Learning to play music should be more of just that — playing! Why not make everything fun? With that in mind, here’s a new miniseries exploring how to make your synthesizer of choice do whatever you want: from burping and farting to shooting out lasers (sonically, of course)! Why? Because laser sounds are actually pretty ubiquitous in music today.…
The beautiful, complex, and strange historical relationship between sound recording and music has changed a lot over the past century. Composition, performance, and audio capture, once relatively discrete disciplines, are now more often treated as one big, amorphous, creative process. But even though recording and mixing tasks have been increasingly wrested away from specialists, these…
In celebration of the launch of the latest addition to our Chiptune Crash Course series, “Chip It: The Chiptune Cover Challenge,” we decided to turn the course’s assignment into an open competition for aspiring and active music makers from around the chipiverse. Alongside contest judges (and chip stars) Chipocrite, glomag, and minusbaby, we asked artists to submit their own,…
+ Learn the nuances of producing beats, arranging tracks, and creative sampling, drawing on the rich history and influence of hip-hop in Soundfly’s acclaimed online course, The Art of Hip-Hop Production. The Middle East is quite the hot topic of today’s dinner discussions regardless of whether they’re actually occurring at the dinner table, or on the…
As you move from your electric or upright to synth bass, you may start to wonder how to support your group or artist while still expressing the arc of the piece. In many situations, we bass players rely on dynamics, feel, and attack to inform our navigation through a piece of music. When I’m building a…
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…
Chiptune and cover songs. It seems like a perfect match, right? Who wouldn’t want to hear their favorite artists and hits filtered through their favorite video game console, creating the ultimate nostalgic remix?! Heck, many actual classic games even tried to include lo-fi, “chippified” covers of “real” songs in their gameplay soundtracks with varying degrees of…
If you have a synth, odds are it has a CV, or “control voltage” input. In more modern synthesizers, like those from Dave Smith Instruments, digging into menus will allow you to assign control voltage inputs to just about anything: pitch, filter, LFO, etc.; in older models, there might just be one CV input that’s hard-wired…
Calling all chiptune geniuses, artists, lovers, and admirers! We are running a one-month contest starting today to win a free modded Game Boy and flash carts (courtesy of Kitsch-Bent!), feedback on your work from chip artist Chipocrite, and promo on Flypaper for your project! Entries will be judged by three of the most beloved chiptune artists on…
Whether you’re working out of a home studio or a small project studio, your Digital Audio Workstation (or, DAW) is probably the single most important part of your setup. It’s the bridge of your musical Starship Enterprise, containing and co-ordinating all the software and hardware you use to create and communicate each of your decisions. It’s…
