the whole-half diminished scale; My Iron Lung is full of chromaticism and interesting mediant moves; most songs have something funky going on. i definitely agree that there’s a jump in inventiveness between The Bends and OK Computer, but i think there might be an even bigger one between Pablo Honey and The Bends… don’t sleep on it!
and this one is a direct response, but i want to acknowledge in advance that i know this is ultimately all subjective :) i always felt that How to Disappear Completely had a very clear key center: F♯m. the b6 (D in this case) to 1 vamp is super common in minor keys, as is going to the relative major (A in this case) for the chorus. there’s even some b7 (E) to 1 resolutions at the end to drive the key center home. one thing i do think is interesting about this song, besides the repeating bass figure, is that the three primary chords (F♯m, D, and A) all have tonic function in the key of F♯m, giving the song a “floaty” feeling since none of its resolutions have particularly strong directionality. we’re basically just alternating one note at a time-D C♯ for the verse, and E and F♯ for the chorus, with the other two tones of the F♯m home chord remaining in place. not tonally ambiguous exactly, but still a very evocative choice!
@@RhapsodyAfternoon Yeah, totally agree about HtDC, that one had me scratching my head. It would be hard to pick a less suitable song for 'avoiding the I chord'. Actually I think Radiohead doesn't really avoid the I chord so often as they make it ambiguous which chord ought to serve as the I - songs like You and Whose Army? or Weird Fishes/Arpeggi or Present Tense come to mind. But even then, I feel like this feature is way less characteristic compared to Radiohead's use of chromatic mediants and chord quality changes as well as certain types of modal interchange. I have a video on my channel where I do a deep dive into this if you're interested.
Completely agree. If you only listened only to High & Dry and Black Star, sure, sounds pretty characterless, but almost every other song on the album has something distinctly ‘Radiohead’ (even Sulk, which I’d say is the weakest track).
I resisted Radiohead for years. I didn’t get it. The band finally clicked when I listened through of all of their records on a two-day, solo road trip. Now I’m obsessed. Thanks for the video.
A composer friend of mine followed your advice a few years ago -- partly inspired by Jonny Greenwood, he bought an Onde Martenot. (It is not cheap.) He even went up to Montreal to study with a prominent ondiste, with whom he collaborated in some original music. It's a really fascinating and complex instrument, and it's hard to believe that the onde has been around for a hundred years, especially given its modern impact. If you want to hear more ondisme, watch basically any movie scored by Elmer Bernstein.
Not only do I love their music, but I respect the fact that they achieved massive success and used that as a jumping-off point for exploring other things rather than churning out More Of The Same. Call the Talk Talk career track, I guess. I don't know that you meant for this video to be inspiring, but I want to go play with my electronic doo-dads more than ever right now.
I think it's worth mentioning that some of the innovations in rock songwriting you talk about were pioneered by David bowie and the beatles! for example the ending of karma police is reminiscent to that of moonage daydream or even hey jude
To me, Hey Jude is a little different, in that I actually think of the outro section as the chorus (Hey Jude is, in this sense, a song built on delayed gratification, making you wait to a little after the middle of a 7+ minute song to hear the chorus the first time, but then looping the chorus as an outro; this is largely because the “so let it out and let it in” section to me feels more like bridge or prechorus than a chorus proper, I think because of the fact that it appears with new lyrics each time) rather than what Karma Police does, which is give a clear verse/chorus structure through its first half and then end somewhere completely different. Another point to this end is that Hey Jude stays in the same key when it moves to its final section, whereas Karma Police arguably doesn’t even really have a “key” so much as a tonal center (I’d argue for A, with a mix of A min/A dorian in the verse and C lydian in the chorus, playing off the relative minor/major thing that exists between Amin and Cmaj but in both cases making room to accomodate the F# that prominently stands out) so it bounces back and forth between A and C as the key centers until that final section which finally lands the song in B (but again, plays with tonality, as the Bmin/Dmaj vamp implies Bmin as the key but then the final chord in the sequence before it repeats is a Emajor, which isn’t in either Bmin or Dmaj but would be in B dorian or D lydian, now mimicking the use of A dorian and C lydian but in the new tone center of B.) Hey Jude to me is in that same family of songs as things like “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey which also delays giving you the chorus to the end, and then turns that chorus into a looping outro section. While Karma Police might have gotten that idea from something like Hey Jude, I think Radiohead managed to transform that idea (if that’s where they came up w it) into something totally new (at least as far as I can tell- I’m sure there are likely earlier examples that I’m not familiar with and maybe come from outside mainstream music; it is worth remembering how much classical and jazz influenced Radiohead to this end, and I’d bet an idea like this could have come from someone like Miles Davis and his use of modal interchange in his works. At the time of OK Computer’s release, Radiohead talked about how influential Davis’s Bitches Brew was on them during the writing and recording of the album.)
