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22 essential arranging tips

By The MusicRadar team February 11, 2008 Tech  

Turn your musical ideas into fully-formed tunes

The arrange page in your DAW could soon be as busy as this one.

Arranging can broadly be de ned as the process of transforming a collection of musical

ideas into a complete track. It can involve everything from writing harmonies, re-arranging
parts, adding parts, removing parts, planning the structure of a song or even adding
e ects from time to time.

If there's one absolute truth about arranging, though, it's that it's the stage where you have to
stop making excuses and start making rm decisions, whether these be about which parts to
leave in or out, where to put them, or whether you need to add a whole new part altogether.

Consequently, for many, arranging is also where music making stops being fun and creative
and starts feeling a bit too much like pressure and hard work.

This needn't be the case, though - with all the power and versatility that modern technology
gives us, the possibilities are endless and the process can be relatively painless. Here are our
22 top arranging tips:

1. Listen, listen, listen. There's absolutely no substitute for experience, so be sure to analyse
the arrangements of all your favourite tracks. Listen to what other producers have done and
try to gure out why it works (or why it doesn't work, as the case may be...).
2. Don't feel like you have to use a dull old fade-out at the end of your track. If it's an album or
radio track, you can have an abrupt nish, or one that's not at the end of a bar. If the music
just stops dead, people will notice and may better remember your tune.

3. Try fading in a track through the intro, perhaps over a sound e ect, such as running water.
The classic late-80s house cut Sueno Latino uses this technique to stunning e ect.

4.You don't have to have an intro at all - a number of tunes, particularly hip-hop tracks, do
perfectly well without. A popular technique is to have the vocal start slightly before the
instrumental parts, with the beats and music kicking in quickly on bar 1, beat 1.

5. Layer, layer, layer! This really is the key to getting a pro sound. While layering is often used
to add fatness to your parts, in this case it's more a question of sonic variation. If you have a
plinky lead ri , for example, use a more rounded synth part with a more sustained envelope
playing the same pattern over the chorus (and try compressing them together for extra
oomph).

6. If you happen to have a decent guitar part in your arrangement somewhere, why not begin
the track with it and kick everything else in afterwards? All Day And All Of The Night by The
Kinks serves as a great example of what we're talking about here.

7. If you want to liven up your chord voicings in di erent sections, try having various synth
pads play the notes of your chords, one for each note.

8. Never underestimate the power of vocals. Don't be shy of dropping out everything but the
vocal in sections of your arrangement.

9. If your arrangement seems crowded, try removing elements of certain parts that interfere
with each other. For example, if your vocal is clashing with a guitar or keyboard part, try
cutting out the guitar when the vocal plays. BB King is the master of vocal/guitar part
alternation.
10. If you need to ll out your choruses, try reinforcing your vocal with an instrument part
playing the same notes.

11. Keep your audience on their toes - don't feed them the same parts and accompanying
chords each time a verse or chorus comes along. Try switching chords and ri s half way
through.

12. To add excitement to strings, pads and other musical parts during key moments, try
layering them up with another version of the part pitched up one or two octaves.

13. Don't be shy of some theatrical mood building. Whether this involves samples from The
Matrix or Olivier's Hamlet is immaterial, as long as it adds interest.

14. Never neglect the power of judicious sidechained compression on dull pads and other
sounds. Put a compressor over them and route your bass drum track into its sidechain to add
some real dynamics.

15. Be sure to know your target audience and craft your arrangements accordingly. If
somebody's most likely to hear it rst at 7.45am on the M1, then a subtle arrangement may
well be lost to fatigue, but if it's meant for co ee table listening, there's much more scope for
imagination and a softly softly approach.

16. Arranging should be fun, so don't get bogged down trying to squeeze large round pegs
into small square holes. If a part isn't working with everything else, ditch it!

17. If you're going to use very distinctive and powerful instruments like saxophones, be sure
to keep them to a minimum or they'll completely dominate your track.

18. If you're planning to take your track on the road, you should rearrange it, paying particular
attention to big, recognisable sections that people might want extended. And don't forget to
plan for a silent section so that the audience can clap along - eight or 16 bars ought to do it!

19. Dance music shouldn't have a monopoly on breakdowns. Keep an ear out for any
interesting weirdness you can nd for a mini tension-fuelling breakdown in a pop or rock
track too. Spoken word, sound e ects and dodgy copyright-infringing movie samples all have
their merits.
20. Don't neglect some of the fun old tricks, such as pitching your track up to heighten its
energy. The easiest way to do this is to make it two or three BPM slower than you intend it to
be in the end, then simply use an audio editor or timestretching program like Ableton Live to
speed (and pitch) the track up when it's nished.

21. Chopping up all the beats of a bar before a chorus and then rearranging and/or muting
them can have a dramatic e ect. You can combine this trick with some sidechained gating,
using a dedicated (and unheard) signal to create a chopping e ect on your track at key
 moments. Check out the debut album from Mylo, Destroy Rock & Roll, to hear the kind of
thing we mean.

22. If you're making electronic music and plan to create a three to four minute radio edit at
some point, make it before, rather than after, the club mix. It's usually easier this way, and it
won't involve you having to agonise about which of your precious and carefully crafted 12"
edits and breakdowns to lose.

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