Tag: demo recording

Explore everything that goes into DIY home recording, including the gear and software you’ll need, getting your space set up, and so much more with our demo recording articles. For more help recording your own music, check out Soundfly’s free course Demo Recording 101.

  • Don’t Hit the Stage Without These Overlooked Heroes of Your Pedalboard

    Don’t Hit the Stage Without These Overlooked Heroes of Your Pedalboard

    Guitarists like to spill ink all the time about distortion boxes, classic overdrives, boutique delay pedals, and bucket-brigade modulation effects. It’s understandable why: These attention-grabbing stompboxes lead to dramatic and satisfying changes in sound. Like a great vintage amp or a top-notch guitar, it’s these larger-than-life pedals that help a player define his or her…

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  • Goal-Oriented Planning: Don’t Let That Fire Burn Out

    Goal-Oriented Planning: Don’t Let That Fire Burn Out

    + 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. Thanks to the ever-frustrating amalgam of rapidly moving digital tech and the old-model music industry struggling to keep up, the truth is that when it comes to marketing your…

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  • 14 of the Most Commonly Confused Terms in Music and Audio

    14 of the Most Commonly Confused Terms in Music and Audio

    Once upon a time, remixing a song meant actually redoing the mix. Many vintage consoles (some Neve 80-series, for example) have a button labeled “remix” that changes a few functions on the desk to optimize it for mixing rather than recording. But sometime in the late 20th century, the word “remix” began to take on a new meaning:…

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  • These Four Classic Covers Can Tell Us Everything About What Makes Great Album Art

    These Four Classic Covers Can Tell Us Everything About What Makes Great Album Art

    Four albums top my all-time favorite records list. They’re some of my favorite albums musically, but their impact and significance to me and other listeners run deeper than that. After spending so many cumulative hours engaging deeply with these works, I realized that these four great covers can teach us everything we need to know about…

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  • Essential Tips for Recording Pro-Quality Lead Vocals

    Essential Tips for Recording Pro-Quality Lead Vocals

    + Recording and mixing your songs at home? Preview Soundfly’s online course, Modern Pop Vocal Production for free, and subscribe here to get unlimited access. Every production and every song is unique, but the lead vocal is typically the part that most directly engages the average listener. The human voice, with all of its frailty, power, and expressive nuances, is…

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  • 4 Other Uses for Your Favorite Guitar Pedals

    4 Other Uses for Your Favorite Guitar Pedals

    By Casey van Wensem Every guitarist has that one effects pedal (or two, or three, or 12) they just can’t live without. Maybe it’s a boutique overdrive pedal that gives you just the right amount of gain and saturation for crunchy leads or a vintage analog delay pedal perfect for lush, dreamy soundscapes and gigantic swells.…

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  • What Makes a Great Debut Album? These 5 Classics Can Teach Us Everything

    What Makes a Great Debut Album? These 5 Classics Can Teach Us Everything

    What makes a great debut album? Its reflection on its time and place in contemporary society? The hype it generates? An ethereal and indescribable showing of artistic genius and virtuosity? While there are certainly patterns and similarities within the athenaeum of commercial music — the “sophomore slump,” the “edgy cover artwork,” or the scorched-earth PR campaigns…

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  • The Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Home Studio: Free and Affordable DAWs

    The Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Home Studio: Free and Affordable DAWs

    + Learning to record and mix at home? Check out Soundfly’s acclaimed online courses on mixing, production, and beat making — Subscribe for unlimited access. Unless you’re recording to high-fidelity magnetic tape or into a four-track recording device, your digital audio workstation (DAW) is a critical element of your home studio. You don’t need a giant mixing…

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  • Squeeze to Please: The Basics of Compression in Audio

    Squeeze to Please: The Basics of Compression in Audio

    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…

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  • How to Write Lyrical Hooks That Stand Out

    How to Write Lyrical Hooks That Stand Out

    Writing a hit song takes much more than just good luck and a sense of melody. To a large degree, songs become hits because they simply get stuck in our heads. Incorporating truly memorable lyrical and melodic hooks is absolutely vital. But what happens when the hook gets buried or is too complicated for listeners to…

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