Music Arrangement Secrets, Part 1: Arrangement Theory

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Music Arrangement Secrets. Part one, Arrangement theory. So in this class, we're going to talk about everything you need to know about arranging music. This is probably the most requested thing I've had in the last year or so with people asking me about this. So here's what we're going to cover. In this class, we're going to talk about what arrangement means and what our goals are of arranging. It's a big topic, so don't think it's just fluff. I'm going to give you a track to work on. You're welcome to work on your own tracks throughout this class. But if you don't have a work in progress that's ready, then I'm going to give you a track that you can play around with, do some experiments on, and then we'll kind of work together throughout the class to turn this very flawed track into a very nice arrangement. So we're going to talk about what it means to arrange something, what it means to have an effective arrangement, and why you're probably getting stuck trying to finish some pieces. It's probably because of the arrangement or struggles you're having with the arrangement. Then in part two and three, we're gonna go way way, way deeper and get into transitions and all the nitty gritty to really make your track pop. So without further ado, let's dive in to Music Arrangement Secrets. Part one. 2. How This Class Will Work: All right. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this giant Arrangement class. Now, this is a class that so many people have asked me for for so long to talk in detail, like real, real detail about arrangement. So I've been working on this for a really long time, like how I'm going to do this. And, you know, I've outlined now three classes worth of material, and this is going to get really in the weeds so that we are making amazing arrangements by the end of this. So how this is going to work? Is I'm going to give you a track, this track that's on the screen. This This is a track of mine that I made for this, and it's fine. It's a fine track. It's not amazing. It's just fine, okay? Like, don't judge me. It's got some arrangement problems, okay? This is not a great arrangement. So we're going to fix it, and we're going to fix it by using some techniques that we're going to learn in this class. I'm going to give you this whole session. You can do whatever you want with it. You can play with it. You can pick it apart. You can, you know, just go nuts with it. But the point of me giving it to you is that we're going to move stuff around. We're going to explore it. We're going to learn how to make a great arrangement, and this will be some great source material. Now, if you don't want to use this track, if you want to use one your own tracks, that's totally fine, too. You don't have to use this one. But I just want to give you something to use so that you can follow along with what I'm doing. So throughout the three parts of this class, we may do three different tracks, and we may do one track like this for the whole time. I'm not sure yet. We'll do this track for part one of this series. We might switch to a different one. I might make something new for part two and new for part three, or we might just keep working on this one for all of it. We'll see what happens when we get there. But for part one, we're going to work on this. It's called Arrangement one track. And we'll see how it goes. Okay, so I'm going to talk to you in just a few minutes about how to download, how to set up this track so you can use it. But first, let's go through some of the more just some quick basics about this class and what you're going to need to take full advantage of this class, including software, hardware, all that good stuff. So let's dive into that right now. 3. Tools you will need in this class: Okay, what kind of tools are you gonna need for this class? Really, just one, and that is a DA. I'm going to be using Ableton in this class, but wait, you don't need Ableton. Don't let that freak you out. You can use any do you want, and I'm even going to show you how to set up this track in whatever do you're in. The D really won't matter for this class, okay? It really won't know that I say that in every class or a lot of classes. And I know you probably hear that in a lot of classes, and then you're like, Oh, he said, It doesn't matter if I'm using logic or not, but this class is all about logic or whatever. But in this class, it really won't going to be talking about big picture stuff. We're going to be talking about how to set up transitions and all of this stuff. It's going to be music stuff. It's not really going to be click here, click here, click here. I'm going to assume you know how to do a lot of stuff in your da. So this isn't a how to use a Da class. If you don't know what I mean by Da, I mean like Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, FL Studio, reaper, garage band, any of them. Any of them will be fine. As long as you can make music in that Da, you will be just fine. So what do you need to be successful in this class? You need a DA, something like that, and you need music. You need some music to work on. If you have some of your own, that's awesome. If you don't have this track of mine that I'm going to get you in just a second. Okay? Easy peasy. That's really all you need. There's nothing else fancy here that we need to worry about. So next, let's just spend a minute and focus on what we talk about or what we mean when we talk about arrangement, okay? Because this is a heavy thing. This is a big topic, and it means a few things. It means different things to different people, and it means different things based on what genre you're in, even. So let's make sure we're all on the same page and talk about what arrangement even means. 4. Let's define Arrangement. It means a few things.: Okay, so I have this friend who is a professional arranger, okay? There are a lot of people who are professional arrangers. Uh, this friend of mine, he works for a big, well known TV show that you've probably heard of one of those talent shows, right? So where you where there's, you know, like, a young singer on stage, and, like, America votes on how much talent they have. I'm trying to avoid saying the name of the show, even though I just basically said the name of the show. So when they come up to when they get on the show and they say, I want to sing this song, someone has to arrange that song for the local band. Um, and so this is what this friend of mine does. That's his job. And so, arranging to him means getting the chart and notating out the harmony, the instrumentation, and the structure of the tune. That's an arrangement. An arranger typically does that in the traditional sense. It's someone who is a music theory monster. Especially in the jazz sense, an arranger is someone who is really rewriting the music from a really, like, harmonic perspective. That's a little different than what we're doing. What we're talking about is primarily songwriting here. We're not really in the jazz or classical world at the moment. We're going to be talking about songwriting in pretty much any genre, other than classical and jazz, I suppose. And we're going to be talking about how to structure a song for Maximum Impact, to help it land on the listener the best. So we're going to be talking about how do we make our chorus just really hit? How do we make our verse, build to our chorus. How do we make those transitions between the two work? How do we control the emotional arc of the piece? So we're mostly going to be talking about form, structure, transition, emotional arcs, like I just said, and all the nuance that goes in with that. We will talk a little bit about harmony and how that affects all of these things. So you're not going to get off the hook with the music theory stuff. There will be a little of that, but not too much. Don't forget. But our main goal is to figure out how to take your song that maybe isn't quite working right to restructure it to just really make it pop. So that's what we're going to be focused on when we talk about arrangement in this class. 