I will surely miss you.
it just seems unreal still… i always thought he would out live everyone
RIP Michael you music will live on forever.
I swear I hear a moog on some of his older music. 
i was extremely shocked at the news. i was not really a big fan, but he has definitely made a great impact on music. i was kind of interested to see what his final grand tour would be like.
The music will never die. Michael Jackson was a legend in his own right. Thirty years from now, we’ll tune in to our satellite radios and hear WHEE HEE…OW! NYAH AHH OW, and think back to when we lost him forever. I’ll never forget that he died on my day off, and that that day was spent running errands.
MJ was a genius. Very influential.
He had synth bass in a lot of his tracks… check out Scream or Remember The Time. Listening to stuff like this got me into bass playing and specifically Moog basslines.
RIP MJ
Wasn’t he just a singer? I mean, he didn’t actually make any of the music right?
Right. But he “designed” the songs with the help of his producers.
So he basically said, “yeah I like that” when he heard something he thought sounded good?
Sounds like you’ve seen a video of Michael Jackson’s music making process or read an interview, can you point me to it?
There’s his Wikipedia page, which tells of how he practiced his singing, and there’s also his 1988 autobiography. I’m sure there are other sources. I recommend the autobiography. 
I read his Wikipedia page and it says nothing about his contribution to any of the music, only his singing role.
I searched terms like ‘Michael Jackson plays the’ and ‘Michael Jackson wrote the music’, but apparently he never played any instruments.
I didn’t see anything that said he helped design the music either.
Good singer though.
For anyone interested, Recording Engineer Bruce Sweden’s book “Make Mine Music” offers an entire chapter on the making of the “Thriller”, “Bad” and “Off The Wall” albums. The book itself is a terrific read, detailing the career of a great engineer who worked with a LOT of great singers, performers and musicians over the years (Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughn, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, Paul Macartney, Jennifer Lopez, etc.).
There’s also a short chapter on Synthesizers that includes a rare photo of Bob Moog standing behind a Moog Modular (circa 1970), and an interview with Bob from back in the Big Briar days.
Highly recommended.
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- Greg
An example: MJ wrote, composed, and arranged ‘Billie Jean’ What I’ve read is that he sang each part (drums, bass, guitar, etc.) and then they had studio musicians play those parts. Allegedly, he had the entire song in his head.
Any other examples?
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I actually heard something similar about Billy Jean and Black or White, but that was it.
As for being credited for the songs on Bad, I could be wrong but I believe that’s for his writting of the lyrics, not the music. He had other lyric writers working with him time to time.
I know some of his best songs like Thriller were composed by others.
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There’s that documentary of him in his studio showing how he “writes” music. A fully formed backing track plays, and he shows how he dances to it. WTF???
Anyone who has had to pitch a jingle to a fat bald 50 year old Pepsi executive knows how this type of musician “writes”.
“Hey Manny, I think it’s not ORANGE enough. Ya know what I mean? It needs more of the Hippy Hop the kids are all crazy for, right? Let’s go have lunch. Hey you! (spoken to the engineer) Put some orange in it. And more heavy mental. We’ll be back at 3.”
Madonna is the same. Put her at a piano with a gun to her head and say “play a minor chord or I’ll blow your gap-toothed head off”. She wouldn’t stand a chance.
I met a guy in NY once who had this gigantic Manhattan flat covered with gold records. Turns out he wrote Aerosmith’s “Pump” album. No written credit makes him about 100X his credited fee.
That’s gold, Jerry! Gold!