Using V-Is is great for experimenting with adding out-of-key chords. They keep the listener grounded in the key center so they don’t get lost in weird chords and this lets you truly get a feel for how that chord sounds in that key.
as a long time Radiohead fan that watched a lot of related videos to the band, I really think you did great work and I enjoyed every bit.of watching. thanks :)
Really interesting but Radiohead became Radiohead before OKC: The Bends is unmistakably them. But it’s even earlier… Blow Out. Radiohead started with the final track of Pablo Honey.
Whatever a Radiohead is, my biggest takeaway from this video is finding out that there's something called a baroque recorder which is apparently almost exactly the same as recorders I'm familiar with to the point that I don't even want this knowledge I now have of the difference.
I would love to see videos like this on other artists as well! Bowie made almost 500 songs over decades but always sounded like bowie and I have always looked up to him for his musical talent.
I think they just use some weird loops, some different rhythms on piano, some mood and ambience, some weird effects, some slow vocals, and ... I'm sometimes wondering if they're good or if they suck.
@@LazyCat010 Even more so as he said almost the same thing (including the "keyboards were being bought" line) on that episode of TPS (just over 38 minutes in).
Maybe I'm outing myself as uncultured swine, but Creep will always be my favorite Radiohead song. That shit just gets to me in such a good way. Last I checked, the band didn't dislike it, Thom just wasn't I that place anymore, and they have started playing it again.
I had a buddy in highschool that made a Radiohead station on Pandora, but he down voted every Radiohead song, it made one of the best rock stations on Pandora. That being said, I really slept on Radiohead, Everthing it the Right Place has my favorite chord progression and a perfect tember for it.
I was introduced to Radiohead via Panic! At The Disco's cover of Karma Police, and it has remained a song Iove for years now... And I've somehkw NEVER noticed that we don't go back to either of the other sections once we lose ourselves for a minute there.
Dude, just found out about your channel like a couple weeks ago, pretty quickly I started searching for something on your channel about Radiohead and I was sad when I couldn't find one. But now you've posted this! I guess you read my mind 🤯
Left hand … right to left. And with a permanent marker with no mistakes. Translator various languages- understands equipment, how to use it, and how to express it. More than Rare- more valuable than rare.. nearly extinct and I appreciate you. Gratitude for sharing. You mention the songs I enjoy most.. which are some of the most difficult for the artists to perform which reflects their brilliance- geniuses including yourself. I love gummy bears too
hey! can you make a video on Aphex Twin if you haven’t already? radiohead took alot of inspiration from him and he is one of the most influential artists in electronic music.
I want to thank you for this, specifically, so many song analysis videos you find on youtube are just pure theory, what chords and scales they use and maybe a bit about the meter. But, to me that always feels so incomplete, especially when dealing with bands like Radiohead that uses such a wide range of tambours and experimental sounds that fall outside of traditional music theory. I was worrying a little at the start that this would be more of that, but you very much proved me wrong, and you do consistently try to highlight elements outside of classical theory. My guess would be that it's at least partially because of your background in Metal and the importance of distortion and guitar tone in order to make the genre what it is. You take the same notes and chord progression and play it through a completely clean tone and it is not the same song.
It really kind of bugs me how much The Bends gets overlooked these days. Maybe I have a bias because it was the first full Radiohead album I ever listened to and owned, but honestly it sounds to me like they're already trying to break out of the mould that Pablo Honey had established for them. I guess as a sophmore album it was hard for them to stray too far from what the record label thought worked about that album, but you can already tell that they have more ambition than that. As for Black Star, it's a song that hits really close to home for reasons that are way too private for me to get into in a public forum, but it's a very personal song for me.