5. How to mastering arrangement help our music?: So why do we care about arrangement? Why does this matter? Why is this such a big deal to a lot of people that they've been bugging me to make this class for so many years? A few reasons. One is that the arrangement of a song is what finishes it, right? A lot of you probably have some really great sections of songs. You might have 100 tracks just sitting in a folder unfinished. And if you just had some tools to help you arrange them, you might be able to finish them, maybe even combine them together to make a, you know, maybe one fragment of a tune is a chorus, and one fragment is, you know, a verse or whatever. So having some really good arrangement tools at your disposal, some really good techniques and some rules will help you finish tunes. It'll help you start tunes. Another reason is that it helps you tell the story. And this is the one that I really can't emphasize enough. Arrangement is about contrast. You're gonna hear me say this 100 bajillion times in this class. Contrast. A chorus doesn't hit without contrast, right? What comes before it matters just as much as what it is, right? Like, if you have, like, a big, loud, awesome chorus, but right before it is a big, loud, awesome bridge, then that chorus isn't gonna hit, right? It's just gonna we're just gonna roll into that chorus, and it's not gonna really land. So that doesn't mean you can't have a big, loud, awesome bridge. It just means you need a interest you need some kind of transition to get into that chorus, or maybe you need to rearrange it so that we can contrast a little bit before we go into the chorus. So contrast, contrast, contrast is what we need to to make our arrangement, have an arc and tell the story that we're trying to tell. If it's just quiet all the way through, if it's just loud all the way through, we're going to lose our listener, and they're not going to understand what we're trying to depict with our song or our track or our piece or whatever it is. So the arrangement is just as important as the lyrics, as the harmony as any other element of the tune. Okay. Alright, let's talk about genre real quick, when it comes to, like, how we're going to roll with this class. M. 6. A note about genre: Okay, genre. If you've taken my classes before, if you know me, you know kind of what I'm into, right? So, this class is genre neutral. You can be into any genre you want, and that'll be just great. You'll be able to follow along just fine. I work really hard to make this open to all genres. So if you're working on, like, country music, rock music, anything you want, okay? That being said, my main background is in electronic music. So I kind of focus I kind of talk from an electronic music standpoint, but that's just kind of my language and where I come from. It doesn't need to be how it is. So you can totally interpret this through the lens of any genre. The track I'm going to give you is pretty much an electronic thing. It does have a vocal track to it, so it does feel more like a song. And we're definitely going to focus in on songs in this class. But I just want you to know that any genre is fine. All of these principles we're talking about will work in any genre, except for a few little things. We'll talk about, like, some things like the drop and things like that that are specific to electronic music. I'll mention kind of on the side. But by and large, all of this applies to any genre, even though I like to talk about electronic music because that's my jam. You can use all of these techniques in any genre that you like. Cool. Cool. Alright, let's talk about this track that I'm going to give you and how to get it set up so that if you want to use it, you can get it set up, and then we'll dive into some stuff. 7. Here is an Imperfect Track to Work on: Okay, so let's take a quick look at this track. It's, you know, a little bit of a mess. I think I labeled it in my notes as a mess. That's the name of the track at the moment. So it starts with this kind of atmospheric thing. Up here, we've got drums. Nothing kind of extraordinary here. A little bit of ambient effects, hats, snare drum, this kind of cool just crunching away base grooves. You can kind of see where it shifts harmonically here and here. This green stuff is all synth things that are happening. And then down at the bottom, we have these vocal things. These are just vocal samples that I found. This is the main one up here, and it, like, kind of works. It's not awesome. I just kind of threw it in there so that we would have something to work with. There's definitely a potential here, and we will chop it up and make it work better, and I'll show you how I'm going to do that. Shortly, um but basically, we have the main vocal here and then just affected vocals here. So we've just got a bunch of, like, reverb and delay and EQ and tuning and things on these other ones, and then some background vocals here. So these are not my vocals, just samples I found online, able to be used. So everything is intentionally just a little janky. So it's leaving room for us to polish it up, both in terms of just some of the oddities of the track, but also in terms of the arrangement. There is intentionally, you're going to listen to it and say, I don't really know what the verse is and what the chorus is. And what I would like you to do the first time you listen to it, which we're going to do in just a second, is think about why that is. Think, what is the verse and if you can't identify which section is the verse or which section is the chorus, try to figure out why. Why is it hard to tell in this particular track, okay? We'll come back and dissect that shortly as we work on fixing it. Okay? So let's hear it one time through now. 8. Here is How to Download and Install it Using Ableton.: Okay, so here's how you can download and set up this very flawed track. If you're on Ableton, here's how you do it. If you're not using Ableton Live, you can skip this video and go to the next one where I talk about how to do it if you're using anything other than Ableton Live. Okay, if you are using Ableton, all you have to do is go to the download link. Now, that might be in the file section of this site, or it might be in a text link in the next lesson or two lessons from now. So when you see that, you're going to download the Ableton link, which will get you an Ableton Pack, okay? That Ableton Pack is going to look like this. Arrangement one PAC ALP, okay? Now, these