How to Convey These 8 Emotions Using Chords and Harmony
We polled members of the Soundfly staff and mentor community to ask about their go-to chords and progressions for certain emotional outcomes. Check it out!
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Exploring the Lydian Mode with Elliott Smith’s “Waltz #1”
Like thousands of other young music fans with a penchant for the delicate beauty born through the combination of musical genius and a great deal of misery, I obsessed over Elliott Smith’s music back in college, and was affected deeply by the news of his tragic and sudden suicide in 2003. Performed on Saturday Night Live in…
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How ‘Apocalypse Now’ Etched Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ into Our Brains Forever
There would be only a handful of musical pieces that could rival Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” for its iconic status in screen music. It was present in the starting days of silent cinema when chosen by D.W. Griffith to partially score his controversial, artistic watershed, Birth of a Nation (1915), and it was lovingly parodied by…
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Can Descending Chords Ever Sound Happy?
Descending melodies and progressions often sound sad, but one of the most resoundingly happy songs ever, Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” begs to differ.
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Chartmania!! I Broke Down Every Song That Reached the Billboard Top 5 in 2017
Alright songwriters and song-guzzlers alike, strap on your boots for a knowledge voyage with more divergent rectangles than the NYC skyline: that’s right, the top pop charters have now become 2017’s top pop graphed. The Top 40 song charters that is, but why 40? Well, besides this number’s significance in pop music as a result of…
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Move Beyond Cliché Chord Patterns with ‘The Creative Power of Advanced Harmony’
New course announcement! Over the past few months, the most popular course on Soundfly has resoundingly been Ethan Hein’s Unlocking the Emotional Power of Chords. This 101-level harmonic theory course dives deep into the ways certain intervals and chord progressions tug at our heartstrings while others fall flat, providing the student with the newfound ability to…
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How I’d Redesign Piano Sheet Music
TL;DR: Here’s a new method for writing sheet music for piano that makes it easier to learn to play everyday songs. Traditional sheet music relies on symbols, scales and memorization and can be difficult to learn and read, so this new notation uses visual cues by showing “fingers and hands” on keys. It’s read from top to bottom with…
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Longing for Simpler Times? Why the ‘Good Old Days’ Ain’t So Simple This Time Around
Have you heard Macklemore and Kesha’s recent duet, “Good Old Days”? It’s got a main theme everyone can relate to: “why, oh why, did I take those days gone by for granted?” The video features some pretty universal moments as well, just driving through the woods in a van at various states of chill along…
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Allegro! Exploring the Legacy and Technique of the Great Django Reinhardt
+ 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. A fire roars with life on a cool summer night somewhere in the north of France, possibly even just over the Belgian border. Music drifts into the night…
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Where Have All the V Chords Gone? The Decline of ‘Functional’ Harmony in Pop
+ 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. So there I was, doing research on topics such as “summer 2017 songwriting trends,” when it hit me. You guys, this is getting ridiculous — where did…
