Author: Peter Flom

  • How Guitar Amps Work and What You Can Do to Start Tweaking Your Own

    How Guitar Amps Work and What You Can Do to Start Tweaking Your Own

    + Welcome to Soundfly! We help curious musicians meet their goals with creative online courses. Whatever you want to learn, whenever you need to learn it. Subscribe now to start learning on the ’Fly. Electric guitars play a big role in nearly every type of music these days, and the amplifier is a huge part of the equation. Guitar amps might seem complicated, but…

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  • 10 Tips for Creating More Realistic MIDI Music

    10 Tips for Creating More Realistic MIDI Music

    + Learning to record and mix at home? Check out Soundfly’s acclaimed online courses on mixing, production, beat making and more — Subscribe for unlimited access. Eighty years ago, people could only dream of computers making music. The first machines to do this were as large as a bus and sounded like a dying duck choking on garbage. By contrast, modern…

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  • Blow Past Your Writer’s Block with Experimental Arranging

    Blow Past Your Writer’s Block with Experimental Arranging

    Every songwriter knows that painful moment: Staring at a blank page, unsure of what to write. But I believe it’s much worse to stare at a half-finished song. You desperately try to think of what to do next, yet still feel locked into the style, chords, and rhythms that you have already established. It can seem hopeless at times to continue a…

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  • Why Every Piano You’ve Ever Played Is Too Small

    Why Every Piano You’ve Ever Played Is Too Small

    + Bridge the worlds of theory, improvisation, and jazzy hip-hop, and improve your piano chops with Grammy-winner Kiefer in his course, Kiefer: Keys, Chords, & Beats. Beautiful, versatile, and astoundingly complex, the piano holds a key place in nearly every form of music. It can be found across the globe in the back corners of smoky nightclubs, the…

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  • How to Improve at Writing Music by Hand

    How to Improve at Writing Music by Hand

    The most confusing part of reading a handwritten score is the fact that music spacing and phrasing are not always considered when writing.

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  • 10 Tips for Making Your Sheet Music More Readable

    10 Tips for Making Your Sheet Music More Readable

    + Welcome to Soundfly! We help curious musicians meet their goals with creative online courses. Whatever you want to learn, whenever you need to learn it. Subscribe now to start learning on the ’Fly. Everyone has lived through a terrible performance of a piece of music. Some songs are beyond help, but far too often a bad performance is a result…

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  • What Is a Music Engraver? (And What Does It Take to Become One?)

    What Is a Music Engraver? (And What Does It Take to Become One?)

    Whether you’re a composer or musician dabbling in writing arrangements, creating legible sheet music is an important and often overlooked skill. Some may never be required to learn how to read sheet music, while many others write the bare minimum, creating basic charts for their band and working out the details during rehearsal. But when a professional…

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Unlocking the Emotional Power of Chords