work a little funny. This pack has everything you need. It has the session. It has the samples. It has everything laid out in it. All of the MIE tracks, I've rendered as audio tracks. So you really don't need to worry about any effects or anything like that. Everything should just work fine. So you're going to double click on this ALP, and it's going to ask you for a place to save it, okay? And this is one thing it's a little confusing. So I'm going to put it on my desktop, and it's going to extract everything. This is basically like a zip file, if you're familiar with that. So it's going to extract everything. But once it's done, extracting everything, it's not going to do anything. It's just going to sit there. And this can be a little confusing. So okay, see, it's done, and it didn't do anything. So what you need to do now is find go to the spot on your computer where you extracted it too. Go there, and you'll see Ableton session. Open that session, okay? And then that's your session, okay? So save that and you're off and running, okay? So you extract it and then go to where you extracted it and then open it, okay? And then you'll be good to go. You'll have exactly what I have here on the screen. So couldn't be easier. So, you are one of the lucky ones if you're using Ableton. If you're not using Ableton, it's a little more complicated because we're gonna have to do it with stems, which we'll talk about doing right now. 9. Here is How to Download and Install it Using Any Other DAW (Using Stems): Alright, next, let's talk about how to set this track up on any other software. So if you're not using Ableton, how to set this up. Now, just a reminder, you don't have to set this track up. If you're like, Oh, my God, this track is awful. I'd rather use one of my own songs. That's just fun. You will totally be able to do that. But if you want to do this, setting it up in any other DA is just fine. It's not too hard. We're going to do it with the stems or the individual files. So I'm going to do it here in Logic. So I've made a new session in Logic. I'm going to go create a new track, and I think I'm going to need about 25 tracks. Just audio tracks. I make my window a little smaller here so you can see it. Okay, now, in the download, which you'll see in either the next text thing or in the downloads of this area, depending on how this website is formatted, you will see something called Download stems. Okay? That's what you want to download. This will be a very big file. So click Download and then get a cup of coffee. Wait a second. And then you will have a folder that looks like this, stems and a bunch of audio files. Okay? So here's what I'm going to do. Going to go. I'm going to take one of them. I'm going to drag it in and drag it all the way left. For this first one, it's going to ask me if I want to change my sample rate. Let's say, or convert file doesn't really matter for us in this case. Okay, so we're going to do that. It's going to think for just a second. Great. Now I'm going to take the next one. I'm going to drag it in. Now, the key here, I'm going to zoom in. The key is your track each of these audio clips needs to be all the way to the left. Okay? If they're not all the way to the left, this isn't going to work. Like, if this one is here, that's not going to work. It's going to make a mess. It has to be all the way as far left as you can go. This is going to make sure that everything lines up, okay? So here's the next one. Here's the next one. Here's the next one. And I'm just going to do this with everything. And once I'm done, I'll be able to just hit play, and it'll sound exactly the same. Now, if you want to be a little extra, which I would highly recommend in this case, there's a lot of organizing you could do here because you've got some extra stuff here. You've got buses and groups that are here that you don't really need there's really nothing wrong in having them. You also have our tracks, I think, sorted probably alphabetically here, which isn't a very good way to sort them. So you might want to rearrange them like I have them in the Ableton session, so based grouped by percussion, bass, synths and vocals. And somewhere, there's going to be a full bounce to the very last one, it would appear. Here it is. This very last one is a full bounce of the full track. So you can use that to compare and make sure everything is right, this one here. Okay? So for now, I'm going to just kind of turn that one off. Even though it doesn't look like there's much here right now, lining up everything at the beginning will make it so that everything works and everything sounds great. But I would recommend that you organize the session, cut out empty space can actually help. That'll actually help a lot for what we're doing. What I mean by that is, you can do this to cut out the empty space that's here, but be careful. Don't do this and move the clip. You don't want to do that. You want to do this and cut out the empty space. It's very difficult to tell the difference. How would I tell the difference? Gosh, I don't even know. It's this symbol that I'm seeing here. This is trimming empty space, and this is moving the clip. So just be sure that you're not moving the clip, but you're trimming empty space. If you want to do that, if you're like, whoa whoa whoa, I don't understand what you're saying. Forget. Just forget it. Don't worry about it. But this will set up your track so that you can follow along with what we're going to do with this track in the class. Cool. 10. When Moving Chucks Around, Be Sure you Land EXACTLY the Barline: Alright, so in this section, I want to talk about some basic timeline functions that we're going to need because we're going to be moving, like, big chunks of material around in the timeline in order to mess around with our arrangement, and we want to make sure we don't screw it up. So there's a few things that are going to be really, really helpful tricks for navigating this task of moving big chunks of stuff around. So I want to give you a couple tips before we go into that. First, we're gonna be moving things around in bars, okay? So typically, most of the time. At least, once we get into working on transitions, that'll be a little different. That'll be a little more nuanced. But when we're working on the main arrangement, we're talking about bars primarily. So let's look, like, right, maybe right. Let's find a good spot here. I don't know, right here, okay? So if we take, like, all of this material here, right? Let's just take all of this stuff. And we move it to over here, right? I'm just clicking and dragging to move it over there. That's fine, right? Like, that totally works. I'm going to undo that. Here's one thing that I see happening a lot, okay? Now, Ableton is gonna stop me from doing what I really want to do. So I'm going to make it so it's a little easier to do the wrong thing. Okay watch. Okay, there. Looks like I did it just fine, but I totally didn't. This is going to screw up my arrangement a whole bunch. Do you know what I did? Could you see it? What I did is when I dropped that chunk of music down, I did not drop it exactly on the grid. If I zoom way in, you can see I am totally off the grid on this kick. This base is on the grid. The kick is off the grid. That's going to make a huge