As soon as you mentioned the Bridge to Nowhere I had neuron activation about You And Whose Army. On one hand it feels wrong based on the conventions of rock, but I think of it as breaking away from the song, off to something bigger. Sisyphus escaping the stone.
Great video. Have to disagree a bit with the exclusion of the first two albums. I understand why and the point you are making is valid, but there is definitely uniqueness there in how some of the songs were written that is still somewhere in there in the Radiohead of today even (as you sort of reference later with time signatures). These weren't as conventional tracks as people seem to think they are.
I wouldn't have identified the part that I think you're talking about as a guitar with a sustainer, but the idea isn't quite as novel as you seem to imply. The E-Bow is basically the same thing, and that's been in use in popular music since at least U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" (which is to say 1984), and people have been nullifying the attack of electric guitars since pretty much forever just by playing with the volume knob while playing, often called "volume swell".
I was thinking about writing a comment that was about how I never wanted a mellotron and piccolo trumpet to sound Beatlesque, I wanted to follow their example and be innovative, and that's also how you write a song like Radiohead. And then you basically just said it. lol. Of course my influences came right out and people said my songs sounded like the Beatles and Prince. Though I did once get compared to the Boomtown Rats and Spiders from Mars era Bowie and at that time I wasn't really familiar with either. Attempting innovation is fun. Let's run everything through the Leslie speaker. Let's put the mic in an ashtray. Let's use a Theremin. I like using household items for percussion and sampling odd sounds. Juxtaposition is fun too. I haven't done a ukulele or banjo solo in a metal song yet, but I think I or someone else ought to. Write like Radiohead by not writing like Radiohead.
I think the idea for it started with an e-bow, and likely came from REM given Radiohead’s love of them as a band. That said, I do think there’s a bit of a difference just based on the specific mechanics of how the two work, and in particular in that an e-bow really is only meant to work on one string at a time whereas the sustainer strat can use all 6, allowing for a bowed effect but on full chords rather than just a melodic single note line.
When talking polymeter the Beatles are the kings. Anyone that likes the Beatles has some polymeter catalogue incorporated. She said she said, Strawberry fields forever, all you need is love, two of us, even Here comes the sun. Personally, the catchiest guitar riff I've ever written is en 5/4 and I've still haven't found a way to incorporate it to an actual song 😢
My favorite term for a bridge to nowhere is a "pier". Famous examples include Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers and Don't Stop Believing by Journey.
![Woo-hoo!: How Blur Mocked Grunge & Destroyed Britpop ["Song 2"] | New British Canon](/img/n.gif)
Get 40% off an annual plan with Nebula: go.nebula.tv/12tone
Watch the full version of this video: nebula.tv/videos/12tone-how-radiohead-writes-a-song
Some additional thoughts/corrections:
1) Technically my lifetime overlaps with the existence of Nirvana, making them probably the most influential band of my lifetime, but I was only 4 when Cobain died so that feels like cheating. Radiohead has a good case for most influential band since I started forming long-term memories, but that doesn't sound as snappy.
2) I do really want to emphasize how much of this is drawn from Dr. Osborn's book. I tried to make that clear throughout the script, but I'll reiterate it here: He's the one who did the thorough corpus study of Radiohead's catalogue to establish these patterns. I just read about it. The presentation is mine, and some portions of the analysis are as well, but I want to make sure I'm giving proper credit because this video wouldn't have been possible without his work: I simply don't have the time to do a complete corpus study like this and still make videos at the rate I need to. Feel free to assume anything particularly insightful in this video is paraphrasing Dr. Osborn, you won't be too far off. (Anything incorrect or unhelpful is, of course, still entirely mine.) Normally the academics whose works I reference appreciate it and think it's cool, but since this is direct analysis rather than just describing a model it seems easier than normal to accidentally take credit for someone else's work and I want to make sure I'm not doing that.
3) I should also note that the How To Disappear Completely analysis isn't the only viable way to read it. I do think there's a solid argument for just calling it F# minor, or even saying it's not really in a key, but the bassline complicates those readings for me because it so clearly spells out a very A-centric chord loop, so I'm inclined to at least view Dr. Osborn's version as plausible.
4) To clarify, monothematic form is a kind of through-composition. I don't know if that was clear from how I worded it.
