Over the last two years, Soundfly’s courses have become a crystal ball, letting us see into the future of who we’ll all be listening to as new waves of artists and bands float up to the forefront. We hear it time and time again from artists: In order to make it, musicians today need to constantly challenge themselves to learn more, dive in deeper, expand their vocabularies and skill sets, and be their own managers. That’s why we do what we do, to help artists get to that next level of greatness. So here’s a glimpse of the next generation of the world’s favorite music makers, honing their craft with Soundfly courses!
Discover more of our favorite music in the Soundfly Rising Artists series here.
Abstraction
Abstraction is electronic producer Benjamin Burnes from Minneapolis. Ben joined our brand new course on sampling found sounds in Ableton, Making Music from Everyday Items, and we couldn’t be more excited about his presence in the comments section! He’s already posted an incredible submission in response to the course’s challenge to create a song using samples generated from only one source. Hear “Make It Snappy” (built from audio of, well, you can probably guess…).
Watch how Ben made that track from start to finish here.
Yaya Cross
Yael Flores is a Chiptune artist from Mexico City, who, despite admitting she’s merely a student, seems to have a deep grasp of 8-bit composition! Yaya has been sharing her work in our Chiptune Crash Course series, which, hint hint: is going to be growing soon (!).
Seal Eggs
Seal Eggs is the solo ambient pop project of Gwendolyn Wolfenbarger from Colorado Springs. Her beautiful looping vocals remind us of Julianna Barwick, and since she’s blasting through Touring on Shoestring, hopefully we’ll be able to catch her live as she blasts across the country on her next tour!
Mark Strozier
Kansas City-based composer Mark Strozier ended up taking both of the courses in our Mainstage composers’ series, Orchestration for Strings and Introduction to the Composer’s Craft, even though it’s clear that Mark is no beginner! Here’s his final submission for the Composition course, a beautiful Latin-inspired counterpoint with homophonic string textures and an improvisation for flute!
Nigel Parry
Nigel Parry is a folk guitarist and singer/songwriter from Wellington, New Zealand who writes and performs both new, original work, and traditional or early folk music. He brings his experience and inventiveness to the DADGAD course segment of our Alternate Tunings for the Creative Guitarist series. Early in the course, Nigel shared a track making use of this particular tuning, and it’s had us singing along in the Soundfly office ever since!
Luka Blue
And finally, we’d like to feature one of our absolute favorite bands to have joined Soundfly in the last few months, Luka Blue hailing from Kent. This is not a joke; these guys are young, but extremely talented and courageously fusing Afrobeat with indie rock à la Vampire Weekend, yet with the vocal stylings and stadium-aspirations of Imagine Dragons. With a bit of administrative finessing gleaned from our Building a Better Band course, I don’t doubt we’ll be seeing them on magazine covers any day now.
