+ 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. Most of us record albums with budgetary constraints — that’s just our reality. Imagine waking up one day with unlimited resources at your fingertips. Here and now, there’s…
Rappers used to say, “The real backbone of hip-hop is disc jocks.” Nowadays, though, the real backbone of hip-hop is ostensibly the virtuosic studio musicians dominating the most heralded releases of the past few years. In leaving their indelible marks on records by award-winning artists like Chance The Rapper and Kendrick Lamar, instrumentalists like Nico Segal (a.k.a. Donnie Trumpet), Robert…
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…
You may not have known this, but yesterday was International Jazz Day. Look around, and you’ll find a ton of jazz festivals happening right this moment worldwide — from Denton, Texas to Espoo, Finland, and not to mention New Orleans. On the surface, it might seem like jazz is doing just fine, chugging along and as…
+ Learn the nuances of producing beats, arranging tracks, and creative sampling, drawing on the rich history and influence of hip-hop in Soundfly’s acclaimed online course, The Art of Hip-Hop Production. One of Kendrick Lamar’s greatest benedictions as an artist is his ability to connect, which, on the surface, seems strange, because his stories are so…
As someone becomes more and more familiar with rap, he or she realizes that — in a genre that encompasses the styles of everyone from riddlers like MF DOOM to philosophers like KRS-One — there’s no problem finding completely different artists to enjoy completely different styles. If you want good party music, it’s Drake. Try 50 Cent if…
+ Learn the nuances of producing beats, arranging tracks, and creative sampling, drawing on the rich history and influence of hip-hop in Soundfly’s acclaimed online course, The Art of Hip-Hop Production. The Middle East is quite the hot topic of today’s dinner discussions regardless of whether they’re actually occurring at the dinner table, or on the…
It’s been dissected as a runaway commercial success. It’s been analyzed as an incisive commentary on current race relations. It’s even, at times, received its due as an example of complex poetry in rap. But, rather counterintuitively, relatively few trained musicians have talked about this Broadway hit as pure music in and of itself. Leaving the…
This week, VH1 is premiering their much hyped new cooking show, “Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party,” hosted by, you guessed it, Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart. Now, despite the fact that Snoop and Martha have quite the history, many see this as yet another tacky contribution to the typical unscripted and pulpy celebrity-centered programming for which VH1 is…
I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but dreams do come true: Frank Ocean has reappeared with not one, but two albums as a follow up to his critically acclaimed 2012 debut, channel ORANGE. The spoils of this past weekend have been in the works since then and were actually expected to arrive in July of last year.…