Evolution of Sound Manipulation since the '90s (They even came up with some new FX for Guitars too!): Portishead, Radiohead -> Autreche, Oval, Aphex Twin -> Richard Devine, Tipper, Sphongle, Ott, Beats Antique -> Spoonbill, SIXIS, Mr. Bill, Fine Cut Bodies, Mindex, Jlin, Au5
Hello, i just wrote a blogpost with a new theory of music, would you mind having a look? anewtheoryofmusic.blogspot.com/2024/09/a-new-theory-of-music.html
Brad Osborn here! What a great video, and thanks for doing something so cool and accessible with my book.
It’s an awesome book!
@@fcariani Hey that's really nice. Honestly, seeing all the cool multimedia analyses people have done inspired by it has been the best part.
crazy coincidence i just bought your book today!
@@decentsingersclub oh hey thanks! I hope you like the more thorough unpacking of the Pyramid Song rhythm that makes up the bulk of Chapter 6.
Hey I loved your book!
This Radio Head band seem pretty cool, I’ll have to check them out!
have you heard of the beatles, by chance?
@@Carlit0s. oh, I love them! I think my favourite Beatles song is “Don’t Look Back In Anger”
@@DavidBennettPianothat’s not Beatles that’s a blur song…
@@Severity. oh yeah, sorry. Then I guess my favourite Beatles tune is “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Hey, it's that David guy! Y'know, the guy who wrote "Bloom" and "There, There". I love his music!!!
A “bridge to nowhere” I’ve always called it “a pier”.
that's very clever
Thank you for the giggles 😂
I just barely noticed that he's left-handed. I've been watching for years.
Good catch! If you watch carefully, he's very cognizant that left handers can more easily smudge the ink because English is written right-to-left. 12Tone therefore often starts on the right hand side of the page and works back to the left to avoid smudging the images with his left hand.
Hence the right to left writing, given they use a sharpie and those smudge bigtime with left-handedness when writing left to right.
they're left-handed*
So he IS left-handed! That explains why I like him.
I remember reading an interview in Wire magazine with Radiohead years ago, where they said pretty much the conclusion of the video; yeah we write avant garde experimental stuff but at the end of the day we’re still a rock band writing 4 minute songs
One thing I've noticed with Radiohead is that the vocal melodies don't always start where you expect them to. It's often not at the same time as the guitar melody starts a new phrase. Thom has a very unique sense of phrasing that's hard to follow if you're singing along. It's noticeable in songs like Weird Fishes, All I Need, Where I end and you begin, and many others.
Also, I made the very bad decision of trying to sing "Go to sleep" at karaoke once. I didn't realize even though I'd heard it dozens of times, that the first half is in 10/4 and then the rest is in 4/4, but the phrases in the 10/4 section don't start at the beginning of the measure always and it's more difficult than I realized.
Also, side note, but on the bit about "interesting sounds" they've come up with; this is really something they've been building on at every new album, that culminates at their newest album. A Moon Shaped Pool rarely gets talked about as one of their best albums, although it is a great one. Where it really shines is in sound production. In my opinion, it blows everything they've done previously out of the water in terms of sound design. Where in earlier albums, even Kid A, they have a lot of interesting new "instrument sounds", each one feels like a discrete and separate instrument playing in a band. In AMSP, many songs, especially Daydreaming and Decks Dark feel like complete soundscapes, not a collection of instruments playing together, but rather an indivisible whole, if that makes sense.
Wow what you said about AMSP is interesting. It's def not my favourite album but songs like Decks dark, Daydreaming and Ful Stop sound like an orchestra is playing in your room and not like something made in a studio!
❤ I fought with my dad for Radiohead when I was a teenager. He always had to said the old adage that no music after the 1970s was worth listening. I grew up listening to my mum’s classical recordings and my father’s rock music from the 1960s and 1970s but when Ok Computer came out I finally had something new to listen that was so engaging to me like no other contemporary music was. Finally something I could talk about with people my age. I went to see Radiohead live many times. With this video of yours I understand better why they manage to keep me hooked so deeply.
Sounds like your father is musically small minded. The 80s were amazing too.
@@JeighNeither Just a typical baby boomer. The 1980s weren’t easy for him.
