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…
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…
+ 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…
If you’re tired of spending your hard-earned cash on hiring other people to record your demos, the logical next step is to set up your own recording studio at home. If that sounds daunting, it really shouldn’t. You can do so much with so little these days, and as time goes on, you can expand your gear…
As DAW and recording technology gets ever better, musicians can collaborate in ways they’ve never imagined… which leads to a whole new host of problems.
Here’s something I know you’re going to dig! Throughout our free Demystifying Synths series of courses, we explore how to recreate the iconic keyboard sounds from tons of our favorite songs. You may have read our recent in-depth article on how to create that unmistakeable keyboard sound from Radiohead’s song “Everything in Its Right Place” off of Kid A, through…
+ Learning to record and mix at home? Check out Soundfly’s acclaimed online courses on mixing, production, beat making and more — Subscribe for unlimited access. Eighty years ago, people could only dream of computers making music. The first machines to do this were as large as a bus and sounded like a dying duck choking on garbage. By contrast, modern…
Cranky neighbors. A dearth of suitable space to stack amps. A shortage of cash. There are any number of obvious and legitimate reasons for learning to record your electric guitar tracks direct in. When you get this skill down pat, you’ll find the approach delivers a great deal of speed and flexibility without compromising too much on…
+ 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…
Today we’re going to learn how to emulate that classic warm keyboard sound that starts Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” in just a couple of steps. A couple of notes: First, we’ll be working in the newly released version of Helm V0.6.1, an impressively powerful free digital synth plugin. Download the free version here to follow along,…
