How to Add Bittersweet Emotion to Your Chords with 7ths
You might understand the construction of a chord or triad, but here’s how to make your music express the heartbreaking lilt of a seventh chord.
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Intro to Electronic Drumming: Connecting Your Percussion Pad to a DAW
One of the best ways to explore complete drumming versatility when using a percussion pad is to combine it with your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), such as Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic Pro, or Reason. In this article, I’m going to break down the steps to connect your percussion pad to Ableton Live. One thing to note:…
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How to Make ‘Pew! Pew!’ Laser Sounds with a Synth
Learning to play music should be more of just that — playing! Why not make everything fun? With that in mind, here’s a new miniseries exploring how to make your synthesizer of choice do whatever you want: from burping and farting to shooting out lasers (sonically, of course)! Why? Because laser sounds are actually pretty ubiquitous in music today.…
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Squeeze to Please: The Basics of Compression in Audio
The beautiful, complex, and strange historical relationship between sound recording and music has changed a lot over the past century. Composition, performance, and audio capture, once relatively discrete disciplines, are now more often treated as one big, amorphous, creative process. But even though recording and mixing tasks have been increasingly wrested away from specialists, these…
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How to Choose a DAW: 7 of the Best DAWs for Every Musical Need
Whether you’re working out of a home studio or a small project studio, your Digital Audio Workstation (or, DAW) is probably the single most important part of your setup. It’s the bridge of your musical Starship Enterprise, containing and co-ordinating all the software and hardware you use to create and communicate each of your decisions. It’s…
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What Is Granular Synthesis?
+ Learning about synthesis? Soundfly’s got a definitive new online course called Advanced Synths and Patch Design For Producers! Preview for free and subscribe for access. When it comes to sampling and Ableton, there are an overwhelming number of methods for turning almost any recorded sound into a functional musical tabula rasa. From simply dragging and dropping a…
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Keep ‘Em Guessing: A Bizarre Holiday Gift List for the Special Musician in Your Life
If you’re still wondering what to wrap up inside a box this holiday season, maybe your list could use a bit of outside the box thinking. We can help with that! Here’s a list of our favorite bizarre musical gifts for the loved ones in your life who deserve something a bit special this year! (If you…
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The Essential Starter Kit for Performing Live with Clicks and Backing Tracks
+ Learning to record and mix at home? Check out Soundfly’s acclaimed online courses on mixing, production, beat making and more — Subscribe for access. If you’re looking to set up your own laptop rig for live performance using click tracks and backing tracks, you’re going to need quite a bit of gear. Seeing as most of us…
