Rock your next solo with these tips, stories, and resources to help you perform better in the moment. For more improvising inspiration, check out Soundfly’s free course The Improviser’s Toolkit.
Improvisation is a complex beast to tackle. You can’t go about the process by just “making it up.” If it seems to you like that’s all Miles Davis is doing when he plays, keep in mind that the best improvisers are the ones who manage to create an illusion of effortlessness, but actually put meticulous…
We know more about hearing than listening. Sound is sound, and all sound can be music. There is virtue and scholarship in all sounds, all music, but we aren’t listening to it. We might be hearing it, but we aren’t listening. We as musicians and music lovers find ourselves forming cliques. We congregate in venues,…
Have you been loving Adele‘s new single “Hello” as much as we have? It’s her first new song in 4 years and she came back swinging with a video directed by Xavier Dolan and staring 90210 and The Wire‘s Tristan Wilds (why can’t anything good ever happen to Michael?! First he falls in with Chris and Snoop and…
Young humpbacks these days, all they do is just yell and scat all over the ocean, collaborating with squeaky squids and beat-boxing blowfish, no regard for the fundamentals and true craft of songwriting. For us old baleen bags of blubber, it’s important to develop an appreciation for what makes our song unique, and to honor…
We recently found this fantastic piece on how musical improvisation affects the brain on Vicky Williamson’s blog Music Psychology and she graciously allowed us to post it here. Vicky teaches and researches on the relationship between music and the brain at The University of Sheffield. Check out more of her writing here. Hello Dear Reader, It is…
“Practice makes perfect.” While I can’t necessarily say I’ve heard any “perfect” music yet, I will certainly attest to the fact that putting in the time will improve any musician’s sound. Throughout my college and post-degree years, I’ve heard people talk about how they “hit the shed” for days at a time — stopping only…
There aren’t many musicians who are able to balance organic emotion and technical prowess in their playing. Most of us lean in one direction or the other. However, in the time I’ve known him, I have never seen Jared play a solo that wasn’t equal parts instinct and practiced skill. As a performer, he is…
These days, it seems like anywhere you turn you encounter prophecies of doom about the state of modern music. Label execs with money on their minds see shrinking sales and panic. Tastmakers see hit factories churning out the same songs again and again and decry the end of creative expression. But from our vantage point, we…
Chesney Snow is a poet, a songwriter, a beatboxer, an actor, but most of all, he’s an artist through and through. Talking to him can feel a little like receiving a sermon from a beatboxing prophet of some sort, as he waxes lyrical about life as an artist today and the power of art to…
