Tag: beat making

  • How to Use Samples in Your Tracks Without Ruining Your Mix

    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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  • Using Ableton Live to Mess with the Rhythm of “Clair de Lune”

    Using Ableton Live to Mess with the Rhythm of “Clair de Lune”

    + Master the tools and techniques of producing pro-level electronic music and audio in Ableton Live with Soundfly’s course, Intro to Music Production in Ableton Live. This article originally appeared on Ethan Hein’s blog. This video recently made the rounds on Facebook. I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I…

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  • How I Made a Trap Song About the Food Chain for 2 Chainz

    How I Made a Trap Song About the Food Chain for 2 Chainz

    It had been two hours of staring at a screen, writer’s block was setting in. And then it hit us… A trap song about marine biology. The rest is history.

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  • How Rap Ushered the Piano Into Its Next Developmental Phase

    How Rap Ushered the Piano Into Its Next Developmental Phase

    Hip-hop is officially pop music. With Bruno Mars and Kendrick Lamar’s sweep of the Grammy Awards earlier this year, it’s evident that hip-hop has officially shed its status as “that controversial music genre” that prompted the Grammys’ organizers to refuse to air any rap categories back in 1989, which subsequently prompted some to boycott the event.…

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  • How to Turn Nasty Noise into a Creative Mixing Tool

    How to Turn Nasty Noise into a Creative Mixing Tool

    + Learning to record and mix at home? Check out Soundfly’s acclaimed online courses on mixing, production, and beat making — Subscribe for unlimited access. You spend tons of time trying to reduce noise in your mixes. It makes sense. The cleanest signal possible ensures each element in your mix cuts through for maximum impact. But tirelessly trying…

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  • 7 MIDI Controllers That Show We’re Evolving Beyond the Standard Keyboard

    7 MIDI Controllers That Show We’re Evolving Beyond the Standard Keyboard

    Electronic music technology continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible with sound and music, and it all starts with the MIDI controller.

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  • The Most Influential Drum Machine Beat of All Time?

    The Most Influential Drum Machine Beat of All Time?

    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 debate,…

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  • Sax in the Box – How I Coaxed a Galaxy of Sound out of Splice’s New Sample Pack

    Sax in the Box – How I Coaxed a Galaxy of Sound out of Splice’s New Sample Pack

    Here at Soundfly, we love it when our favorite artists go out and create tools that are universally useful to producers of all kinds. That’s why I was ecstatic to find out that one of our own, Flypaper author and jazz composer, Mike Casey, was producing a one-of-a-kind saxophone sample pack with our friends at Splice, called “Sounds…

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  • How to Choose the Perfect Compressor Settings Every Time

    How to Choose the Perfect Compressor Settings Every Time

    Compression is one of your most powerful mixing tools. It’s the essential element behind every good mix. But to make your compressors work, you need to understand compression first. It’s intimidating to start learning such a huge subject, especially when the controls and their effect on your signal are difficult to understand depending on your…

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  • How to Get More From Your Samples Using Transposition

    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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Jlin: Rhythm, Variation, & Vulnerability