10 Tips for Making Your First Trap Beat
Practicing your skills as a hip-hop producer? Here’s my best advice for how to start writing trap beats to shop around with vocalists and rappers.
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What the “Tristan Chord” Is and How to Use It
An in-depth exploration of one of the most storied chords in opera, what makes it so influential, and how to use it yourself in your compositions.
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The Lasting Legacy of the Slave Trade on American Music
Today is the UN International Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade, we honor this day by charting the legacy of African diasporic music in America.
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Our 10 Favorite Rap Beats of 2018 and Why We Still Love Them
We count down and break down our ten favorite hip-hop beats of 2018 to find out what’s going on inside them and why they’re still so good.
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How Rap Ushered the Piano Into Its Next Developmental Phase
Hip-hop is officially pop music. With Bruno Mars and Kendrick Lamar’s sweep of the Grammy Awards earlier this year, it’s evident that hip-hop has officially shed its status as “that controversial music genre” that prompted the Grammys’ organizers to refuse to air any rap categories back in 1989, which subsequently prompted some to boycott the event.…
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J. Hoard of Sonnymoon on Why Singers Should Strive to Be Like Water
Welcome back to Soundfly’s monthly interview series, Incorrect Music, curated by guitarist, singer, and composer Lora-Faye Åshuvud (of the band Arthur Moon). In this series, we present intimate conversations with artists who are striving to push the boundaries of their process and craft. Jonathan Hoard is more than just a vocalist. The singer-songwriter has written, composed, and arranged music for…
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Straight Outta Wakanda: How the “Black Panther” Score Fixed Marvel’s Music Problem
+ 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. Spoiler alert! This article contains spoilers for the movie Black Panther. If you haven’t seen the movie, you may want to stop and bookmark this page to read the…
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10 Women Loudly Pushing the Boundaries of Electronic Music
+ Learn the nuances of producing beats, arranging tracks, and creative sampling, drawing on the rich history and influence of hip-hop in The Art of Hip-Hop Production. Electronic music is a vast landscape with all too many sub-genres to keep track of. So much of the most popularly consumed music today is either produced and…
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Kenneka Cook on Taking Music Out of the Loop Pedal and into a Live Band
Welcome back to Soundfly’s weekly interview series, Incorrect Music, curated by guitarist, singer, and composer Lora-Faye Åshuvud (of the band Arthur Moon). In this series, we present intimate conversations with artists who are striving to push the boundaries of their process and craft. Richmond, Virginia’s Kenneka Cook credits her early explorations in arranging to the loop pedal, which she started experimenting…
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What Exactly Is a Nocturne, and How Do You Write One?
Despite what many people think, classical music isn’t just a single, monolithic genre of music written by an old, stuffy bunch of dead guys. In fact, European classical music is so diverse that the only common denominator shared amongst pieces in its vast repertoire is that modern Western musical notation was basically invented in order to be…
