Yes, Household Objects Should Be Sampled in Your Tracks
If you’re like us, you’re probably sitting around your kitchen right now thinking about what kind of snare sounds you can get out of that whisk over there.
-
-
Take the Winter Sound Challenge!
It’s not easy to say goodbye to winter. While the joy of spring’s arrival does tend to make us antsy to hop into our shorts and t-shirts, there’s always that lingering feeling of longing for just one more day out in the snow, one more run on the slopes, and one more snowball fight… Well, winter doesn’t…
-
10 of the Most Interesting Field Recordists Working Across Aesthetic Boundaries
+ 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. The roots of field recording go all the way back to early 1900s when pioneer musicologist John Lomax began recording cowboy songs in Texas. His son Alan…
-
Tales from the Toilet: Truth vs. Fiction in Musical Stories of the Bathroom
If you’re like me, you’ll be celebrating World Toilet Day this weekend! Besides reflecting on the mission of this holiday, which is to raise awareness of the 2.4 billion global citizens with no access to clean and safe sanitation, however, I’m not totally sure how people are supposed to celebrate World Toilet Day — save for using…
-
How to Build a DIY Hydrophone
Hydrophones enable us to record underwater, which is reason enough to worship and adore them. Better still, you can make your own very easily and cheaply. For the Canal Music tour (in 2009), I wanted to make myself a new hydrophone which included the pre-amp I made here. I have made hydrophones using piezo elements before, but…
-
Gain Staging: How to Get a Better Mix with Healthy Levels
Learn the basics of how to create better mixes of your music, no matter where you record, with six weeks of insights from top sound engineers and personalized mentorship from industry professionals! Check out Faders Up: Modern Mix Techniques, and use the discount code at the bottom of this article to get 40% (that’s $200) off the…
-
Equalization 101 – Everything Musicians Need to Know About EQ
Interested in learning more about audio-mixing techniques? We’re working on a new mentor-driven course featuring input from today’s leading sound engineers called Faders Up: Modern Mix Techniques. Sign up to be the first to know when it launches! Good EQ is vital to a great mix. EQ is one of the key tools for producers when mixing audio…
-
The Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Home Studio: Recording Interfaces
Audio interfaces are pieces of hardware that can act as both sound inputs for recording into your computer, like a mixing desk in a studio and as your sound output when performing and processing digital sounds live. For the purposes of this article, we’re only going to be dealing with their recording function since anybody recording…
-
How to Make Your Synthesizer Fart. Yup.
Synthesists are notorious for their tapestries of bleeps, bloops, burps, and farts. From those original Moog modulators to the current craze in analog, it’s been a dogged critique of synthesists — that as non-instrumentalists, all they’re good for is making fart noises on your techno tracks. Oh, who are we kidding? We kinda do love creating…
-
Moments in Music: 10 Affordable Drum Machines That Outshine Their Price
Everyone knows that Jeff Mills shreds on a TR-909, that Egyptian Lover shakes up a room with his TR-808, and that legendary percussionist Sheila E (who worked with Prince, Marvin Gaye, Beyoncé, Diana Ross, and more) makes magic happen with a Linn LM-1. There’s no doubt that these drum machines — and the artists that made them iconic — changed…
