Sort your arrangement to manage mix space
Arrangement is often an overlooked part of the production process as it’s associated with putting notes on a score for musicians to play and that’s not something all of us need to do. And yet arrangement doesn’t only refer to that process. It’s a word used to describe which instruments will play the notes present at any moment in a track, and exactly what those notes will be. What you’ll find is that many arrangements, particularly in Pop and Dance music, often use versions of a technique referred to as ‘call and response’ – a single musical figure followed by a complementary answering one which takes over from it, rather than the two happening at once. This means that both can be loud and attention-grabbing as they rarely overlap.
There are great examples of this in Bruno Mars’ track 24K Magic. Here, a really weighty synth stab is used in the chorus, alongside a raft of vocals – with both lead and stacked backing vocals. To get around the problem of all of these parts playing at once in the chorus, there’s a big stab on the down-beat of the chorus, before the synth drops out to make room for the vocals which, again, stay out of the way when the synth stab comes in again two bars later. It’s only at the end of the phrase that both parts play at once. In the bridge, there is a sustained synth part which builds up to the chorus but, to prevent it getting too large and fighting the vocals, a low-pass filter has been added to it with a quieter, slowly rising synth behind it to build excitement. Via careful frequency selection, volume and ‘space’ (use of reverb to set the sound back in the mix), neither keyboard part gets in the way of the vocal, which is prioritised in the mix.
Pick a track you like and unpick how its been arranged – you’ll probably find the call and response concept features heavily.