This is pretty universal across generations. My Dad was born in the early ‘50’s, and I sold him on Radiohead by describing it as my generation’s Pink Floyd, and after hearing it, he agreed. Musicians seem to be less inclined to let their music tastes calcify after their 20’s-30’s, but it’s natural to hold the greats from one’s formative years as more significant or transformative than contemporary artists. It’s untrue, of course, and follows pretty simple logical fallacies like survivorship bias (the shittier music gets lost to time, while the Pink Floyds remain celebrated). New music still excites me as I round the corner on 40yo. I expect it always will. Here’s hoping, anyway.
My dad was born in 1953 and I got him into Radiohead just by having a few songs on a playlist.
the massive radiohead nerd in me loves all the (moderately) deep cuts you used for this video
yess!!! this is my favourite band of all time. The Smile is fantastic too!
Yeah, I was a little jelly first time I heard The Smile, because I've been doing a Radiohead/TOOL thing for a while now & then they went & did it themselves.
The last place I expected hollow knight content creator BlueSR
BLUEEEEE, YOU'RE HERE??????????????????????????????????????? WOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
When all the music theory jargon finally starts making sense: 👁️👄👁️
Next step may be guitar shopping.
Like a jigsaw falling into place you might say
it still doesnt make any sense
radiohead was my most recent musical obsessions so im very glad to see one of my favorite youtubers cover one of my favorite bands. much love 12tone !
not really a critique of the video, just a digression: The Bends doesn’t get enough credit for its interesting composition imo. Planet Talex opens the album with really odd, mostly nonfunctional chord progressions, and then immediately the title track also goes some pretty unusual places. Just is built around the whole-half diminished scale; My Iron Lung is full of chromaticism and interesting mediant moves; most songs have something funky going on. i definitely agree that there’s a jump in inventiveness between The Bends and OK Computer, but i think there might be an even bigger one between Pablo Honey and The Bends… don’t sleep on it!
and this one is a direct response, but i want to acknowledge in advance that i know this is ultimately all subjective :)
i always felt that How to Disappear Completely had a very clear key center: F♯m. the b6 (D in this case) to 1 vamp is super common in minor keys, as is going to the relative major (A in this case) for the chorus. there’s even some b7 (E) to 1 resolutions at the end to drive the key center home.
one thing i do think is interesting about this song, besides the repeating bass figure, is that the three primary chords (F♯m, D, and A) all have tonic function in the key of F♯m, giving the song a “floaty” feeling since none of its resolutions have particularly strong directionality. we’re basically just alternating one note at a time-D C♯ for the verse, and E and F♯ for the chorus, with the other two tones of the F♯m home chord remaining in place. not tonally ambiguous exactly, but still a very evocative choice!
I'm a huge fan of the album, and Just in particular
@@RhapsodyAfternoon Yeah, totally agree about HtDC, that one had me scratching my head. It would be hard to pick a less suitable song for 'avoiding the I chord'. Actually I think Radiohead doesn't really avoid the I chord so often as they make it ambiguous which chord ought to serve as the I - songs like You and Whose Army? or Weird Fishes/Arpeggi or Present Tense come to mind. But even then, I feel like this feature is way less characteristic compared to Radiohead's use of chromatic mediants and chord quality changes as well as certain types of modal interchange. I have a video on my channel where I do a deep dive into this if you're interested.
Completely agree. If you only listened only to High & Dry and Black Star, sure, sounds pretty characterless, but almost every other song on the album has something distinctly ‘Radiohead’ (even Sulk, which I’d say is the weakest track).
I love the album, it doesn't get enough love. "Creep" gets all the attention, but "Just" and "Street Spirit" both blow it out of the water.
I resisted Radiohead for years. I didn’t get it. The band finally clicked when I listened through of all of their records on a two-day, solo road trip. Now I’m obsessed. Thanks for the video.
My brain popped when I realized Pyramid Song's 3-3-4-3-3 pattern is a slowed down bossa nova beat.
Also, 4 3-sided shapes and one 4-sides shape make... a pyramid!
I'm surprised that you haven't done a radio head video sooner
A composer friend of mine followed your advice a few years ago -- partly inspired by Jonny Greenwood, he bought an Onde Martenot. (It is not cheap.) He even went up to Montreal to study with a prominent ondiste, with whom he collaborated in some original music. It's a really fascinating and complex instrument, and it's hard to believe that the onde has been around for a hundred years, especially given its modern impact. If you want to hear more ondisme, watch basically any movie scored by Elmer Bernstein.
