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4. Starting your arrangement

1

After loading in the tutorial files to a 140bpm project, you’ll hear that we’ve got three sections of the track to work with: the intro, piano breakdown and drop. We’ll kick off by extending the intro’s length to 32 bars, muting Break 2 for the first 16 to add suspense. 4

Duplicate the drop section twice, so it’s 48 bars in length. Mute the vocal and piano from the last 16 bars. Now, let’s pitch-shift the female vocal using SoundToys LittleAlterBoy. Load the plugin, link the Pitch and Formant then set them to 7, giving an instant chipmunk vocal. 2

We’ll mute the 808 Bass for the first eight bars. Now, let’s double the length of the piano breakdown to 32 bars. Copy Break 1 and 2 over to the second 16-bar section, then mute Break 2 for the first eight. And mute the last bar of the breakdown entirely. 5

Delete the last bar of the drop, then copy over the reverse break and MC vocal fill from the breakdown in order to replace it. This’ll break things up, leading on to the next section of the track. Take the second 16 bars of the intro, and place it in after the drop. 3

A vocal snip from Insideinfo’s CM194 sample pack adds some impact to the drop. Load in Coppa3.wav, and delete the second bar. Turn the channel down to -6dB to balance the levels. Copy a bar of Break 1 into the gap, then reverse it to make a fill. 6

To complete our arrangement, grab the second 16 bars of the breakdown as well as the whole drop, then copy it over to the end of the arrangement. Mute the drums from the first eight bars of the second piano break to make this section different from the first one.