mess. That's all it. So I'm just gonna undo that. Zoom back out. And turn back on snap to grid so that it makes it impossible for me to do that, right? Now, it's just going to kind of make me do that. But I'm still going to zoom way in. I'm going to make sure that I am exactly on the grid. If you are exactly on that downbeat, right here where it gives us where it tells us, that is the downbeat when we get, like, a whole number. No matter how far you zoom in, we are going to be right on that line, right? I zoom way out. Okay? So I see this happen all the time with students where they're moving things around and things are just sounding worse and worse and they can't figure it out. And the problem is every time they move something around, they're not landing just perfectly on the grid. So you have to really pay attention to that, okay? Some software makes it easy for you to lock right in on the grid. So doesn't just keep an eye out for that, okay? If you're not locked into the grid, you're gonna have problems. Unless you're dealing with ambient or some kind of music that's not on a grid, then it's a different story. But if you're dealing with, you know, pulsed music, make sure you drop it exactly where it needs to go. 11. Select All, Select Some, Select Everything in Front of this Point: Okay, next, let's talk about selecting things. There's a couple handy little tricks we can do here. So let's say I want to grab everything in this region. I can click on something Shift click. Okay? Shift click. A very important tool. Shift that works on just about every DAW and operating system. I'm pretty sure. Shift click. I can shift click down too. I can go down here, Shift click. It's going to select everything in between. Shift click. Shift, click Shift, click. Okay? Go all the way down here. Shift, click. Okay? So shift, click. Now, another selecting thing you can do is some software has the ability for you to select a point like here, and then everything in front of it, or even sometimes everything behind it. So you could click and then say, select everything in front of this clip, right? Or everything behind this clip. You can't do that in Ableton, as far as I know. So the way I do it in Ableton is just zoom way out and then shift click this way to get everything that you want. So if I am here on this click, kick, and I need to make some space right here. See, this is a very common thing when you're working on an arrangement. Like, I need to insert a bar right here, right? How am I going to do that? Because it means I'm going to have to move everything over that way. And that is exactly what it means. So you could select here and then all the way down and then all the way over here and then nudge everything over like that. Undo that. Or or you could just select here. And if you're in a DA that you have the ability to select everything in front of it, you could do that, too. But in Ableton, I'm typically just going to zoom way out, select everything, and then drag it over like that to make the extra space that I need. If you have any automation or anything like that, typically that moves over with what you're doing. One last undo. One last thing about selecting that is very important is select all. Command A is select A. Now, Select All has kind of a hidden trick to it. You can use Select All just to grab a lot, but not everything, right? So we're going to select Okay, so watch this. I'm going to select A, and then on a Mac, anyway, you can command click while you have everything selected to unselect that track. So if I want to do everything except the kick, I can command click this kick track, and now I have everything selected except the kick, right? Let's undo that. So Apple A Command A for Select All, and then Command click to unselect some things, right? You can also do Command A to select A, and then control, Shift click on a thing, and then shift, click on back where you were. I'm sure there's an easier way to do that, but that's how I often do it, and that I'll leave off something like that. Now you can collect that to make the extra space that you want right there. So just little tricks for, you know, navigating around and selecting big chunks of stuff can be really handy because we're gonna be doing probably a lot of that as we grab different chunks. 12. Option-Click and Drag to Copy and Duplicate: Oh, and I almost forgot one of my favorite, favorite like, select copy paste tricks that I use all day long is selecting Let's go in on something. Selecting and then option click and drag. Okay? If you're not familiar with that, what it does is it leaves the clip where it was and makes a copy of it. Right? So basically, you're dragging away a duplicate just like that, right? Like, here's the thing, Option click and drag. Now you have two of that thing. It's a clone It's a cloning machine. And it works on whole sections two. If you want to do this, let's say we want another one of these, we can just go like that. And now we have that section again, right? So option click and drag is a great way to just fill things out. So don't forget about that one. You're gonna see me do that a lot, and that's what I'm doing. 13. Creating a Version History.: Okay, two more quick things. And then we're gonna get into Arrangement theory, which is where things start getting real good. Okay, save multiple versions, okay? I'm going to say that again even closer. Save multiple versions. This is very important, okay? Um, you're going to make a really cool arrangement, and then you're going to say, uh I can make it better, and you're gonna keep messing with it, and then you're gonna be like, Man, what I had yesterday was cooler. I wish I still had it. And if you would have saved multiple versions, you would still have it. So here's what we're gonna do. Every now and then, maybe once a day, maybe once an hour. Every time you feel like you got something kind of interesting, we're gonna go here. We're going to go file, we're going to go save Live set as. We're going to call it whatever we want to call it, and then we're going to say, underscore or just hyphen. Let's go just hyphen. If you want. It's easier, and then the date. However you write the date. I write it ten, 15, 25. So, okay, we're going to do that. You're going to save it as a ten in the same folder. Here's the deal. These Ableton files or these session files, whatever, Do your m. The session files themselves are really small. They're essentially a text file, sort of. They're really not big at all. All the audio files and the project files are in these folders, and these ALS files, the session files just reference all of those files. So the actual project file is just like a text file that says what to put where. It's like a map. It's not a big file. Like, I'm going to tell you how big this session, the ALS file is 140 kilobytes. That is a text file. That is a very, very, very small file. That's like the size of an email, a big email. So save early, save often. These won't eat up your hard drive, okay? So then if you think, I wish I remembered what I did the other day, go back and you have it. This is especially important when you are working on your arrangement. You're welcome. And 14. We (Usually) Work in Groups of 4, 8, or 16 Bars: Okay, last thing on just some sort of technical stuff. This one kind of bridges