You see it more and more with living room and kitchen Djs, but also with professionals: playing with a DJ controller combined with an Android tablet or iPad. This set up doesn’t just make you more mobile but gives absolute beginners the ideal first step into the world of Djaying, especially since Djaying using Spotify has been proven to work. However, this kind of set up is not as straight forward as people might think. So, we’ve put this blog together to answer the most frequent questions that arise when picking out the right DJ controller to use alongside iOS and Android. Which controllers can handle it? And what do you need to look out for?

Everyone does it: get on the train and hole up with a good pair of headphones or ear-buds; soundtrack their walk to work with some happy-music, or go for a jog while jacked into some solid motivational smash hits. In most of these everyday sitches, you’re likely to push the volume up to compete with the traffic, the other commuters on the bus, or the heavy breathing of your fellow joggers. Fair enough. But what most people don’t realise is that this can unfortunately cause your delicate ears some serious damage. In this blog, we seek to answer the most essential questions regarding the hearing damage caused by using a humble set of headphones or ear-buds.

If you’re completely new to FL, or Fruity Loops Studio, and you want to get to know the software, you’ve come to the right place. Before diving headfirst into the countless tutorials, guides and courses, it’s a great idea to get a better picture of what the general workflow of this DAW is like. Guest-blogger Tim Ease is here to tell you about the basics of FL Studio 20 (the successor to FL Studio 12), and guide you through creating your first track.

It’d be a shame if you avoided sharp (♯) and flat (♭) notes simply because you don’t know their exact meaning. However, this is important information to know if you want to play a wide variety of music using sheet music, chord progressions or another kind of music notation. As such, in this blog, I’m going to teach you the difference between sharp notes and flat notes, and how you should use them.

Since most composers don’t mind boasting their complex melodies, harmonies and use of keys, it can be a bit of a struggle for fledgling pianists to find a piano book with easy-to-play yet great-sounding pieces. Fortunately, composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Mozart have also written beginner-friendly music that might even sound familiar to your ears.

Reading guitar tabs isn’t only easier than reading traditional notations, it’s also lot more intuitive. Tabs, short for tablature, show you exactly which string to play and which fret to press down on it at a single glance. It’s worth knowing how these work because they’re used all over the internet and in various guitar learning methods and songbooks. To learn everything you need to know about guitar tabs, simply sit back and enjoy this blog!

As a well seasoned online guitar teacher, Guest-blogger, Michel Penterman often gets asked the question: “Do I have to learn to read music to start playing the guitar, or can I use guitar tablature, or just learn all the chords?” In this blog, Michel sums up the pros and cons of each approach and offers a nice, simple conclusion!

The quality of your guitar sound depends on a range of different factors. Even guitarists with a cheap set up can shape a good sound. On the other hand, there are some musicians who build rigs out of the very best gear going and still are somehow able to make nothing but the sound of a cat slowly dying. An incredibly essential point when it comes to shaping your guitar sound is one that often flies over peoples’ heads: setting up your guitar amplifier.

“That’s major!” some might exclaim when hearing that one of their mates has had a day of it. But in terms of music, Major can refer to something that feels a lot more cheerful, while minor tends to have a more sad vibe. But is this always the case? And how does this difference actually happen? In this blog, I’m going to be saying a lot about how ‘Major’ and ‘Minor’ actually works in music so that you can not only hear the difference, but actually understand it and why it happens at all.

And so we come to the third edition of our blogs about reading music. In the last two, we covered the C-Major scale and the Minor scale, which hopefully gave you a better idea of how to read notes on a stave. We also showed you how to find all of these notes on a piano, keyboard, and guitar. If you’re a drummer, you can find some helpful tips for reading drum notation in our blog, Drum Notation 101. In this blog though, we’re going to cover the mystery surrounding rhythm, tempo, and measure. Of course, if you understand all of this already and want to dive a little deeper, then feel free to check out our written-for-purpose music books.

In this blog, you can learn how chords are built and how to read particular chord symbols and notation. Understanding this will only help you progress whether you’re playing a guitar, keyboard, piano, or in fact, most other musical instruments, or if you simply want to know what lies behind the magic of chords and how they actually work. You’ll also find a useful list of other blogs about chords and music theory, along with our collection of music books.

From newspapers and magazines to alternative-history science-fiction books, everything that originally came in a paper version can now be found online as well. The world of music is no exception. Paper is getting rapidly replaced by pixels and, while this is not always ideal, I’ve gone ahead and made a list of the pros and cons of digital sheet music and will tell you exactly where you can find online sheet music. After that, I’ll highlight various popular sheet music apps and their strengths, weaknesses and possible alternatives.