arrangement strategy

naught101 music music / arrangement / production

I often find it easy to build up good fun music loops, and then get stuck on figuring out where to take the track. These are my notes on how to speed up the arrangement process.

Start with a loop

  • Do this however you want.
  • A very good method is to start with a loop in your head, and then voice-record the melody, bassline, and/or beat. Then re-create it in your preferred production set-up.
  • If you don't have any ideas to start with, here are some methods:
    • Listen to a track you like, and stop it half way through, and then hum the melody/bassline/beat and continue it with variations, until you find something that's different enough, but still cool.
    • Listen to whatever sounds are happening around you (percussive sounds work best for this - try dropping a spoon), and pick up on rhythms and melodies and expand them.
    • Listening to music so quietly that you can barely hear it can also trigger this process.
    • Grab a random 30s sample, and mess with the pitch and time, and loop a section of it. If you don't like it, loop a different section
    • Think of an emotion that you would like to engender. What element would make that work? Create that and then add to it.

Expand your content

  • Make more content before trying to arrange. I like having at least and A and a B section that work together before trying to arrange anything.
  • The easiest way to do this is to take your loop, and delete all but a couple of elements, e.g.:
    • Keep the beat and bassline, and make new chords or lead melodies
    • Keep the kick and snare and something with melodic/harmonic content, and create new percussive loops
    • Keep the bass sound and bear, but write a new riff
    • Keep the beat and bassline, but find a new bass sound that still works, but feels different
    • Keep the bassline and write a new kick/snare pattern (try half-time or double time)
  • If you do some of these a few times in a row, you'll likely end up with a completely new loop, but because it is an evolution from the original, it will more than likely still work. Now you have an A and a B section, and probably a few extra parts that work well in between.
    • Obviously keep going with this if you want. You might generate 4 sections, but only use 2 of them, but maybe you could use the other 2 together in somehting else later.

Analyse for feel/emotion

  • Do a quick analysis of your A and B
    • How do they feel? Happy? Moody? Dark? Sad? Grindy? Driving? Use whatever words you like.
      • If this is hard, see if you can associate it with other situations, or other art that you've experienced, and ask you self how you felt then.
    • Is one more up-beat and energetic than the other?

Pick an arrangement structure

  • it absolutely does not matter which one.
    • If you're making house, your structure might be AAAAAA.
    • For Pop, you probably want something like Intro, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, Outro.
    • EDM might be similar to pop, but with Drops instead of a chorus.
  • Just fucking pick something.
    • Label the sections however you want, but make them clear to you.
    • Also decide how long you want each section to be. Are they all the same? Are your A sections twice as long as your B sections?
  • Figure out how long you want your song to be. Is it a 9 minute tech-house evolution? Is it a 1:50 punk song?
    • Then divide this up into your sections, so you know appoximately how long each section will be (20s? 1min?)
  • You can change all this later! you just need a skeleton to work with to get you going.

Fit your loops into you arrangement

  • Decide which of your A and B sections match your main sections
  • Slot them in.
  • Duplicate them out to 8 or 16 or 32 bars (or 12, or 7, I don't care, be different!), so that they are about as long as you estimated in the previous section.
  • Leave gaps for intros and bridges and stuff

Great, now your song is arranged!

  • Now, figure out what you need for the others sections.
    • Does your intro need drums? Can you just copy them over from the A section, an maybe remove some elements to thin them out, or change some of the intensity by reducing velocity or using different samples?
    • What changes in your bridge sections? bass line variation? chord sequence change?

Now your track is complete!

As my friend Evan says, the rest is just production. Now you will want to go around, adding transitions, fills between and within sections, and modulation and variation. And then come back and add whatever ear candy you want to include to keep it spicy. Or maybe minimal is fine, and you can call it done now.

That's it for now. I will probably come back and edit some more thoughts into this over time. If you've got any suggestions, let me know via Mastodon.