Shake up your songwriting and improvising with articles to help you integrate new patterns into your playing, and provide tips and tools to help you recognize and remember chords more quickly.
+ 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. The Major Scale (also known as the Ionian Mode) is really common and often used as the scale all others are defined against. It’s the “Do, Re,…
By Mike Casey Raise your hand if you’ve heard this cliché before: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Well, as cheesy as that sounds, I happen to believe it’s right on the money. After all, advanced musical devices, concepts, and patterns are usually just a slew of basic fundamentals stacked on top of one another, inverted,…
Although a lot of songwriters have at least a basic sense of either the guitar or piano, there are still quite a few who rely solely on their voices when writing melodies and lyrics. While that’s a perfectly fine place to start, songwriters could gain a lot by expanding their instrumental horizons, especially when they…
The next time you’re writing a heartbreaking, gut-wrenching tune, try using this handful of chords to drive your sadness home.
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.
That 12-string guitar is a difficult thing to tune! All those high-tension thin strings can be really difficult to deal with, especially the high G string, so this instrument doesn’t necessarily readily encourage alternate tunings. It is a lot of work, but if you take the time to explore the options for alternate tunings on a 12-string, it can…
By Kathy Dickson If you have been a guitarist for any length of time, you’ve no doubt heard about scales and how you need to know them. But let’s face it, the sheer number of scales to learn can be overwhelming. They smack of theory and are boring to play, right? In truth, scales are…
If there’s one thing I’ve heard guitar students say over and over again, it’s that they love guitar and can’t wait to practice every single day of the week until they lose feeling in their fingers. But if there’s a second thing I’ve heard from guitar players, it’s that they feel trapped inside the patterns and…
Today we’re going to take a look at the guitar lead in on “Send My Love (To Your New Lover),” the third single off of Adele’s spectacular 2015 album, 25 (we also broke down her first single “Hello” on piano here). This is a great song and a fantastic riff, and it is a total blast…
While playing chords on a bass is nothing new, the practice has long been considered a little taboo. But now that players like Thundercat are making chordal playing more prominent, it may be time for you to get your chord chops in shape. In this article I’m going to outline some of my favorite voicings on the four-string…
