Making Programmed Drums Sound Real
Even with great-sounding VST drumkits, it can be tricky to make them sound real – here are some great tips!
Read moreTag Archives: Composing
How To Do Lead Guitar Harmonies
Having two guitars that play the same melody but at different intervals in a scale, you can create the same beautiful effect for your lead guitars that choirs use for vocal harmonies.
Read moreHow to Get a Great Tone from Bass Plugins
With no bassist and no bass guitar, you can still make bass tracks for your songs using a plugin in your DAW. Learn how to apply the mixing tips in the Systematic Mixing Guide bass chapter to a bass plugin to get a great bass tone.
Read more7 Essential iPhone Apps for Guitarists
Even if you are extremely busy or always on the go, you can get a lot done musically done with your iPhone or iPad. Here are the apps I use most to learn and create music.
Read moreWriting Your First Song Part III: Putting It All Together
This is the third and final part of a series. You’ll find the previous parts here: Writing Your First Song Part I: Creating Riffs Writing Your First Song Part II: Recording and Arranging The Other Instruments Having recorded your guitar tracks and decided the order of the different parts you are ready to put them […]
Read moreAdequacy Is Irrelevant – Anyone Can Make Music
It is my great pleasure to present this guest post from Dan Vuksanovich, who runs the site Why I Suck at Guitar: It can be daunting for an aspiring rock/metal guitarist to feel adequate these days. There was a time when a few tasty pentatonic licks might turn heads, but the rock guitar game changed forever […]
Read moreWriting Your First Song Part II: Recording and Arranging
This is the second part in a three part series. You find the first part here: Writing Your First Song Part I: Creating Riffs. When you have a bunch of riffs you need to arrange them into a song. A song normally has (all or some of) the following building blocks (borrowing a bit from […]
Read moreWriting Your First Song Part I: Creating Riffs
This is the first of a three part series about writing, recording and mixing your first song. I’m by no means an expert on the subject, but this will get you started. The obvious first obstacle is coming up with a song, writing the chords and notes. Composing, if you will. So where do you […]
Read more10 Great Tips from Wikihow on Writing Thrash Riffs
I found a list of 10 great tips in an unexpected place – Wikihow. Wikihow is a collaborative site with how-to manuals on almost every subject, including writing thrash riffs apparently. The tips are simple but really very good and most of them can be applied to writing music in general. Here’s the list in […]
Read moreI Made a Song
As my guitar lesson a couple of weeks ago we made a song! I brought a bunch of riff ideas to class and together with my guitar teacher I arranged them into a song. It was a real eye-opener even though the result was just a draft with a lot of cut-and-paste cheating. Since then […]
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