Much like the age-old songwriting soup-versus-salad debate, there’s a lot of disagreement between camps over whether a song should be deliberately written from your hard-fought experiences in life or from stories made up in your head. The Argument for Imagination Some feel as though it isn’t fair for you to write about something about which…
Words you say never seem To live up to the ones inside your head The lives we make never seem To ever get us anywhere but dead. — Chris Cornell/Soundgarden Chris Cornell left this Earth too soon. Still, judging by the life he led, he seemed like the sort of legendary artist who belonged to…
Music can have a ton of both emotional and psychological effects on the brain. Its mnemonic power has been called upon for millennia, as poets and storytellers fashioned some of humanity’s first works of literature from the oral tradition of singing epics. From Tibet to England, the bards of old could recite hours and hours of…
A canon (or round) is a single melody line that provides a counterpoint to itself. Canons can, at times, feel lighthearted and happy go lucky (“Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Frere Jacques” for example), but even the simplest sounding pieces require careful attention and are difficult to craft well, especially where more than two voices are…
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…
+ 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…
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…
+ 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…
If you’re still wondering what to wrap up inside a box this holiday season, maybe your list could use a bit of outside the box thinking. We can help with that! Here’s a list of our favorite bizarre musical gifts for the loved ones in your life who deserve something a bit special this year! (If you…
What is it that makes a Billboard #1 song? Why do some songs make it to the top while others flop? The answer seems to be a difficult cocktail made up of formulaic songwriting mixed with a few unique ingredients that set a song apart; when blended correctly, it’s capable of hooking millions of listeners. Let’s…
