+ Recording and mixing your songs at home? Preview Soundfly’s online course, Modern Pop Vocal Production for free, and subscribe here to get unlimited access. Every production and every song is unique, but the lead vocal is typically the part that most directly engages the average listener. The human voice, with all of its frailty, power, and expressive nuances, is…
Your charts say a lot about you and your music. Make sure your players understand your vision with clear notation that helps everyone sound their best.
If an artist has just given the best, most effortless and inspired performance of their life, they’re not going to want to change much when the next gig rolls around. Few things will keep musicians working more consistently than the ability to support and flatter a vocalist or soloist — particularly if they’re a joy for the rest…
The beautiful, complex, and strange historical relationship between sound recording and music has changed a lot over the past century. Composition, performance, and audio capture, once relatively discrete disciplines, are now more often treated as one big, amorphous, creative process. But even though recording and mixing tasks have been increasingly wrested away from specialists, these…
Many techniques and resources help you deepen your rhythmic skill set, and there’s no better classroom in which to learn the art of groove than on stages in front of audiences (and beside experienced rhythm section masters). But the second-best classroom might be inside your own headphones! Take a listen to some of these classic…
Pedals! Despite the wide range of effects they produce, individually, they’re typically pretty straightforward devices. But as soon as you begin to assemble a chain of pedals, complicating factors seem to mount up exponentially. The inconvenient reality is that the more complex the system of pedals, the more helpful it becomes to have some basic…
As DAW and recording technology gets ever better, musicians can collaborate in ways they’ve never imagined… which leads to a whole new host of problems.
By Brad Allen Williams Rudy Van Gelder died 25 August, 2016 at the age of 91, having made some of history’s most enduring sound recordings. If you’ve explored the variegated tapestry of 20th century recordings lumped together under the criminally reductionist banner of “jazz,” you probably know the name. If you’ve dug through crates and slid…
