Club Construction

Write, arrange and build the perfect dance track

Structuring a dance record shouldn’t be hard. After all, genres such as house, techno, grime, DnB and other electronic styles are reasonably basic next to epic film scores and elaborate pop records.

However, the magic in this simplicity can make the act of arrangement a frustrating one. What sounds effortlessly simple on a record or dancefloor isn’t necessarily easy to replicate again. And unless you’re multitracking audio from hardware, live jam style, it’s likely that you’re a prisoner of the DAW: the software studio environment that brings both unlimited possibilities and crippling creative restraints.

With so many producers struggling to extend out short loops and sketches into impactful arrangements, it’s time to revisit this field of DAW-based despair with an inspirational guide to dance music structuring in all forms.

Over the next few pages, we’ll tackle arrangement from the electronic producer’s perspective. After a conceptual tour of the approaches you need to get those tracks finished, no matter the genre, we’ll look at specific techniques you can work into your productions right now, from sound design to drum programming and more.

Artful arrangements

Although production skills like sound design, composing and mixing are all useful, the field of arrangement is probably the most important. Why? Well, everything else falls apart if you can’t get those parts to work collectively across a defined period of time.

After all, becoming proficient at arrangement is tougher than learning a specific skill in, say, synth programming or mixing kick drums. Structuring music is objectively more ‘art’ than ‘science’, and each genre has its own trademarks, which can be interchanged and subverted. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, which is what makes a true producer an artist – but also why so many of us struggle to spin short musical ideas into actual songs.

What cements the importance of arrangement is the fact that so many tracks – especially those designed for clubs and dancefloors – are created using an absolute bare minimum of elements, and those sparser tunes are often the ones that are most effective. Less is more, as they say. This minimalist approach to writing seems inherently counterintuitive, as when a song sounds incomplete, our initial instinct is to reach for more ‘stuff’ to plug holes and develop the idea further, even though the act of doing this is probably diluting that initial idea and only creating more problems come mix time.

Ultimately, training yourself to become better at arranging and finishing music is a process of trial and error, meaning you have to simply try (and fail) over and over again to build up the proficiency required to get those 16-bar loops past the finish line. It’s analogous to ‘progressive overload’ at the gym – you need to train your arrangement ‘muscle’ and get all of your loops laid out in some form of structure each and every time, even if the results aren’t perfect, as that’s how you’ll learn what works.

Aside from studying other tracks and identifying why their arrangements work, a big factor in structuring tracks effectively is ‘feeling’. This may sound a little abstract… but have you ever played around with a track sketch and allowed the sounds to almost arrange themselves? You might have an evolving synth that takes itself on a timbral journey into its own arrangement, or your drum groove may create its own sense of progression as you introduce and shape the sounds in context. When this happens, it’s vital that you embrace these ‘clues’ and roll with the structure that’ll work best – or better yet, take these ideas and use them to influence a whole new structural adventure.