Whether you sing in a choir, a rock band or your bedroom, it’s crucial that you keep your vocal cords in good shape, even if you’re singing just for fun. Guest-blogger Fabienne Kervella shares five simple tips for good vocal health.

Recently picked up your first acoustic guitar? Then it’s worth knowing that you can make more of your six-string when it comes to the sound, the tuning stability and even key changes. Here are three simple yet massively effective tips.

A family get-together, a night in with your mates, a night out at the pub – or even a work bash – a solid pub quiz can really help make it a night to remember. And it doesn’t have to be hard work! If you’ve ever been to a good pub quiz then you’ll already know that it’s always about bringing the laughs. The only technical stuff you need to know is how to piece everything together. Here, we gain the wisdom of one of the experts: Guestblogger, Gerjon, who offers some tips and tricks to help ensure that your music pub-quiz is a hit.

Guestblogger and multi-instrumentalist Nigel Hubee explains the setup he uses when he performs as part of the acoustic duo The Tickets on YouTube. To his mind, the trick is to simply use the resources that you already have around you: so your backdrop can be your own living room or another good room; you can use the instruments and microphones that you always use on stage anyway; and you can film everything on just your phone, a tablet or an action camera that’s able to film in HD (1080p) – so that’s most models these days. Next to that, you’ll need your laptop and some kind of recording software, some simple video editing software, some monitor speakers and, last but not least, an audio interface so everything can be coupled up.

The whole spectrum of Latin genres and beats, including salsa, merengue and calypso would be nothing without the percussion that drives the groove. Latin percussion isn’t just limited to Latin American music but has reached out into pretty much every other genre going. In this blog, we take a look at the percussive instruments that make Latin percussion what it is.

The combo can be undeniably awesome: drums and percussion joining forces in one band. In principle any and every style and genre will benefit from even a little bit of percussion, but to achieve it, drummers and percussionists need to work like a well-oiled machine. All going well, you get something deeper and more interesting, whether you’re a jazz band, an indie band, or a party band.

These days, bands have to do almost everything for themselves: getting the right gear, writing the right music, setting up some good lighting, all of the admin and even organising the shows. When it comes to designing stage decor, it can be a bit of an afterthought – if it’s thought about at all. But placing the music in a visual context can immediately get the audience in the right vibe even before you’ve played a note. Here, we get four solid stage-dressing tips from one of the professionals.

Getting booked to play a nice club night or party and playing a banging DJ set is great but is it enough to make a real impression on your clients? As a DJ, how do you make sure that you always come across as professional and make sure that you’ll be recommended by every booker you work for? Guestblogger, Amar Amlani (AKA DiceDJ) shares some of his hard-won experience.

Michael Jordan has already passed the 60 year mark, and with that height comes plenty of wisdom. That he’s a legendary figure within basketball is undeniable, but his popularity stretches far beyond the court, and in the age of memes, Jordan has dropped some pretty inspiring one-liners. Can musicians and producers learn something from the GOAT of all GOATs? Definitely. Here, Guestblogger Rutger Steenbergen puts seven of Jordan’s best quotes in a more musical context.

Sampling has been a part of the music-sphere since the eighties, where snippets of forgotten gems or stone-cold classics are spliced into new tracks. Whether it’s a snatched bit of the vocals, melody, bass line or drum beat, sampling has boosted the feel of some pretty big hits. Some purists see it as stealing, but our Guestblogger Marlies sees it as a smart and creative way of recycling fragments of music and even introducing old smashers to a new audience. Here, she presents the top 10 most sampled songs of all time and lines up her own sample-heavy favourites.

Flipping back through the tomes of music history, the so-called ‘British invasion’ has happened more than once. In the ‘60s, of course, we exported the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. In the early 2000s, it was names like Coldplay, Adele and Sam Smith who managed to break beyond the shores of our wee islands. But in the ‘90s, emerging from buzz-words like ‘Cool Britannia’, we had Britpop – which, if you believed the music rags of the time, was dominated by two giants of guitar-driven pop: Blur and Oasis. Here, Guestbloggers Nick and Martin have a quick look at the short-lived but oh-so impacting phenomenon that was Britpop.

DJ equipment is constantly changing and advancing, and since you can’t DJ without the equipment, the gear involved plays a big role in how DJ’s perform and produce. In this blog, we take a wide overview of the history of DJ gear as we know it and how various technological leaps have accelerated its evolution. Here, we’re going to focus on the main game-changers: the technology that caused the biggest shift within the DJ-verse. Where did it all start? Back in 1971, with the introduction of the audio mixer.