the technical and the arrangement theory stuff. But I want you to look at your bars up here, okay? This number, for me, it's up here. For some of you, it's at the bottom. But we're going to look at bars, okay? See here, I see 81 82, 83. And depending on how you're zoomed in, those are going to look different. So 81 means bar 8,181.2 means bar 81 beat two. Bar 81 beat three, bar 81 beat four, bar 82 beat one is what that means. The beat 1.1 is shorthand. It's just kind of to hide the 0.1. Okay, but I'm going to zoom back out just a little bit. There we are. So we're looking at 1 bar is this, okay? The reason I'm pointing this out right now is that when we're talking about arrangement, we're typically working in groups of bars, four, eight, 16. Sometimes 12. But 48 or 16 is the most common thing. So we're talking about chunks of 4 bars, chunks of 8 bars, chunks of 16 bars. That's typically how we're working. And that's a really interesting thing you can kind of study if you want. That's just kind of how we like our music in these repeating patterns of 48 or 16. It's just weird. That's just what we do. Now, here's one of the important things about arrangement. Does that mean you have to have your track be in groups of four, eight, or 16? No, it does not. Does not mean that at all. But what it means is that the expectation is that the expectation from the audience, from the listener is that your track is going to be in some sort of groups of four, eight or 16. You don't have to do that, but if you don't do it, you have to know that you're playing with someone's expectation of what's happening. And that can be really fun. Okay? So you have to either do what's expected or do not what's expected, both of which are fun. We'll talk more about that soon. But when I say we do things in groups of 48 or 16, what I mean is, like, if we look here, this is four beats long or 4 bars long, this intro thing, and then there's 4 bars of something else, and then 4 bars. And then, you know, the base comes in. So each of these kind of chunks is 4 bars. I put a marker every 4 bars in this just to help us kind of see what's happening. So here's 8 bars. Here's 12 bars. That's weird. So watch out for those groups of four, eight, 12 or 16 bars as we're working. Those are the main things that we're doing. Those are the main things that people expect out of a song. Alright, those are the main kind of principles that I just kind of wanted the technical things that I just kind of wanted to get in your head, get us all on the same page on. Now, let's get into arrangement theory. 15. Here is the Magic Word I'm Going to Say 1000 Times in this Class: Contrast: Okay, so arrangement theory. So I'm going to tell you kind of three big ideas about arrangement. And when I say arrangement theory, there is no, like, arrangement theory. There is no, like, music theory for arrangement. When I say arrangement theory, what I'm talking about is ideas that go into making a great arrangement. And these are things that I've collected through books, study, and just analysis. So this is my own theory in a way, but it's based on, you know, hundreds of hours of study and listening and writing and the way I do stuff. So I'm going to talk about three concepts, and then I'm going to go into a list of rules, big quotes around that, because I know from all my other classes, y'all like rules. So I'm going to give you a list of rules to follow, and we'll get to those in just a minute. But first, I want to talk about these three kind of big ideas, okay? These are things I want you to keep in mind whenever you're arranging. So first, arranging is about contrast, okay? We've talked about this before, but let's go into it a little bit more. Contrast is everything. That's how we know where we are in a song. The loud part is the chorus. The quiet part is the bridge or the verse or whatever, right? Listen to any song and listen to the density of the song, right? So what is the density? That is how thick or thin it is? Is there a lot going on? Is there a little going on? Let's listen to that in our example track here. I'm going to fix that. We'll call. We'll do that. Just hold on. Then maybe we get to here. Same thickness, same density. Now, this idea of density, one thing I like about traditional notated scores, just, you know, notated music. Whether you can read music or not, you can see this idea of density on a score really quickly. Let me show you. Is Mahler's ninth symphony, okay? This is like, page 26 or whatever. So check this out, right? Like, this is, you know, a whole bunch of notes. Don't worry about it. But let's zoom way way way way out, right? If we just kind of zoom way out, don't worry about individual notes and just think about what does the density look like? We can kind of see maybe right here, things are getting a little thicker. Maybe right here, there's some kind of line and more is happening here than was happening before. What about right here, right? Like, less is happening here. There's a lit It's thinner there. So we can kind of see, here's a thin part, here's a thicker part. We can kind of see this idea of density. Now, it's not the same that in Mahler, we're going to see like verse chorus, verse chorus in the same way as we see it in a pop song, right? Like, this is a symphony. It's much more complicated than that. Form works different, but it's the same idea, right? You can see the contrasting sections. That's how we know we're in different sections of a song is by the contrast between them. If there's no contrast, then there's no section. There has to be contrast. Contrast is everything. So, if you want to make that chorus really pop when you get to it, how do you do it? Yes, you need to make that chorus land perfectly, but you also need to take a step back to the previous section and pull it down to increase the contrast, right? If that previous section goes way down, gets real quiet, gets really thin, gets real light in its density, then when that chorus comes and it's big, it's going to really hit, right? That's what you want. It's not always about making the chorus as big as it can be in the case where you want a big chorus, right? I'm just using this as one example. It's also about increasing the density or the contrast by making the previous section thinner so that the chorus feels bigger. It's all about contrast. 