Not only do I love their music, but I respect the fact that they achieved massive success and used that as a jumping-off point for exploring other things rather than churning out More Of The Same. Call the Talk Talk career track, I guess.
I don't know that you meant for this video to be inspiring, but I want to go play with my electronic doo-dads more than ever right now.
i wanna play with my doodad too
Oh boy! I've been waiting forever for you to do a radiohead video, and you did not disappoint! Great video!
I think it's worth mentioning that some of the innovations in rock songwriting you talk about were pioneered by David bowie and the beatles! for example the ending of karma police is reminiscent to that of moonage daydream or even hey jude
To me, Hey Jude is a little different, in that I actually think of the outro section as the chorus (Hey Jude is, in this sense, a song built on delayed gratification, making you wait to a little after the middle of a 7+ minute song to hear the chorus the first time, but then looping the chorus as an outro; this is largely because the “so let it out and let it in” section to me feels more like bridge or prechorus than a chorus proper, I think because of the fact that it appears with new lyrics each time) rather than what Karma Police does, which is give a clear verse/chorus structure through its first half and then end somewhere completely different.
Another point to this end is that Hey Jude stays in the same key when it moves to its final section, whereas Karma Police arguably doesn’t even really have a “key” so much as a tonal center (I’d argue for A, with a mix of A min/A dorian in the verse and C lydian in the chorus, playing off the relative minor/major thing that exists between Amin and Cmaj but in both cases making room to accomodate the F# that prominently stands out) so it bounces back and forth between A and C as the key centers until that final section which finally lands the song in B (but again, plays with tonality, as the Bmin/Dmaj vamp implies Bmin as the key but then the final chord in the sequence before it repeats is a Emajor, which isn’t in either Bmin or Dmaj but would be in B dorian or D lydian, now mimicking the use of A dorian and C lydian but in the new tone center of B.)
Hey Jude to me is in that same family of songs as things like “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey which also delays giving you the chorus to the end, and then turns that chorus into a looping outro section. While Karma Police might have gotten that idea from something like Hey Jude, I think Radiohead managed to transform that idea (if that’s where they came up w it) into something totally new (at least as far as I can tell- I’m sure there are likely earlier examples that I’m not familiar with and maybe come from outside mainstream music; it is worth remembering how much classical and jazz influenced Radiohead to this end, and I’d bet an idea like this could have come from someone like Miles Davis and his use of modal interchange in his works. At the time of OK Computer’s release, Radiohead talked about how influential Davis’s Bitches Brew was on them during the writing and recording of the album.)
Using V-Is is great for experimenting with adding out-of-key chords. They keep the listener grounded in the key center so they don’t get lost in weird chords and this lets you truly get a feel for how that chord sounds in that key.
Well done. This has to be a tough topic to cover in a youtube video format but you did great. Now I have to get that book...
as a long time Radiohead fan that watched a lot of related videos to the band, I really think you did great work and I enjoyed every bit.of watching. thanks :)
Really interesting but Radiohead became Radiohead before OKC: The Bends is unmistakably them. But it’s even earlier… Blow Out. Radiohead started with the final track of Pablo Honey.
Whatever a Radiohead is, my biggest takeaway from this video is finding out that there's something called a baroque recorder which is apparently almost exactly the same as recorders I'm familiar with to the point that I don't even want this knowledge I now have of the difference.
YOOOO my favourite music youTuber talking about one of my favourite bands!
You have no idea how long have i dreamed of this moment, thank you very much.
wow 12tone, this was quite inspiring. I had to jump to the DAW three times to catch an idea before I even was at minute 17 in your vid. thanks a lot!
I would love to see videos like this on other artists as well! Bowie made almost 500 songs over decades but always sounded like bowie and I have always looked up to him for his musical talent.
Even the Bowie songs that were clearly supposed to sound like someone else still sounded like Bowie
So ready for this video. Huge Radiohead fan
I appreciate the love for Hail to the Thief at work here
7:12 lmaoo the dream theater logo when he talks about 23/16
yay a full radiohead music theory video!!!!!!! (i love radiohead) they inspired me to start writing music
"Combining the innovative with the familiar"... true enough for Radiohead, but also true of just about any worthwhile creative endeavor.
