The Weird and Creepy World of String Harmonics
Experimenting with string harmonics can lend an eerie, etherial sound to your compositions. Here’s how to get started.
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The Best Vehicles to Tour in for Bands on a Budget
Money, such as it is, is hard to come by in the music business of the 21st century — so most bands have to jam econo just to break even (if that). Fortunately, there are lots of cost-efficient options for the modern touring band — especially those who are only able to make regional jaunts. So I thought…
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The COMPASS: Winnipeg, Manitoba
By Slow Leaves What is often overlooked about Winnipeg, is that it’s subtle brand of near perfect mediocrity is precisely what provides such fertile grounds for honest artistic expression. The city is not grand enough to incubate the large scale arts trends found in bigger cities. But it’s the perfect size to grow genuine art…
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How Wu-Tang, Björk and Jay Z Turn Albums into Fine Art
There is only one single copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s newest album, The Wu – Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, that has seen the light of day. The Wu-Tang Clan will auction this handcrafted album off after an international museum listening tour, and bids are already coming in exceeding $5 million. This single copy is encased in a…
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Off Notes: Inventing New Instruments
Happy Friday! We never go into writing Off Notes with a theme, but week after week, there seem to be common threads in everything we come across. This week: creating instruments. We’ve found not one, but two newly-invented instruments, a stunning video of building a guitar by hand, and a short piece of web code that will turn your…
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Three Jazz Artists Harmoniously and Creatively Blending Arabic and Western Music
By Lee Dynes The sound palette of Arabic, Persian, and various Middle Eastern regional cultures are generally not typically heard in the West outside of TV shows like Homeland and some films. Those droning tones, the anguished cries reminiscent of classical singers like Oum Kalthoum of Egypt or Yusuf Omar of Iraq, can evoke uneasy feelings…
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What Music Journalists Want Musicians to Know
If you’ve been doing this music thing for more than a minute, you’ve probably met a few music journalists along the way or have a shortlist of writers with whom you’d love to work. You also probably have a general idea about what they do and what they expect. But there are a few things…
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What the “Tristan Chord” Is and How to Use It
An in-depth exploration of one of the most storied chords in opera, what makes it so influential, and how to use it yourself in your compositions.
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How to Get More From Your Samples Using Transposition
+ 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. Here’s a step-by-step guide to pitch-shifting, finding the key, and warping. When you’re working with samples, the pitch is key! You found that perfect sample, but there’s one problem… It doesn’t fit with…
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In Defense of the 128 Kbps MP3: The Greatest Music Media Format Ever
A short essay on why we should’ve never eaten the apple of industry-approved digital music streaming, and why the low-bitrate MP3 is all we really need.
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6 Amazing Organizations Promoting Music Education in Africa
In need of something to make you feel good about the world? Here are 6 inspiring music ed. organizations making change in African communities right now!
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3 Tips for Getting Out of a Lyric Rhyming Rut
Stuck in “rhymer’s block?” We enlisted a professional songwriting coach to show us three creative schemes for helping to write song lyrics that rhyme.
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How Jonny Greenwood Uses Materiality, Clusters, and Aleatoricism in His Film Music
We break down a handful of composer Jonny Greenwood’s go-to techniques in examples from his scores to Phantom Thread and There Will Be Blood.
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How to Use Samples in Your Tracks Without Ruining Your Mix
+ 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. Samples are good for everything. They’re one of the most flexible and useful tools for any stage of music production. But mixing with samples is confusing… how do you get them out of…
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Bach Wrote a Mini Comic “Opera” About His Love for Coffee in 1735
Bach’s Ode to Java Rocket fuel. Joe. Jitter Juice. These are just some of the nicknames we’ve given to one of the world’s most favorite drinks: coffee. It’s no surprise that artists over the years have been compelled to pay homage to the great brown muse; Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and even blues legend Mississippi John…
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6 Fresh Tips for Selling Out “Old” Merch
+ 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’ve ever been on the road or toured for an extensive period of time, you know that #merchlife is real. Merch isn’t just an…
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8 Music Crowdfunding Campaigns We’ve Got Our Eyes on and Why
It’s all about the story. Fundraising experts will say this time and time again: “People fund people, not ideas.” In other words, when asking for money, what tends to get through to your audience the most is having a compelling and personal story, and a drive to succeed, not necessarily a great business idea. When it…
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Student Spotlight, Volume 4: Listen to New Works by Student Artists
Each month, we start a new Mainstage session, welcoming in a fresh batch of uniquely talented student-artists, ready to step up their game and take their music farther than ever before. Our team of Soundfly Mentors works with these creative artists, striving to help them reach their learning goals and build confidence in several areas…
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How to Make an Instrumental Track Shine with Vocal Samples
+ Bridge the worlds of theory, improvisation, and jazzy hip-hop, and improve your piano chops with Grammy-winner Kiefer in his course, Kiefer: Keys, Chords, & Beats. Tons of producers making instrumental electronic music today scour YouTube and other online forums to find “vocal samples” to add to their tracks. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve googled…
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Opening Band Etiquette
I’m currently reading Meet Me in the Bathroom, an excellent oral history of the rock and roll resurgence in NYC at the turn of the century, written by Lizzy Goodman. Aside from the havoc that existed then, as the swan song of the “glory days of the music industry” was playing out and my own nostalgia…
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6 YouTube Metrics Every Artist Needs to Monitor
Your YouTube channel serves many purposes. It gives you a platform to display dynamic content, from music videos to interview clips. It lets everyone from fans to industry moguls see you in motion, experiencing your personality and style. And, importantly, it should help inform the kinds of content you make in the future. But how…
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Soundfly’s 2017 Year-End Music Favorites: Albums, Songs, Articles, and More!
It’s getting a little ridiculous now. Too much great, new music is coming out every single week, and it’s tough to keep up. And since we here at Soundfly HQ can be found, most weeks, grooving out to the new, freshly composed, produced, and mixed sounds of our talented students alongside all the commercially released…
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7 Uncommon Ways to Make Your Tracks Better with Randomization
+ Learning to record and mix at home? Check out Soundfly’s acclaimed online courses on mixing, production, and beat making — Subscribe for unlimited access. Sometimes, the best sounds are the ones you can’t predict. Predictability is a plague in music. It’s not uncommon to listen to 50 songs these days, and each one just blends…
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Thelonious Monk and Harnessing Dissonance
Today, Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) would have been 100 years old. Happy birthday, brother! To celebrate a century of Monk, here’s a video from our free course exploring the roots and musical extensions of the American musical language of the blues called A Conversation with the Blues. In it, instructor Vince Di Mura explains how Monk is able to coax a…
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In Case of Nuclear Apocalypse, Here Are the Top 5 Bands in North Korea Right Now
The news has been dominated this month by the announcement that North Korea has developed the capacity to reach U.S. soil with a nuclear missile — a development to which our own supreme leader has responded with the grace and tact of a tantrumming two-year old. Given the dumpster fire that is the current state of our…
