[The above video and below post both cover ascending intervals. If you’re looking for help with descending intervals, check out our “Memorize Descending Intervals with This Handy Guide.”] Being able to recognize intervals in music is one of those classic hallmarks of being a pro. If you’re a singer, it means you can walk into an audition…
As a former writing major, I know all too well the faults of bad criticism. It makes the writer feel bad, it makes the commenter look inconsiderate, and it doesn’t help the writing improve. In songwriting, something you’ve poured your heart and soul into, it’s especially uncomfortable to receive harsh criticism. The wrong things get attacked, and the…
Last week, tons of bands got into the spirit of #SongwritingWeek by posting stories of how one of their songs was written or recorded. And in honor of their hard work, we’ve decided to give out a few awards. So drumroll please… the winners are… The Great Nostalgia Award: Exiles (Brooklyn, NY) Kill the Lights by Exiles Exiles…
The Broadway musical is such a mélange of parts — often Frankensteined together — that it’s easy to take for granted the weight that each of the creative elements bear. I think ten out of ten composers would agree that songwriting is the most integral of said elements. After all, no music = no musical.…
+ 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. Writing creative lyrics is a challenging task. If you want to write for radio, you’ll probably lean towards accessible themes of love with simple, easy-to-digest lyrics. Poetry, as beautiful as it…
Need a boost of inspiration? Try any of these fool-proof chord progressions to jumpstart your writing process.
Here at Soundfly, we encourage everyone to work towards finding their own musical voice, and improvise on top of anything. But did you know, in many states you could be fined, or even arrested, for embellishing on the national anthem? To celebrate the Fourth of July, and America’s tradition of going against the rules, here…
In order to create all the videos, resources and course assets for our popular Mainstage course, Orchestration for Strings, we worked closely with the incredible young composer, Ian Davis, who writes and arranges in the band, Landlady as well as his solo project Relatives, and has composed for such notable acts as My Brightest Diamond. Specifically for the course,…
If you’ve seen Easy A, you probably remember the scene where Emma Stone receives a card that plays Natasha Bedingfield’s “Pocketful of Sunshine” and how Stone’s character hates the song — at first. Flash forward to a few days later, and she can’t stop singing it. There are songs that we can’t stand, yet can’t get out…
This is part 3 of a series on how to write a musical. Start from the beginning with a brief history of musicals and explore the role of the music in telling the story. The basic question we’re looking at today is: when writing a musical, where do you begin? First of all, it’s important to know the purpose that…
