How Do Key Signatures Work?
Learning to read or write music? Here’s a quick-yet-deep primer on how key signatures work across major, minor, modal, blues and other tonalities.
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How Portishead Uses Chromatic Voice Leading in “Glory Box”
In this lesson plucked from Soundfly’s The Creative Power of Advanced Harmony course, we go over the chromatic device in Portishead’s melodic writing.
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The Amen Break of Snobbery
Which obscure piece from the classical music canon has become so engrained and intertwined with cinematic snobbery that we’d all recognize it within seconds?
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Syncopation in Chopin
What happens when you remix a Chopin piano étude with the Amen Break? A ton of interesting glitched out syncopations! Let’s explore…
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Announcing NYU MusED Lab’s Theory aQWERTYon
NYU MusED Lab’s famed web-based music toy, the aQWERTYon, just got a reboot. Now you can play with it and learn theory and chords. Enjoy!
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Why Can’t You Tune Your Guitar?
15 minutes of math and learning about frequency divisions can help you understand for good why your guitar may never fundamentally be in tune.
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Learn Diatonic Harmony from a Classic Breakbeat
A particularly perfect music theory lesson happens to exist completely intact inside this classic breakbeat from funk/soul history.
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Teaching Myself the Bach Chaconne With Ableton Live
From a South American dance to a romantically rubato performance piece, Bach’s Violin Partita in D minor has some funky rhythms and bizarre chromaticism!
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Learning to Scratch with “This Is America”
+ 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. This article originally appeared on Ethan Hein’s blog. One of my projects for this summer is to realize my decades-old ambition to learn how to scratch. I borrowed a Korg Kaoss DJ controller from a…
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Using Ableton Live to Mess with the Rhythm of “Clair de Lune”
+ Master the tools and techniques of producing pro-level electronic music and audio in Ableton Live with Soundfly’s course, Intro to Music Production in Ableton Live. This article originally appeared on Ethan Hein’s blog. This video recently made the rounds on Facebook. I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I…
