Write It Tight: Tips for Writing More Successful Notation
Your charts say a lot about you and your music. Make sure your players understand your vision with clear notation that helps everyone sound their best.
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10 Easy Ways to Overcome Writer’s Block
By Uche Ibe What if I told you that combating writer’s block is easy? That all you need to do is to follow the right steps and advice, and you’ll be able to come up with awesome lyrics in no time, even if you’re stuck at the beginning? Solutions never need to cost an arm and…
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What Is “Prepared Piano” and How Do You Notate It?
American composer John Cage was arguably the most prolific composer of prepared-piano music and is often credited as having invented the prepared piano, so to speak. While there were earlier instances of composers placing objects on the piano strings, or bypassing the keyboard in order to directly manipulate the strings in performance (most notably Henry…
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20 Creative Songwriting and Composing Prompts Courtesy of ‘Every Song Ever’
+ Improve your songwriting with Soundfly! Explore our range of courses on emotional chord progressions, basic songwriting technique, songwriting for producers, and many more. Subscribe for unlimited access here. Ben Ratliff’s Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty is my favorite book I’ve read in the past year. In each chapter, Ratliff details a…
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How Does Cory Arcangel’s Cat Video Mashup of Schoenberg’s Atonal Opus 11 Stack up Against the Original?
The New York and Stavanger, Norway-based contemporary artist Cory Arcangel is widely known and respected for his use of hacked technology such as video games and software to produce thought-provoking, beautiful artwork across a range of media. His largely absurdist oeuvre explores technology from a number of theoretical angles and offers commentary on cultures that…
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The Statistical Analysis of the 70 Most Popular Disney Songs You’ve Always Wanted
+ 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. Have you ever wondered if there was some kind of magical formula to all those memorable Disney movie songs you grew up with? I always did, because they…
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How Successful Musicians Practice: Songwriters & Composers
Welcome back to my four-part series of articles on How Successful Musicians Practice. If you’re just joining us now, this is the third installment, so if songwriting and composition aren’t ultimately your areas of interest, feel free to peruse the practice regimes of either these seriously successful percussionists or these 4, 5 and 6-string samurai! To briefly…
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Meet Your Course Advisors for January 18
On Wednesday, January 18, we’re running the next session of our Mainstage courses. Mainstage courses are premium courses on Soundfly that offer you the chance to work with a personal advisor for the duration of the course. These “Course Advisors” as we call them are there to serve as facilitators, mentors, accountability partners, and teaching…
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A Drummer’s Guide to Learning New Music
When I first started playing drums, I had to learn how to play songs just to be able to play with my friends or at my church. Back then, my method for learning a tune was playing along from the start, stopping whenever I messed up, then restarting the tape recorder to try to get a…
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Extracting Latent Sound: Composer Lawrence English on Scoring David Lynch’s Photography
In 2015, Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art presented David Lynch: Between Two Worlds, a major retrospective of filmmaker David Lynch’s works across painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. To celebrate the landmark retrospective, curator José Da Silva, along with Lynch and his studio, developed a number of commissions for the exhibition. One of these commissions was HEXA’s…
