Tag: listening

  • Listening and Liberation: The World Is Sound

    Listening and Liberation: The World Is Sound

    When you enter a Tibetan shrine, you see objects lit by the flicker of candles, hear the sounds of chanting, and inhale the smell of incense. We are trained to look at art, but these objects have lives and relationships with humans that are contingent on all of our senses. In a museum we typically prioritize…

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  • Mastering: Decoding the ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of It All

    Mastering: Decoding the ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of It All

    + Pursue your mixing or audio production goals with a Soundfly Mentor like Andrea! Soundfly offers four-week mentorship sessions with a pro, customized to you. Get in touch to learn more. Your music has been carefully recorded and painstakingly mixed, but there’s still one more step before it’s ready for the listening public: mastering. Mastering is the bridge…

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  • Why Streaming Playlists Will Never Kill the Album Format

    Why Streaming Playlists Will Never Kill the Album Format

    + 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. It’s true. The album might be dead. Or at least the album as we once knew it is dead. Before you start throwing all your record sleeves…

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  • How to Properly Maintain Your Vinyl

    How to Properly Maintain Your Vinyl

    By Jessica Kane Any vinyl enthusiast will tell you how crucial it is to maintain and protect your records. Although vinyl records are considered by many to produce the best quality sound, they certainly won’t do so forever unless you take care of them properly. Records are particularly susceptible to scratches, heat, and sunlight. To…

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  • Aesthetics: The Forgotten Frontier in the Tone Debate

    Aesthetics: The Forgotten Frontier in the Tone Debate

    If you’ve spent enough time around guitarists or bassists, you’re certainly familiar with what gear obsession looks like. You may even be a gear obsessive yourself, or have at least been through a phase of quarreling over minutiae in online fora. And if you know a gear obsessive, you’ve almost certainly witnessed them debate their main adversary: the “tone-is-in-your-fingers”…

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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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  • When You’re a Piano in a Forte World

    When You’re a Piano in a Forte World

    By Liam Singer Live rock music and noisy bars go together like beer and… more beer! The sounds of a drum kit, electric guitar, and amplified vocals are all designed to cut through the noise of clinking glasses and drunken conversations. These are not “dinner party” instruments. Audiences in these spaces don’t always like hearing…

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  • Thank You, Nat Hentoff: A Writer Listening Beyond Category

    Thank You, Nat Hentoff: A Writer Listening Beyond Category

    By Sarah Manning In an interview with the Rutherford Institute in 2012, journalist, author, and jazz critic Nat Hentoff told interviewer John W. Whitehead about some advice Duke Ellington had given him. “Look. Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.” That’s exactly what Nat…

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Jlin: Rhythm, Variation, & Vulnerability