16. Arrangement is a Narrative Tool: Okay. Thing number two, Arrangement is a narrative tool. Think about it this way. Let's say you are your favorite author, right? Let's say you're, you know, Stephen King, whatever. And you sit down to tell a story. And in the course of telling that story, you come up with great characters, okay? You've got these awesome characters, and you're like, Cool. My characters are great. They do awesome stuff. They are dynamic. They are powerful. They have cool things about them. Everything is awesome about these characters. Cool. So what am I going to do now with these characters? I'm just gonna throw them back to back in the story, and that's the end. Okay, cool. That's my story. No, of course not. That's a terrible story, right? The story is about how your characters change over time. That's the story. Yes, you need to have great characters. And in this metaphor, the characters are your musical material. Is your musical characters the characters are. The characters are your musical material. So you've got this great musical material, right? Those are the characters in your story, but you still need to tell a story with those characters with that musical material. So how are you going to do it? You're going to introduce a character, a theme, an instrument, a melody, a chord progression, however you want to do it. You're going to introduce something. Maybe you're gonna let that go for a minute. You're going to introduce something else, something that something that works with the thing that we've already been introduced to those who are going to work. Now, we're going to get to a new section. What is that new section? That's the That's the conflict in the story. That's where things are changing. That's where the characters are realizing what they need to do to get to the end of the story. You can't I Stephen King just said, Here's this psychotic clown. Cool. There you go. It would be a terrible story, right? The narrative, how it unfolds over time is the story. So that's arrangement to us. We have to think about how all of our musical materials unfolds over time. Otherwise, it's just a series of cool sound after cool sound after cool sound, which can be fine, but it it's not really going to resonate with most listeners, right? A series of cool sounds can be fun, but that's sometimes what we call what I call a demo piece. I used to I don't know if I should say this. I'm going to say this in somewhat coded language. I used to go to these conferences all the time. Is like music conferences for composers. That's all I'll say about that. And at those conferences, they often, what I would hear is what I would call it's a demo piece, meaning this is a composer who's saying, Look at what I can do. They write a section of a piece of music, and it sounds cool. And they write another section. It sounds cool. They write another section. It sounds cool. Put it all together, and it's dumb. It's not interesting at all, because it's just a series of cool sounds. It told me nothing as a piece of music. I didn't move me at all. I didn't strike me as anything interesting, and I'm bored to tears. Heard some cool sounds. Sure. But there's no story there. So, the arrangement is a narrative tool. 17. Arrangement is about Expectation and Anticipation: Okay, third and final kind of big umbrella topic that'll come up a whole bunch. And that's that arrangement is about expectation and anticipation. Here's what that means. We've all heard millions of songs in our lives, right? Music is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. We're always hearing music all the time, right, in our society. So we know that after a verse, there's often a bridge and then a chorus, right? Like, these are just things we expect. There is a certain expectation that songs do a certain thing. There always has been and there always will be. It's just a sign of the times. It's changed over time. Sure, it was different for Mahler than it is for us, but there's still an expectation that songs go a certain direction and do a certain thing. So there so no matter what you do, when you write a song, you have to know that there's an expectation that it's supposed to do a certain thing. Now, here's what's interesting about that. You don't have to do that. But what you have to be aware of is that you're always playing with this expectation. So that expectation is there, whether you do it or not. You can choose to ignore it, but ignoring it is a choice. So if you do the thing that you're expected to do, that's fine. That can be a fine choice. If you do something different than what you're expected to do, that is a choice, and it carries some weight, also, right? You're defining an expectation. So arrangement is also about playing with expectation. So tying it back into the narrative one, previous one, there might be an expectation that you're going to go a certain direction because you're telling a story in which you go one direction, right? Like, the story is that these two people are going to fall in love, right? And you're telling that story and everything's fine. But you decide to thwart expectations, and the two people fall off a cliff, right? You are now playing with expectations in a way that is really fun and exciting. So you don't have to do what's expected. But if you're not going to do what's expected, you have to be well aware that you are tricking or deceiving the listener. Deceivings a better word than tricking. You're deceiving the listener and kind of rerouting them, and that can be fun. That can be that can be tricky to pull off. That can be and that can be really rewarding. But it has to be done intentionally. That's the whole point of what I'm trying to say. If you don't do this intentionally, then you're just going to make a mess. So you have to be aware of the expectation so that you can choose to do it or not to do it. Okay, those are my three big things to think about all the time when you're arranging those three concepts. Now, for those of you that want rules, let's make some rules. Here we go. 18. Rule 1: No Rule is Universal.: Alright. Six rules. The six rules for arranging. Now, remember, these are just my rules. These are not some fancy series of rules or anything. However, I do think they're pretty great rules, and I've really worked hard on coming up with these. Okay, so I'm not normally one to just say, like, here are the six rules that you need to follow. I don't like having hard rules, but I know a lot of you do like having hard rules. So I've come up with these six. Unfortunately, for you, if you are someone who likes these hard rules, the first of the rules is one you're probably not going to like. The first rule is there are a lot of exceptions to the rule, okay? This is art, okay? So no rule is universal. That is rule number one. Uh, so as you're working, if you think to yourself, the rule says, maybe I should do this or I should do that. But I kind of feel like maybe it would be cooler if I did this or that than do this or that. Like, follow your heart. Do what you think is going to make the better piece of music, even if it breaks rules, especially if it breaks rules. Um, Music doesn't live by rules. Art doesn't live by rules. If all music and art live by rules, we would all be living in a very boring world. Breaking rules is how you make good stuff. So rule number one, no rule is universal. Okay? So file that away. Keep that in mind. Your ear always wins. Your musical intuition always wins. Your taste always wins. Now, now that that's out of the way, let's go to the other five rules. 