+ Improve your songwriting with Soundfly! Explore our range of courses on emotional chord progressions, basic songwriting technique, songwriting for producers, and many more. Subscribe for unlimited access here. By Hannah Sumner I had finally reached a point in my career where I was recording at least five sessions a week, teaching regularly, and performing several times a week. For…
“I got my first real six-string. Bought it at the five and dime. Played it ’til my fingers bled. Was the summer of ’69.” – Bryan Adams Whether you’re thinking about hunkering down and buying your first guitar or looking to upgrade from the $199 Strat pack that your grandma gave you for Christmas to…
Welcome back to my four-part series of articles on How Successful Musicians Practice. If you’re just joining us now, this is the third installment, so if songwriting and composition aren’t ultimately your areas of interest, feel free to peruse the practice regimes of either these seriously successful percussionists or these 4, 5 and 6-string samurai! To briefly…
Pedals! Despite the wide range of effects they produce, individually, they’re typically pretty straightforward devices. But as soon as you begin to assemble a chain of pedals, complicating factors seem to mount up exponentially. The inconvenient reality is that the more complex the system of pedals, the more helpful it becomes to have some basic…
Becoming comfortable with playing electronic percussion is a vital skill for the modern drummer, especially when playing contemporary, digital-heavy genres such as trap, neo-soul, and pop-rock. Contemporary music production has a tendency to involve a combination of very specific drum sounds and completely electronic sounds that cannot be easily emulated by acoustic drums, and as a…
Welcome to the second installment of How Successful Musicians Practice. If you’re just joining us now, take a minute to peruse the practice regimes of some seriously successful percussionists here. To recap, I see there being four kinds of practice goals a musician works towards over the course of their career: practicing to learn an instrument and gain…
That 12-string guitar is a difficult thing to tune! All those high-tension thin strings can be really difficult to deal with, especially the high G string, so this instrument doesn’t necessarily readily encourage alternate tunings. It is a lot of work, but if you take the time to explore the options for alternate tunings on a 12-string, it can…
Happy holidays, dear Flypaper readers and Soundfly students! If you’re anything like me, that is, a chronically dissatisfied gear nerd, this is the time of year when many manufacturers and distributers offer great deals on their products, upon which we must pounce like the bargain-savvy consumers that we are. Heck, it’s our right as Americans! This year,…
+ 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. You’ve done it. You’ve crafted a song from start to finish. Perhaps a couple songs. You’ve poured your heart and soul into your music and spent hours…
Along the road to becoming a successful musician, one encounters quite a few “P” words: patience, perseverance, posture, pain, etc. However, the most important of these words is undeniably and frustratingly, “practice.” I’ve personally had a love/hate relationship with practice since 2002. I can remember quite clearly my mother insisting that I practice my drums on a…
