In 2021, the moment finally came when Anni-Frid (1945), Björn (1945), Benny (1946) and Agnetha (1950) treated the world to a completely new album. Who’d have thought it? The band had long since broken up and even the promise of a billion dollar paycheck for a tour wasn’t tempting enough to bring them back together. However, this blog isn’t going to dig through the ABBA legend (you’ll be able to find plenty of ABBA history lessons documented in countless books and YouTube clips). Instead, we’re going to look at the musicality of this special band and the technical details that made it all possible. What are the necessary elements of the ABBA sound? Where do you start if you want to write a song like ABBA and how do you capture that distinct ABBA style?

Ever considered penning your own original music for a musical? Then you’ve probably already noticed what a challenge it really is. In this blog, we take a look at how show tunes are put together and what separates a musical number from your average pop song or film score. Fix yourself a drink, sit back, relax, and allow the Bax Music theatre to take all you ambitious composers and curious musical-lovers on a tour of how musical music happens.

Whether you’ve just started playing or you’ve been at it for years, every musician faces the same challenge at some point: you want to learn the rhythm or the groove of a track but it’s not working out. Maybe you’re confronted by a new technique that you’ve never tried out before and it seems impossible to learn. Are there any tricks that drummers can have up their sleeves to avoid the frustration? To be fair, there’s only one trick: broaden your horizons by taking on every genre going, and never fear any strange and new playing techniques.

Most bands can’t afford to hire their own light technician and are forced to trust in-house light techs, which means that your light show may vary from gig to gig and more often than not doesn’t look like what you asked for. The cause? Communication, or rather miscommunication. Guest-blogger and stage manager Thomas Oberson-Ricoat is here to share five welcome pieces of advice.

In this article, guest-blogger Wietse Hendriks shows you how to write and compose your own drum parts. Covering topics like where to find inspiration and how to deal with band leaders, conductors and composers, Wietse taps into his twelve-and-a-half years of experience as a drummer.

Real DJs spin with real vinyl…or do they? Guest-blogger Menno from Supa-Dupa Studio explores DJ history to find out how much truth this statement holds and gives his personal opinion on the vinyl versus digital debate.

Having spent holiday evenings with family and friends, sitting around the campfire with a guitar in his lap, Guestblogger Michel Penterman has some experience in this matter. Being a campfire guitarist is no joke – you have a job to do. You need to bring the vibe and, not only bring the vibe, but keep it there. So it’s not the moment to pull out those face-melting solos, it’s the moment to get crowd-pleasing – and that’s some free advice right there! Read on to get some tips about the right kind of campfire guitar, the right campfire repertoire, the chords you’ll need to know and even the accessories and apps that might come in handy for any campfire guitarist in-training.

As a musician, the spotlight is usually yours. After all, capturing the full attention of the audience is part of the job, but for some gigs, you need to take a step back and provide the background music. This demands a really different way of working and of performing and can sometimes be hard to pull off. Here, Guestblogger Kevin Okkema offers some tips for getting the best out of those quieter shows.

Bands that feature a horn section made up of brass or woodwind instruments come in all shapes, sizes and genres. Big bands will often include around four trumpets, four trombones and five saxophones, while some cover bands make do with one trumpet, a tenor sax and maybe an alto saxophone and trombone. But the more horns you have, the harder it is to get everything perfectly aligned. So, what’s the secret to building a tight-sounding horn section? Following up on our first blog covering the brass section, we take a deeper dive into the finer details.

Hip hop is way more than just rapping and also more than just music. Hip hop was first born from a subculture with the music at its centre and, like most subcultures, started as an underground movement before going mainstream. Hip hop first grew up in America in the seventies and didn’t cross the pond to Europe until around a decade later. In this blog, we offer up a quick hip hop history lesson.

One trend that has been picking up speed is gigs where a DJ and one or more musicians team up to make music. What’s the driving force behind this? And what does it entail? Read on, learn and get inspired!

There are several questions about wireless microphone systems that we get all the time, and we don’t blame you — those different frequency bands can drive you crazy. Thankfully, Bax Music’s own microphone expert, Stefan, is here to lay out the simple facts of the matter.