8 Ways to Perform with a Backing Track (and Still Engage Your Audience)
If your onstage MO includes a backing track or other electronic support, follow these steps to still give a live performance your fans will love.
In this edition of “Talking Points,” composers and electronic artists Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto discuss the nature of collaboration and improvisation.
It was late 2009 when I got my first taste of Agadez. Searching a relatively primitive YouTube for new music to explore for an ethnomusicology class, I came across a four-minute clip that would change my perspective on the electric guitar for years to come. Recorded in 2004 by Sublime Frequencies founder Hisham Mayet, the…
Before the synthesizer, electronic experimenters were already at work with another instrument — the tape recorder. Before the ability to record, musical excellence, virtuosity, and authenticity were associated with playing a live instrument. In fact, recording was often perceived as a “dishonest” activity by some artists at its introduction. Until it fell into the hands of those willing…
Inspired by Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, here are three ways to use atonal composition techniques in your pop music-making!
My journey to discover more women composers led me to create a database of scores written by women from the last 150 years. Here’s how.
Themes and Variations has featured a ton of great guests en route to our 20th episode — here’s every single guest ever featured! Listen up!
By RE Katz Perhaps it’s fitting that the untimely death of composer Jóhann Gunnar Jóhannsson is shrouded in silence and rumor. We do not know why he died so young, we just have the one repeating syllable in our heads. We have this one soaring melodic line, these shimmering strings. Just over a year ago,…
How does composer Nico Muhly stay organized while juggling travel, commission deadlines, meetings, collaborations, and his own creativity?
We look at Ligeti’s famous composition in order to decide how much, or how little, the use of music’s foundational parameters really matter in composing.
Welcome back to the dance floor, Quick Trackers! Once a month, we hook you up with a short production or songwriting challenge, aimed at helping to up your musicianship. To respond to the challenge, just email us, leave a comment, or post to social media with the hashtag #quicktracks and tag us @learntosoundfly. It’s so easy, as a…
+ 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 you wander up an unremarkable remote backroad outside a certain quiet village in Germany, you might stumble across the home of one of the world’s most…
In Bach’s pre-Enlightenment time, understanding how and why he composed his music might lead contemporary composers to new and exciting areas. Learn more.
+ 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…
In July, I found myself reading some everyday music industry news on Billboard, or Rolling Stone, or The Guardian… it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember which website it was because everyone was calling Primephonic the “Spotify of classical music.” And I have to be honest, that kind of marketing nomenclature (“the Airbnb of toilet paper,” “the Uber of…
Who will win Best Original Score at the Oscars this year? With a powerhouse list of nominees, the choice isn’t going to be easy…
Yes, you may be a technically proficient artist. You may even have a following. But if you’re not entertaining your audience, your live show will suffer.
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. Inventive, exciting music plus an educational angle? Now that’s a Soundfly super combo! Here’s a topic we’ve wanted to…
A little over a week ago, the Kennedy Center uploaded a video of a concert in which singer-songwriter and composer Ben Folds creates an orchestral piece of music in under 10 minutes and performs it with the full participation of the National Symphony Orchestra. The video, which has since been shared over 100,000 times, is a…
Taken from our “Themes and Variation” companion course on Soundfly, this lesson uses Saint-Saëns’ to explore how stories get told musically.
If you’re like us, you’re probably sitting around your kitchen right now thinking about what kind of snare sounds you can get out of that whisk over there.
We’ve written on cats in classical music before, so this should come as no surprise to the casual Flypaper reader, but, yes, we are that excited. “Cat mania” has certainly reached new heights in the Internet Age, with “Grumpy Cat” earning over twenty million views on YouTube and searches for “cat merchandise” yielding over ten thousand results…
+ Learn to create and arrange original, instrumental hip-hop music from sampling pioneer RJD2 himself in his new course on Soundfly, RJD2: From Samples to Songs. Despite its deep roots in musical tradition, covering and sampling other artists’ work is a sticky topic. Some songwriters have no issue with drawing inspiration from existing songs and sounds, while others…