To the readers who complained that my recently published “5 Worst Ways to Describe Your Band If You’re Trying to Get Press” piece lacked suggestions for successfully relating your sound to music writers: here’s your answer! While these tips are meant to help guide you in successfully illustrating your style, I’d like to point out…
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,…
New York Dolls – New York Dolls Release Date: July 27, 1973 “The New York Dolls are the new Rolling Stones.” –The Village Voice, 1972 On November 6, 1972, after the New York Dolls played a sold-out show with Faces at Wembley Stadium, drummer and songwriter Billy Murcia “succumbed to what is usually referred to as…
As a songwriter, you’re responsible for transmitting the world as you see and understand it to your listeners. Songs have this incredible power to distill moments in time, experienced or imagined by a single person, and communicate them to a global audience. So when technologies that have permeated popular culture move forward and change, those…
Each and every DAW provides something unique and valuable to different types of producers, but from where I’m sitting Logic Pro still remains on top.
+ 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. The dark is afraid of Billie Eilish. The 16-year-old electro-pop phenom recently dropped her newest track, “You Should See Me in a Crown,” and it is some…
What may be institutionally indefinable, the obscure genre term “indie pop” is considered an umbrella for most of the accessible-yet-alternative pop music being made today by predominantly young, western songwriters. Indie pop is hard to define because it covers an enormous range of sounds, from electronic synth-driven voyages to jangly and reverby guitar-based music, to warm harmonies…
https://youtu.be/71ATSIJ40Gc In the above video, a companion to our Mentored course, Beat Making in Ableton Live, electronic artist and educator Dan Freeman shares his somewhat polemical argument that a preset drum beat on the Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2 is the “most influential drum machine beat of all time.” Now, a statement like this is highly subjective and open to…
Welcome back to our interview series, Incorrect Music, curated by guitarist, singer, and composer Lora-Faye Åshuvud (of the band Arthur Moon). In this series, we present intimate conversations with artists who are striving to push the boundaries of their process and craft. Bristol’s Aisha Chaouche (known professionally as Chaouche) has this dynamic-yet-slow vibrato that works in unusual contrast against her…
Two weeks ago, Soundfly CEO and founder, Ian Temple, and I went live on Facebook with two of our favorite audio engineers working today — music mixer and producer for the hitmakers, Jake Aron, and acclaimed post-mixer and sound designer, Kate Bilinski — to talk about Ear Training for Audio Engineers. (Watch the full Office Hours session here.)…
+ 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. By Soundfly Mentor Andre Madatian If you ask almost any Broadway Street musician in downtown Nashville, they will tell you that the Nashville number system has gotten them through…
+ 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. Arvo Pärt is a rarity in the modern music world. His work is conceptual, yet also imbued with deep sentiment and religiosity. This balance between heart and…
https://youtu.be/jHP-16QyYDw In the above video, featured in our free online course, Digital Pedalboards with Kaki King, our instructor, guitarist and composer Kaki King, shares her reasons for making the switch to a digital pedalboard, after years of touring around with a full rig of hardware. Here, she’s using Apple’s MainStage 3 software with a MIDI trigger…
Welcome back to our interview series, Incorrect Music, curated by guitarist, singer, and composer Lora-Faye Åshuvud (of the band Arthur Moon). In this series, we present intimate conversations with artists who are striving to push the boundaries of their process and craft. Join our weekly email newsletter to get more insights like this into how professional artists are making music,…
+ 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. Colin Woodard’s book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rivan Regional Cultures of North America, identifies a number of distinct cultures that have historically spread across and divided…
Join us as we recap a year of incredible online learning with our run-down of the best Soundfly student works of 2018! Want in? Mainstage starts next week.
Take a tour of 5 important copyright infringement cases in music history to learn about the decisions that helped shape how we look at songwriting today.
Music education has been known to increase test performance results for students in other areas, but these 8 schools take it much, much further than that!
Learn about some of our favorite grants and fellowships, awarding money, time and space to create new works of music, and get the funding boost you need!
Hidden in plain sight in a second act interlude of Berg’s monumental Lulu, sits a full orchestra musical palindrome unlike anything in music history.
Flypaper ran over 320 articles this year. Let the Soundfly staff navigate you through the best of the best in this list of our Top 5 articles from 2018.
Let’s look at how music can make a song sound sad even when there are no lyrics — and why we like that so much.
+ Pursue your dreams faster with a Soundfly Mentor! Share your musical goals with us and we’ll pair you up with a professional musician, engineer, educator, or music industry veteran who will help you achieve them in a customized four-week session. This article originally appeared on Ethan Hein’s blog. I’m in the process of doing some large-scale writing about the…
Interested in learning about pro-audio mixing techniques? Preview Soundfly’s online mixing courses, Faders Up I: Modern Mix Techniques and Faders Up II: Advanced Mix Techniques today. Each 6-week course combines tips and perspectives from today’s top sound engineers with 1-on-1 professional mentorship from a Soundfly Mentor. Sign up for either Faders Up course now and take 30% off with promo code: FRIENDOFTHEFLY. We’re…
The term “virtual reality” always reminds me of some cheesy ’80s or ’90s movie that involved chunky headsets and dreamed of a future with flying cars and household robots doing everyday chores. The actual reality is that we have self-driving cars (thanks, Tesla), household robots to whom we can ask questions, (“Alexa, stream Total Recall”), and…
