American composer John Cage was arguably the most prolific composer of prepared-piano music and is often credited as having invented the prepared piano, so to speak. While there were earlier instances of composers placing objects on the piano strings, or bypassing the keyboard in order to directly manipulate the strings in performance (most notably Henry…
+ 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. Ben Ratliff’s Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty is my favorite book I’ve read in the past year. In each chapter, Ratliff details a…
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…
+ 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. Have you ever wondered if there was some kind of magical formula to all those memorable Disney movie songs you grew up with? I always did, because they…
When I first started playing drums, I had to learn how to play songs just to be able to play with my friends or at my church. Back then, my method for learning a tune was playing along from the start, stopping whenever I messed up, then restarting the tape recorder to try to get a…
Okay, so there’s no such thing as a “happy” blue note, I made that up. But if you’re curious as to why I did that, read on. To start, if you don’t know what a blue note is — or what the difference is between a “blue note” and a “blues scale note” — you should…
+ 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. If a music lover happens to be a fan of both technically complex music, and popular genres like rap, electro, hip-hop, and dance EDM, then the Gorillaz’ 2001…
By RE Katz When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last week “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” the literary world promptly ripped itself in half trying to respond to the announcement. Some folks stood right up and applauded Dylan, and have since commended the Nobel committee…
Last Wednesday, October 19, presidential candidates Donald J. Trump and Hillary R. Clinton faced off in the third and final debate leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. With absolutely no reasons remaining for viewers to continue to tune in to further coverage of this news media maelstrom, Stephen Colbert and his team at The Late…
