2019’s Oscar Nominated Film Scores Loved Their Chords
And the winner is…. Chords! This year’s Oscar nominees for Best Score put a ton of stock into creating lush chord textures over other attributes.
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Learn Diatonic Harmony from a Classic Breakbeat
A particularly perfect music theory lesson happens to exist completely intact inside this classic breakbeat from funk/soul history.
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How Imagine Dragons Writes Such Memorable Melodies
Imagine Dragons’ “Demons” plays with our sense of memory about how the melody is supposed to play out each time. How does this work?
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How Do You Make an Audience Feel Nostalgic with Music?
Writing music for a show or film? Check out this beginner’s lesson on creating a sense of nostalgia in your music to fit the narrative.
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3 Atonal Techniques for Adventurous Songwriters
Inspired by Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, here are three ways to use atonal composition techniques in your pop music-making!
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How Blood Orange Uses Chasms of Harmonic Ambiguity on “Negro Swan”
+ 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. When it comes to music, balancing invention and convention is like baking the perfect cake. Artists that deviate too far from an already established sound run the risk of becoming…
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Using Ableton Live to Mess with the Rhythm of “Clair de Lune”
+ Master the tools and techniques of producing pro-level electronic music and audio in Ableton Live with Soundfly’s course, Intro to Music Production in Ableton Live. This article originally appeared on Ethan Hein’s blog. This video recently made the rounds on Facebook. I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I…
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Billie Eilish’s “You Should See Me in a Crown” Is Microtonality Gone Pop
+ 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. The dark is afraid of Billie Eilish. The 16-year-old electro-pop phenom recently dropped her newest track, “You Should See Me in a Crown,” and it is some…
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Why Ariana Grande’s “no tears left to cry” Is So Uplifting, Even in a Minor Key
+ 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. Last week I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with super-knowledgeable music theory super-nerds Dean Olivet and K Marie Kim, and picking their brains about a…
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How Rap Ushered the Piano Into Its Next Developmental Phase
Hip-hop is officially pop music. With Bruno Mars and Kendrick Lamar’s sweep of the Grammy Awards earlier this year, it’s evident that hip-hop has officially shed its status as “that controversial music genre” that prompted the Grammys’ organizers to refuse to air any rap categories back in 1989, which subsequently prompted some to boycott the event.…
