Category: Music

Share Good Karma – free gifts from Sounds True!

Dear friends, we wanted to let you know about a new program at Sounds True, called Share Good Karma, which was created so that you could receive free gifts from us – and share them with your friends.

The first two titles featured in the program are a collection of relaxing and healing music, entitled Meditation Music: An Invitation to Still the Mind and Open the Heart; and The Practice of Mindfulness: 6 Guided Practices. Once three of your friends “accept” these free gifts from you, you’ll receive an additional free gift of your choice.

Learn more and get signed up for Share Good Karma!

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Breaking the Approval Addiction and Expressing Our Cre...

Jamie Catto is the creative catalyst behind the popular philosophy/music/film project 1 Giant Leap and the author of the Sounds True music program Internal (with Alex Forster). In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami and Jamie discuss how to tune into our woundedness as a gateway to creativity, how our shadow material can become our life’s “rocket fuel,” the meaning of Jamie’s “Creativity Manifesto,” and much more. Plus you’ll hear samples of three new tracks from Internal. (63 minutes)

The Healing Pulse – a free music download

We’re happy to offer you The Healing Pulse, a free download featuring inspiring and and expansive music for healing, relaxation, and contemplation, Includes hand-picked selections from the Sounds True archive, including tracks from our friends Deva Premal, Jai Uttal, Snatam Kaur, Glen Velez, Kimba Arem, John de Kadt, Singh Kaur, and Riley Lee.

Download The Healing Pulse now!

More music from the Sounds True archive…

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What Are Your Five Healing Music CD Picks…That Don...

by Andrew Young (Writer at Sounds True)

Can you help me out here? I need more great “background” music for de-stressing and sparking my creativity.

The skinny: I review healing and meditation music CDs for Sounds True and other retailers and labels and have listened to well over two hundred over the years. Most of them are, uh…just okay. Some totally suck the pranic wind. Of course, you’ll find none of those at soundstrue.com (nudge nudge, wink wink).

I play this kind of music for relaxing, writing, and drawing, so I don’t like distracting melodies, in-your-face vocals, cheesy synthesizers, or stuff that I’ll get sick of after a few weeks of frequent play. Recommendations please!

In the meantime, here are five of my faves:

1. Sampradaya – Pandit Shivkumar Sharma (Real World Recordings). Great for when I’m feeling mentally sluggish or “stuck.” Not marketed as a healing music CD—but incredibly effective as one. The Indian hammer dulcimer (santoor) master plays here with his son Rahul and tabla wizard Shafaat Ahmed Khan. These are traditional ragas, but sound nothing like the familiar sitar/tambour offerings: uplifting, resonant layers of bell-like melodies and jaw-dropping overtones arise independently from the actual struck notes and float beyond the room. Joyful and mind-expanding, sparkly and fresh like cool sunlit rain.

2. Crystal Bowl Sound Healing – Tryshe Dhevney (Sounds True). This is my favorite CD to play when writing, drawing, or photoshopping piles of photos. 100% organic (no synths), beautifully recorded in a giant natural cave (seriously). Tryshe uses rare customized gemstone bowls perfectly tuned for expanding consciousness via the Om frequency and other well-tested resonances. It’s so good that when I first got the 8-minute sample track for writing the CD package copy, I set it on “repeat” and listened to it looped for hours. Tip: if you download this album, don’t “re-rip” the tracks to make them smaller. You’ll want the highest sound quality to fully experience the effect of the pure, subtle harmonics.

3. Aural Resonance Astral Harmony – Simeon Hein (Mount Baldy Press). Yes “astral harmony” sounds really new-agey, but this recording is not, and it is amazing. My massage therapist played this for me during a session years ago. It’s just a sustained, multi-layered perfect-fifth harmonic chord that goes for 70 minutes. Made with 100% synth, but works so well that I grant it full amnesty. This CD is my sure-fire last resort for insomnia and clearing writer’s block, BUT it is not for everybody: the effect is so intense that the first five times I used it, I would sometimes hear it resonating in my head for hours after turning it off.

4. Relax – David Ison (Sounds True). I play this album on my iPhone so often that if it were an old-fashioned LP, it would be worn out. What makes it so good? For one, David doesn’t use brainwave frequency entrainment—he builds his compositions using healing principles based on sacred geometries and proportional tonal relationships and rhythms from ancient Greece, Egypt, and his own intuition and rigorous experimentation. He also uses some very unique studio sound production tools to create tuned ambient spaces that have a clear and calming somatic effect. Even more relevant though is that the music on this album is simple yet incredibly beautiful. The first time I played it, it gave me the chills. The primary “voice” on this album is Ison’s guitar (a massive dreadnought Martin acoustic I think). David has been using this music program to help war veterans in the healing process with powerful results. For maximum effect, play this on a good stereo speaker system or with high-quality headphones.

5. Audio Serenity (iAwake Technologies). These folks are at the far event horizon of brainwave entrainment research. For example, they’ve addressed the problem of frequency habituation—your brain adapting to sound entrainment so that it no longer syncs to beneficial effect. Problem solved here (don’t ask me how, but it works). And they use a suite of other acoustic technologies to massage your brain, nadis, meridians, and positronic circuits (if you’re a Star Trek android). Sound-wise, this program does in fact use synth, but it’s very gentle. Get ready for an extremely quick and deep calming effect. My only caveat is that it’s pricier than a conventional music track (iAwake’s first-hand research takes time and resources). That said, I can tell you that this program is as effective as the awesome MindSpa [http://avstim.com] audio-visual entrainment device that we reviewed here at Sounds True a while back—at a fraction of the cost.

Okay your turn: please recommend some of your favorites so we can all have more relaxation and creativity music options!

Live from the Wake Up Festival!

Dear friends,

We’ve arrived in Estes Park and are preparing the ground for this year’s Wake Up Festival! We get started in just a few hours with an opening ceremony where we’ll be welcoming a few hundred friends from around the world who will be participating in one of our pre-Festival workshops. The main Festival begins on Wednesday which will feature a concert with Snatam Kaur. As a reminder, we’ll be live streaming Snatam’s concert at no cost for those of you who would like to tune in! We’re expecting upwards of 1000 people to share in the Festival with us, and are so happy to be in this field with you all!

This year’s pre-Festival workshops, which we’re quite excited about, include:

Into the Heart of Chanting with Snatam Kaur

Qigong Empowerment – Awaken the 4 Golden Wheels with Robert Peng

Energy Medicine: A Hands-On Experience with Donna Eden and David Feinstein

The Deepest Acceptance: Discovering an Effortless “Yes” to Life with Jeff Foster

Journey with No End: Writing and Spiritual Growth with Mark Nepo

Experiencing the Shamanic Journey: A Direct Path of Revelation with Sandra Ingerman

Leaving you here with a photo live from Wake Up central… sending our love to all our friends around the world.

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Free live stream from opening night of The Wake Up Fes...

Dear friends, as we prepare the field for the upcoming Wake Up Festival, I am so happy to announce that we’ll be offering a free live stream of our dear friend Snatam Kaur’s opening night performance, on Wednesday, August 14. We’d really love to share this evening with all of you around the world and hope that you can join us.

To learn more and to register, at no cost, for the live stream, please see http://bit.ly/15tkdk9.

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