Shine at your next gig with these tips, stories, and resources to help improve your performance and help you put your best foot forward on stage. For more help, check out all of Soundfly’s free and premium courses on music performance here.
Setting up a proper workspace can make practice time infinitely more productive — at least, it definitely did for me. Here’s a list of things to keep at hand when you’re honing your craft. 1. A notebook Okay, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be a literal notebook (though I personally feel pretty tied to…
For a brief few years in college, I got to treat music as a full-time job, devoting 40+ hours a week to musical improvement. I lived ten minutes from the practice rooms and had very few responsibilities, so I could practice as much as sleep and school would allow. Now that I’m a full-fledged grown-up…
“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…
+ Bridge the worlds of theory, improvisation, and jazzy hip-hop, and improve your piano chops with Grammy-winner Kiefer in his course, Kiefer: Keys, Chords, & Beats. Singers need to learn piano — it’s a fact. I’ve played many instruments over the years — trumpet, clarinet, and sax to name a few — but first and foremost,…
Last Summer throughout the UK, it was quite possible that if you wandered into an outdoor arts festival, you had a good chance of seeing a flock of pigeons flying overheard, producing a beautiful soundscape of tones. Introducing Nathaniel Mann, a London-based composer, sonic artist, instrument designer, ethnomusicological thinker and the man who strapped whistles…
We’ve all heard that word before — a blend of German-sounding “ocks” and “schps” that, at least for me, conjures up images of old cuckoo clocks or Alpine adventures. But for those who don’t know, a glockenspiel is actually a small metallic xylophone with tuned keys that produce a high-pitched set of percussive tones. The…
Whenever I check in with my friend Gillian Jackson, she’s into something new. Currently, it’s teaching rock to children, scoring films, and playing scream metal (I don’t know if that’s how she’d classify it, but it definitely has screaming in it). Before that, it was neo-classical music, museum tours, and working with snakes and other woodland…
Stockings are coming down, crumpled wrapping paper’s being shoved into recycling bins, and people worldwide are skeptically patting their winter weight in anticipation of the coming year. While we whole-heartedly support your decisions to start taking cross-acro-zum-fit classes and maintaining a strict paleo-free-tarian diet, why not add something painless to your resolution list? Here are two…
Ian Davis is your standard musical chameleon — with a seemingly infinite number of bands and projects going at any one time. You can catch him touring around the country with Landlady, writing and recording his own family Christmas albums, or even arranging pieces for My Brightest Diamond. We asked him a few questions to…
