DAYS 15 TO 21 Creating an arrangement

Aims:

> Turn our ideas into full tracks

> Add movement and tension to your work

Hopefully by now you should have a variety of ideas that fit the brief you set yourself with week 1’s exercises.

It’s this next stage of the track creation process that can trip up a lot of music makers; transforming an idea we’re excited about into a full track without draining all of our enthusiasm for it in the process.

This is where the templates created in week 1 come in. Take your ideas, loops and track elements and – as best you can – lay them out in, or record them into, your DAW’s arrangement window to match the structure of your MIDI template. This won’t instantly give you a finished track – you’ll undoubtedly find plenty of areas that need refinement. Hopefully though, refining your tracks based on these initial frameworks should feel less daunting than staring at a 16-bar loop and wondering where to go next.

Your first step should be to decide what’s missing or needs moving.

Does your track’s intro feel too long or short? Do your chords need backing up with a synth pad? Is the bassline carrying the weight of the track or do you need an extra sub to back it up? You might find that certain sounds don’t feel quite right now that they’ve been placed in a wider context, in which case it might be worth swapping or rerecording elements.

The second stage is to edit your arrangement for movement and tension. If sounds remain static throughout the track, you’re unlikely to hold listeners’ attention. This is particularly true in dance music where build and release – aka ‘the drop’ – is key to engaging the dancefloor. This is achieved in a variety of ways, the most obvious being through automation – changing the parameters of a sound – or the addition of ‘transition FX’, ie pieces of audio designed to bridge the gap between track sections. The most obvious example of these latter elements are the white noise builds heard regularly in dance music.

On this page you’ll find some tips to help you flesh out and add movement to your arrangements.