Author: Max Alper

  • 5 Professional (and Pragmatic) Practices to Make the Most of Your Performances

    5 Professional (and Pragmatic) Practices to Make the Most of Your Performances

    Whether we are firing up the van for a coast-to-coast tour or showing up for our first open mic, we as performing musicians must hold ourselves to professional standards. Of course, we will still maintain our DIY-punk aesthetic onstage, and in our day to day lives. But when it comes to our bands, we take things…

    Read more

  • Sampling as Instrumentation: How Recorded Noise Found Its Way Into Music

    Sampling as Instrumentation: How Recorded Noise Found Its Way Into Music

    + 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…

    Read more

  • 5 Innovative Things You Can Only Do with Vinyl

    5 Innovative Things You Can Only Do with Vinyl

    At the same time as computer technology has exploded, we’ve watched the precipitous decline in music as a physical medium. It’s an obvious and understandable trend from both the consumer and manufacturer perspective. Listeners consume music almost exclusively as streamable files on our computers, tablets, and portable devices, so why should we be spending our money on obsolete…

    Read more

  • Pauline Oliveros Made Me a Better Listener

    We know more about hearing than listening. Sound is sound, and all sound can be music. There is virtue and scholarship in all sounds, all music, but we aren’t listening to it. We might be hearing it, but we aren’t listening. We as musicians and music lovers find ourselves forming cliques. We congregate in venues,…

    Read more