19. Rule 2: Play with Expectations: Alright. Rule number two. All the rules about arrangement are going to tell you what the audience or the listener will expect. Your job is to play with expectation. It's not to do the expectation, right? It's to play with the expectation. So I know this isn't exactly like a do this do that kind of rule. I will get into a few do this, do that kind of rules in a minute. But this is an important concept. And I know we've already talked about it a little bit, but the idea is, for every choice you make consider going two directions, okay? If you're thinking, I could go to the chorus here or if you think I should go to the chorus here, consider two things. You think I could go to the chorus here or I cannot go to the chorus here. What does that mean for the expectation of the listener? Does it mean if I go to the chorus, it means that's the expected thing for me to do? What happens if I do the unexpected thing? That is what you need to keep in mind for every choice you make when it comes to the arrangement. What is the expected thing, and what is the unexpected thing? And what are the consequences of doing either the expected or the unexpected, okay? Because remember, your job isn't to do one or the other. It's to play with one or the other. That's how we tell the story, right? Especially when you're doing instrumental music. If you have vocal music and you're actually telling a story, then you might have some lyrical things that are helping push you in a certain direction. But if you don't have any lyrics, which is how I typically work, then you really need this kind of push and pull of expectation to create the narrative arc of the story. Okay? So it's about expectation and defying it. So that's wheel number two. 20. Rule 3: The Economy of ideas: Okay. Rule three, make nothing new. Here's what that means. When you're in the arrangement mode, you have all the material you need. One thing that we'll be talking a lot about and we're going to start talking about right now is this idea of the economy of ideas. That means that well, let me rephrase that. One thing I see a lot in students is throwing the kitchen sink at a track. And we don't want to do that because it just gets too confusing for the listener. Think about the very short attention span of your listener, okay? We want to give them three or four things to have in their short term memory at a time. Okay? So in a piece of music, once you've written your verse chorus or whatever, you probably have everything you need, okay? We're not going to add any more material when it comes to the arrangement or the transitions, frankly, in a very rare case, maybe. But in almost every other case, we're not going to add any new material. It's all in the track already. Let me show you what I mean. So let's say in this track, let's say I wanted a new something right here. Okay? Let's make a new little 4 bars right there. Let's say I need a big transition right there, okay? What could I do? I could say, Okay, I want a big build right there. Well, I could add a big build. You know, I could just reach dig into my samples, dig into my sinks, add something new, create some big floishO I could do something better by just using what I already have. That's gonna make the piece feel more cohesive. If I add something out of left field, it's like, Ah, what is this new thing that doesn't fit? It doesn't make any sense. It's like adding another character at the end of a story. Like, it doesn't make any sense. So let's use something we already have. One thing I really like to do is dig for, like, an inner line. Like, here's this FMPAT. Maybe we haven't really taken advantage of this thing. It's already in there, but maybe it wasn't really well pronounced. Let's take that. Let's maybe I'm going to do, like, some really not okay things right now. Like, don't boost your track like that, but this is just an example, okay? Don't me. So, you know, I'm gonna boost this really a lot. Maybe I'm gonna reverse it. Let's go to think for a second. But I'm going to reverse this clip, and then it's still the same sonic material. So it's not going to feel like something new. You know, and then maybe we'll automate some effect so that this happens over time. You know, we'll, you know, take our volume and create something here so that this ramps up and then maybe put, like, our baseline coming in halfway through, and it does the same thing. Like that, right? So now I've created a new section out of material I already had. I didn't add any new drum loops. I didn't add anything new to it. That's going to make our track feel more cohesive. Don't just keep piling on more stuff, okay? When you are arranging, no new music, you have everything you need already in the track, okay? Economy of ideas. All the ideas you need for this tune are already there. 21. Rule 4: Density Fluctuation and Alteration: Okay, density fluctuation. We've already talked about this a little bit about what density means when we're looking at a piece of music. Here I've kind of formulated this into a rule for you. So if every section of a piece of music could be classified as either low, medium or high in terms of its density, right? Like, low or we could use different words. We could use thick medium or thin in terms of intensity, right? Thin, medium, thick, right? If there are three grades of density, right? And no more than that. Okay? There are only three. Every part of your song, you're going to classify as one of those three. Then every piece of your song has to change. Okay? Every section of your song has to change. So if you are in a medium density section, your next section can only be low or high density, okay? If you are in a high density section, your next section can only be medium or low, okay? That's the rule, okay? Now, of course, yes, you can break this rule. Rules are made to be broken. But as a good starting point, that's my rule. Um, if we look at our tune, let's hear this crazy transition I just made, by the way. I don't think it's gonna sound very good, 'cause it's like 4 bars long. You know, drums would have came in there right there. I would have liked it. I was kind of a cool intro, maybe. Okay, so let's look at density here. See, this track has sort of a problem, many problems, but density is sort of one of them. Like, here we can see kind of thick density. Let's go like that so we can see a little bit better. And then the next section, here, it's still thick density. The problem is, we can't really tell what our sections are all that well, which is another problem it has. Here's a fairly thick one. Here's another fairly thick one. I mean, these are all the same sections still. So it's kind of hard to tell what's going on in this one. But if we look at another track, we can see the ebb and flow of density. Let's do that. Okay, so here's another track of mine. This is more of like a techno track, so it doesn't have a huge ebb and flow of density, but you still can kind of see an arc to it that when we start, we're relatively thin, and it gets kind of just basically opens up as it goes. It's one long kind of shift of density. So here, it's basically thin here kind of middle and here, thickest. So really only three kind of big sections there. Although if you zoomed in, you'd find more sections. But in a techno track, it kind of just goes for a long time, and there aren't a lot of variations in density, but some, a little bit. So, let's hear what this sounds like. Maybe just give you. So here's the thinner part. So fairly thin. Let's come to the tip part. Here's the tip part. So a lot of strings, a lot of thick, building on that groove. So density fluctuation Rule four. 22. Rule 5: Clarity: Alright. Rule five. Clarity, okay? What that means is at any point in the tune, I want you to be able to say what the name of the section you are in is called, okay? So as you are listening to the song, you should be able to say, we are in the chorus. Now. Or we are in the verse. We are in the bridge, whatever we are in, it should