Meet Our New Mentors: Osbourne, Gould, Ono, Rachmaninoff, Sporty Spice, and More

With the addition of Soundfly’s new Headliners Club program to our list of mentored offerings, we’ve had to do a lot of recent hiring! One-on-one professional mentorship is our bread and butter, so we need to stand behind our Mentors and feel confident that each and every one is the right person for the job and can help students achieve their goals and aspirations, whatever they might be.

With that said, we’re extremely delighted to announce our newest round of hires in the Soundfly Mentor corps — who represent the next generation of up-and-coming performers, songwriters, and composers, and all of whom we have the utmost trust in that they’ll be able to deliver an incredible Mainstage or Headliners experience. Here they are!

Ozzy Osbourne – Advanced Jazz Harmony

Known primarily in orchestral circles as a concert flautist, and in elevator circles for his work as a smooth jazz vocalist with an impeccable falsetto, Ozzy dazzled us with his application to become Soundfly’s newest harmonic theory mentor for our courses, Unlocking the Emotional Power of Chords and The Creative Power of Advanced Harmony. We all agree that his rising band of emerging talents, Black Sabbath, has the potential to become something great in the jazz world, and we’re all rooting for him.

Glenn Gould – Live Performance Prep and Mixing Production

Glenn is a singular, virtuosic pianist and musical mind. Spend a four-week Headliners session with him, and you’ll go to some seriously distant places with your music! Okay, so he retired from public performance at the age of 31 due in part to some bizarre interpretational performance choices, so maybe he’s not “the best” at teaching you how find your stage confidence… and, okay, maybe he did spend a bit too much time in the studio tape-splicing takes together. But he sure knows a thing or two about using the studio itself as an instrument in the mixing process!

Yoko Ono – Band Management

Yoko actually took our free course, Building a Better Band, and told us she had some trouble keeping her boyfriend’s band together. Hey girl, we know them troubles! Yoko has done a lot of work as a solo artist, and since taking this course, she’s managed to keep, um, zero bands together… ever. But she’s a ton of fun — give her a chance!

Sergei Rachmaninoff – Confidence Building

Having built up a decent résumé composing some of the world’s most difficult-to-perform pieces during the Russian Revolution, and becoming the conductor of the Bolshoi Theater, we’re very pleased to welcome Sergei to the Soundfly team. He’s a little shy, and well, we’ll admit that he has a bit of a temper, but his incredibly strict discipline and high expectations of every student performer to read and interpret music with the utmost precision will do wonders for your confidence! After working with Sergei in Orchestration for Strings or Introduction to the Composer’s Craft, you may never want to touch an instrument again… But if you’re one of the few who do, you’ll enjoy ownership of a supremely inflated ego for years to come!

Charlemagne Palestine – Polyphonic Composition

Charlemagne is a pianist and accordionist by trade. His brain is a vast wonderland of creativity. When he makes music, he’s imagining entire orchestras playing and the noises of the world coming together like an ear-bursting symphony of sound and color! It’s just that, well, he doesn’t like to actually hear or play any of that. Charlemagne likes to play only a few notes, for a very, very, very long time. He’s currently mentoring our Orchestration for Strings course, and you can hang with him in Headliners, too, if you want a bit more access to his unfettered creativity.

Nelly – Totally Appropriate Tour Booking

Nelly is a rapper who loves the road. In fact, he took our free course, Touring on a Shoestring, to learn more about how to book DIY spaces and plot more sensible tour routes. And in 2015, he brought his act all the way to Erbil in northern Iraq! Okay, there may have been some issues with having to live-censor his own lyrics there (see below for a slightly awkward version of “Hot in Herre”), but most of the time, he gets it quite right! Help him help you book appropriate tours for your music!

Sporty Spice – Advanced Banjo

Little known fact: Mel was raised in a coal mine in a family of 17 brothers and sisters, 25 feet underground, eating squirrel meat and potatoes every night while her pappy played the banjo and sang. She took to the instrument quick and got “discovered” when Ginger Spice fell down a well and had to follow the mysterious music she heard in order to get herself out.

If any of these wonderful, shining stars feel like a match for you, let us know.

Happy April Fools’ Day!

Real talk: You can preview any of our Mainstage courses for free, and get personalized 1-on-1 mentorship and feedback from a professional in the field, a semester’s worth of video content and resources, practice prompts and inspiration, and a platform to showcase your work to thousands upon completion, when you sign up. Or, if that feels too daunting and time-consuming, get all of the feedback and support on your project from a Soundfly Mentor without the course work, for much cheaper with Headliners Club

Use code SPRINGREVERB today for 30% off any course (that’s 150 bucks!).

Elijah Fox at the piano

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