+ Learning to record and mix at home? Check out Soundfly’s acclaimed online courses on mixing, production, and beat making — Subscribe for unlimited access. If you’ve ever tried mixing something you recorded at home on computer speakers, your stereo speakers, or even headphones, you know that it’s nearly impossible to get a great, objective sense…
Although a lot of songwriters have at least a basic sense of either the guitar or piano, there are still quite a few who rely solely on their voices when writing melodies and lyrics. While that’s a perfectly fine place to start, songwriters could gain a lot by expanding their instrumental horizons, especially when they…
Over my years in the music industry, I’ve seen many, many live shows, both from the stage and from the audience. This means I’ve seen bands make the same mistakes time and time again. And because I’m guilty of making these mistakes too, I created lists of some of the ways bands can avoid these pitfalls without too much effort. These…
+ Learning to record and mix at home? Check out Soundfly’s acclaimed online courses on mixing, production, and beat making — Subscribe for unlimited access. Unless you’re recording to high-fidelity magnetic tape or into a four-track recording device, your digital audio workstation (DAW) is a critical element of your home studio. You don’t need a giant mixing…
Writing a hit song takes much more than just good luck and a sense of melody. To a large degree, songs become hits because they simply get stuck in our heads. Incorporating truly memorable lyrical and melodic hooks is absolutely vital. But what happens when the hook gets buried or is too complicated for listeners to…
So many artists want instant gratification: to shoot to fame before working hard to create something meaningful. It’s understandable, musicians today are forced to compare themselves to artists who have won a certain level of “overnight success.” But even those overnight-success-story artists have probably put in a ton of work behind the scenes over the years…
If you work in the arts, you work in one of the toughest professions in the world. I once heard someone describe it as “getting kicked in the nuts every day and having to say ‘thank you’.” Ouch. Artists are constantly putting themselves out there, baring their souls, and getting doors slammed in their faces…
If you’re tired of spending your hard-earned cash on hiring other people to record your demos, the logical next step is to set up your own recording studio at home. If that sounds daunting, it really shouldn’t. You can do so much with so little these days, and as time goes on, you can expand your gear…
The Rolling Stones’ classic hit “Sympathy for the Devil” is one of my all-time favorite songs — it’s unique in almost every way. The material it mines is fairly unexplored in popular music, particularly with the lyrics from the perspective of the Devil (which led to the perception of Mick Jagger and his gang as Devil worshippers…