I think they just use some weird loops, some different rhythms on piano, some mood and ambience, some weird effects, some slow vocals, and ... I'm sometimes wondering if they're good or if they suck.
Absolutely love everything about this presentation. 💕
It's always a shock when TH-cam recommends me something that turns out to be great.
So good. Thank you for sharing this.
love your style man
Favourite Radiohead songs gotta be Fix You
14:18 - who voiced up Ed O'Brien as American? I suppose that is the Radiohead surprise in a video about Radiohead!
Especially having heard him speak (on That Pedal Show).
It’s Matt from Extra Credits… I think
@@LazyCat010 I have also heard him speak because I watched his Instagram live streams, I am scared to watch the video now
@@LazyCat010 Even more so as he said almost the same thing (including the "keyboards were being bought" line) on that episode of TPS (just over 38 minutes in).
I think that when I rewatch this, I will skip that part, because I have watched several of Ed’s Instagram livestreams and I know what he sounds like
I've been waiting so long for you to talk about radiohead THANK YOUU
Maybe I'm outing myself as uncultured swine, but Creep will always be my favorite Radiohead song. That shit just gets to me in such a good way.
Last I checked, the band didn't dislike it, Thom just wasn't I that place anymore, and they have started playing it again.
Hello, 12tone, I know you probably will not see this, I've been watching your content for a while and I've been loving it!
I had a buddy in highschool that made a Radiohead station on Pandora, but he down voted every Radiohead song, it made one of the best rock stations on Pandora. That being said, I really slept on Radiohead, Everthing it the Right Place has my favorite chord progression and a perfect tember for it.
Amazing video, very interesting, thank you❤
great video and I'll definitely be checking out the recommended book!
I was introduced to Radiohead via Panic! At The Disco's cover of Karma Police, and it has remained a song Iove for years now... And I've somehkw NEVER noticed that we don't go back to either of the other sections once we lose ourselves for a minute there.
Please tell me what it is that you are drawing at 2:01, where you say "....even though it rarely goes exactly where you'd expect."
Dude, just found out about your channel like a couple weeks ago, pretty quickly I started searching for something on your channel about Radiohead and I was sad when I couldn't find one. But now you've posted this! I guess you read my mind 🤯
Bravo, such a well made video.
Left hand … right to left. And with a permanent marker with no mistakes. Translator various languages- understands equipment, how to use it, and how to express it. More than Rare- more valuable than rare.. nearly extinct and I appreciate you. Gratitude for sharing. You mention the songs I enjoy most.. which are some of the most difficult for the artists to perform which reflects their brilliance- geniuses including yourself. I love gummy bears too
One of my favorite bands of all time
This is very well done.
be radiohead and create 'something that sounds nothing like anything they've ever made.' nice. 22:16
Radiohead music was a real art. They don't talk about shit instead, they have meaning in their song
hey! can you make a video on Aphex Twin if you haven’t already? radiohead took alot of inspiration from him and he is one of the most influential artists in electronic music.
Im begging you man u got to do a video on the grateful dead. Either ripple or scarlet begonias as they represent the bands music as a whole very well
I want to thank you for this, specifically, so many song analysis videos you find on youtube are just pure theory, what chords and scales they use and maybe a bit about the meter. But, to me that always feels so incomplete, especially when dealing with bands like Radiohead that uses such a wide range of tambours and experimental sounds that fall outside of traditional music theory. I was worrying a little at the start that this would be more of that, but you very much proved me wrong, and you do consistently try to highlight elements outside of classical theory. My guess would be that it's at least partially because of your background in Metal and the importance of distortion and guitar tone in order to make the genre what it is. You take the same notes and chord progression and play it through a completely clean tone and it is not the same song.
8:52 The best kind of correct.
thanks for this, so many great examples !
13:00 I'd like to mention that there's a recorder in some parts from the bends (song)
It really kind of bugs me how much The Bends gets overlooked these days. Maybe I have a bias because it was the first full Radiohead album I ever listened to and owned, but honestly it sounds to me like they're already trying to break out of the mould that Pablo Honey had established for them. I guess as a sophmore album it was hard for them to stray too far from what the record label thought worked about that album, but you can already tell that they have more ambition than that.
As for Black Star, it's a song that hits really close to home for reasons that are way too private for me to get into in a public forum, but it's a very personal song for me.
Omg Radiohead analysis!!!
