Welcome back to Fundamentals of Guitar Anatomy, my four-part series examining the literal ins and outs of your electric guitar. So far, we’ve covered wood types and body styles, and today I’d like to cover all the different kinds of pickups available at your disposal, how they work and how they create different tonal shapes. An…
Today we’re going to learn how to emulate that classic warm keyboard sound that starts Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” in just a couple of steps. A couple of notes: First, we’ll be working in the newly released version of Helm V0.6.1, an impressively powerful free digital synth plugin. Download the free version here to follow along,…
Like many historically significant Japanese things (Zen Buddhism, character writing, the kimono, temple architecture), the shakuhachi originated in China. And while, like the parenthetically aforementioned items on this list, the shakuhachi can claim Chinese origin, over the course of its history, it has diverged and evolved quite differently from its Chinese relative, the xiao. The shakuhachi is an…
By Andreas Oskar Hirsch Köln or Cologne, Germany, offers a vivid scene with regards to experimental, new music, electronica, classical music, jazz, cross-border projects, improv, and more. To me, the city is quite well-connected to sonic exploration, research, and experiments. In German we call it, “Klangtüftelei,” which means working with sound in a playful and…
Brushy One-String is a Jamaican singer who has become somewhat of a YouTube superstar in the past few years; his songs are inspiring, his energy is magnetic and grand, and he plays a guitar with, you guessed it, only one string. He’s currently touring North America, and in past few years has been able to…
By Mara Rosenbloom Photos by Nick Lerman Musicians throw around the term “the blues” a lot. Often there seems to be an assumption that we all know — and agree on — what that term means. In a jazz context, say, a jam session, if someone says, “let’s play a blues,” typically the only follow-up…
The first song on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo album, and my favorite so far, is the beautiful, gospel-saturated “Ultralight Beam.” The song uses only four chords, but they’re an interesting four: C minor, E♭ major, A♭ major, and G7. To find out why they sound so good together, let’s do a little music theory. “Ultralight Beam” is…
By Claude Johnson “Sweep picking” is a technique where the guitarist plays single notes on consecutive strings with a “sweeping motion” of the pick. While simultaneously using the fret hand to produce a specific series of notes, usually an “arpeggio.” Both hands are essentially performing these motions in unison, to achieve the particular desired effect of…
In anticipation of Carnegie Hall’s upcoming production of West Side Story at the Knockdown Center in Queens, New York this weekend, we’ve been binge-watching anything and everything we can find about the well-loved musical and its creators on YouTube. Of course, it helps that we recently made a series of videos about the show for the aptly named course, The West…
+ Learn to create and arrange original, instrumental hip-hop music from sampling pioneer RJD2 himself in his new course on Soundfly, RJD2: From Samples to Songs. When we turn on the radio to any pop station, we hear sampling. When we utilize any MIDI instrument technology within our DAWs and hardware, we hear sampling. It’s everywhere, and it’s due…
