Compared to most instruments, the modern guitar is a relatively new instrument. While classical instruments like piano, brass, and woodwinds all have hundreds of years of pedagogy behind them, the language of guitar music and how we learn to play is new and constantly changing. Today, we can find chords to any song on the internet…
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…
This is the fourth instalment in our series on How Successful Musicians Practice. If you’re just joining us now, this series asks professional and semi-professional musicians performing and recording with all kinds of groups how they practice and what helps them stay organized. We’re getting to the heart of what it takes to grow your musical…
By Lee Dynes The sound palette of Arabic, Persian, and various Middle Eastern regional cultures are generally not typically heard in the West outside of TV shows like Homeland and some films. Those droning tones, the anguished cries reminiscent of classical singers like Oum Kalthoum of Egypt or Yusuf Omar of Iraq, can evoke uneasy feelings…
When you’re composing music, you kind of have to split yourself into a bunch of different personas. There’s “you, the artist” who contributes all the emotive content; “you, the craftsperson,” who gets anally retentive over just how you’re going to translate the emotive content in such a way that another human being can interpret it with…
If an artist has just given the best, most effortless and inspired performance of their life, they’re not going to want to change much when the next gig rolls around. Few things will keep musicians working more consistently than the ability to support and flatter a vocalist or soloist — particularly if they’re a joy for the rest…
+ 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…
Many techniques and resources help you deepen your rhythmic skill set, and there’s no better classroom in which to learn the art of groove than on stages in front of audiences (and beside experienced rhythm section masters). But the second-best classroom might be inside your own headphones! Take a listen to some of these classic…
Welcome to the second installment of How Successful Musicians Practice. If you’re just joining us now, take a minute to peruse the practice regimes of some seriously successful percussionists here. To recap, I see there being four kinds of practice goals a musician works towards over the course of their career: practicing to learn an instrument and gain…