I love how in The Smile Thom and Jonny completely indulge their ingenius rhythmic idiosyncrasies.
Gonna use this to write a Muse song instead
I like how the subtitles turn even the prettiest little snippets of music into just ‘(bang)’
Forever my favorite band
"how to write a radiohead song"
Just have a mental breakdown
As soon as you mentioned the Bridge to Nowhere I had neuron activation about You And Whose Army. On one hand it feels wrong based on the conventions of rock, but I think of it as breaking away from the song, off to something bigger. Sisyphus escaping the stone.
Wow! What a fascinating video❣️
7:13 I love that little Majesty symbol omg😂
thank you for the video! I just recently started to embrace their discography. my favorite song so far is Who and Whose Army?
i see radiohead. i click
Dream Theater logo to represent complex time signatures - well played.
Love this one! Still think you would do a great job with a Cure song like pictures of you or disintegration
My old boss drew that bear.
I’ll be here for the inevitable breakdown of Wonderwall
Radiohead. One of the greatest bands currently active imo.
Music
I had to laugh when you drew the Old Man of the Mountain for "never changing"
Great video. Have to disagree a bit with the exclusion of the first two albums. I understand why and the point you are making is valid, but there is definitely uniqueness there in how some of the songs were written that is still somewhere in there in the Radiohead of today even (as you sort of reference later with time signatures). These weren't as conventional tracks as people seem to think they are.
she giving my radio head
Where the idea to draw random stuff on the paper, don't get me wrong, it's very unique and i like it. Did you have random reference pictures?
Dos Equis for “don’t always” had me 😂😂😂.
Oh shoot! My fave band! Hey thanks :3
I wouldn't have identified the part that I think you're talking about as a guitar with a sustainer, but the idea isn't quite as novel as you seem to imply. The E-Bow is basically the same thing, and that's been in use in popular music since at least U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" (which is to say 1984), and people have been nullifying the attack of electric guitars since pretty much forever just by playing with the volume knob while playing, often called "volume swell".
Awesome video
I was thinking about writing a comment that was about how I never wanted a mellotron and piccolo trumpet to sound Beatlesque, I wanted to follow their example and be innovative, and that's also how you write a song like Radiohead. And then you basically just said it. lol.
Of course my influences came right out and people said my songs sounded like the Beatles and Prince. Though I did once get compared to the Boomtown Rats and Spiders from Mars era Bowie and at that time I wasn't really familiar with either.
Attempting innovation is fun. Let's run everything through the Leslie speaker. Let's put the mic in an ashtray. Let's use a Theremin. I like using household items for percussion and sampling odd sounds. Juxtaposition is fun too. I haven't done a ukulele or banjo solo in a metal song yet, but I think I or someone else ought to.
Write like Radiohead by not writing like Radiohead.
I agree about Pablo Honey but The Bends is phenomenal.
this compositional style reminded me of boot camp from soundgarden, a similar structure to those radiohead "bridge to nowhere" songs
Sustainer strat sounds almost like a regular strat played with an e-bow.
Which he absolutely also does.
I think the idea for it started with an e-bow, and likely came from REM given Radiohead’s love of them as a band.
That said, I do think there’s a bit of a difference just based on the specific mechanics of how the two work, and in particular in that an e-bow really is only meant to work on one string at a time whereas the sustainer strat can use all 6, allowing for a bowed effect but on full chords rather than just a melodic single note line.
As an elder millenial, I feel completely seen when discussing odd meter. You’re right, I dance to 5/4
If you haven’t heard….they recently got together and rehearsed. Out of Colin’s own mouth!
When talking polymeter the Beatles are the kings. Anyone that likes the Beatles has some polymeter catalogue incorporated. She said she said, Strawberry fields forever, all you need is love, two of us, even Here comes the sun. Personally, the catchiest guitar riff I've ever written is en 5/4 and I've still haven't found a way to incorporate it to an actual song 😢
joyous video once again
good video
Love that you mentioned We Suck Young Blood! Super underrated Radiohead song.
i"m surprised u didn't mention Let Down on the polymeter section
I urge you to make a video on the song "Head Like a Hole" by Nine Inch Nails. Thank you.
My favorite term for a bridge to nowhere is a "pier". Famous examples include Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers and Don't Stop Believing by Journey.