be clear what section you are in. If you say, Well, we're in, like, I don't know, kind of a bridge type thing, that's not good. If it's not clear to you, it's not going to be clear to the listener. And if it's not clear to the listener, it's not going to work very well. It's going to be confusing. So I use this on all my music. I use this on other people's music, too. If I'm listening to music and I can't just stop the track at any point and name the section we're in, if I can't say, like, Oh, this is a bridge, then there's something not quite working for me. Now, that doesn't mean sections can't change. So as you're working, what was the chorus could become the verse or could become, you know, the bridge or something else, or the outtro even, or the intro, things can change. And things can be ambiguous while you're working. But as you work to finalize the arrangement, it should start to feel very crisp. What is what? And your transitions will really help with this when we start working on transitions, which we'll do later. But the transition should really get you to a point where you're saying, now we've landed in the chorus. We feel it. Everybody knows that's where we are, and we've landed in the whatever. We feel it. That's where we know. Everybody knows where we are. At any point, you should just be able to stop the track, and everybody around you should know where you are. So clarity. Make it as clear as possible where you are in the song. 23. Rule 6: The Golden Ratio: Alright, last but not least rule six, okay? Six. And this is a big one. This is one that we don't think about as often, but the golden ratio, this can matter, okay? You don't have to do this, but I do think about this. I think about this in every track that I write and every melody I write, to be perfectly honest with you, the audience will expect the biggest moment of your tune to be right about the three quarter point. This is like the golden ratio, right? If you're not familiar with this concept, this goes back hundreds and hundreds of years to, I don't know, DaVinci. I can't remember who figured this out, but basically, it's that design. You can look it up. But I'm not a scientist of this or a neurologist or not a neurologist, neuroscientist of this or whatever. But basically, the way we as a society, like our art to go, especially time based art, is to have an arc that builds to about a three quarter point, and then sort of sort of an aftermath for the last quarter. So in case like this track, if we say, This is the whole track to here, okay? We can just eyeball it or not. We could say this is, let's see, 134 bars long. What is the three quarter point of 134 bars? Let's find out. So the three quarter point of that, according to my quick math, would be about 100 bars, 100.5. So that would be right 907-90-8909, 100. Be right there. At locator. Golden ratio, whatever you want to call it is right there. Okay? So that is the moment. The denu mall, as we say, sometimes, I think the denu mall, that term is what comes after that moment. But anyway, so that doesn't mean you have to hit exactly that point. That just means that that's what we're looking for when as your biggest point of the piece. Now, what does the biggest point mean? That might mean the most dense point, that might be in the loudest point, that might be in the quietest point. Um, that can mean a lot of different things, right? It just means the point that is going to be the most gripping, perhaps. If you listen to all the music you know and love and keep this in mind, you'll probably find that it's fairly true a lot of the time, not scientifically, three quarters of the way through, but round about there. Watch a movie. Watch a good, like, Hollywood movie, and you'll find this three quarter point is true almost all the time. Let's see what this track does, right about there. Oh. So we've been in this bridge kind of thing here. I mean, often this three quarter point is coming out of a bridge into the beginning of a big final, which I think is base. So it's gonna hit like bigger point background It's not a great three quarter point. Probably fix that. So it's not a very good one in this track. Let's add that to our list of things we should probably fix. But keep that in mind, the three quarter point, the golden ratio, the golden mean, whatever you want to call it. 24. The Main Sections of a Song: Alright. Welcome back. Or maybe you've been just continuing on and watching this whole thing in a binge. But for me, there was a night in between there. Not that you care. Um, okay. So in this section, what we're going to do is I want to just kind of define and talk about each of the sections of a song that we know about, right? Like, let's talk about what a chorus is and what a verse is and all of these terms, right? And we'll do it kind of fast. We don't need to spend, like, a whole bunch of time talking about what is a chorus, 'cause we all kind of know what that is. But I want to, like, actually put some words on it so that we have kind of a definition that we can all agree on. Um, but before we do that, I want to say something that I've kind of said a few times in a little bit different way. Okay, so one of the rules I said is that you need to know at every point in the song what section you're in, right? And I want to raise the question to you. Is that important for your audience as well, right? Does your audience need to know? Like, should they be able to say, Yes, we're in the verse right now, or yes, we're in the chorus right now. And if they can't name it, has the song failed? Is the song ambiguous? This is a question, right? Like, I don't know the answer to this. And I think the answer is dependent on your style of music and how you look at music. A lot of people do really experimental things with the arrangement. Some of my favorite albums use very experimental arrangements where there is no verse chorus structure to it. It's just, like, verse, verse, verse, verse, verse, the end. Like, that's it. I love music like that. That just experiments, you know? But I'll just say, again, for the record that if you're going to do that, if you're going to play with our expectations, just make sure that you do it intentionally and you know what and you're steering the audience, right? You're steering the listener to go one way or the other. Like, if you don't have control over where the listeners going, then it's probably not working really great. But if you have control of the arrangement, you can drive, right? You can drive where we're going, and you can take the listener with you, even if you're doing something experimental. But certainly, if you're doing something that's more traditional, like a verse chorus type arrangement. So that being said, let's go through the different sections and just put a little definition on them. And then after that, we're going to dive into R Track and start trying to put some structure to it and tidying up the arrangement of R track here. So here we go. 25. The Introduction: Okay, the introduction, right? Like, we all know what an introduction is, but let me just kind of change the way we think about it. Let's think of the introduction not only as, you know, this kind of ramping up of material or however we think about it, but let's think of it as setting the mood. Let's think of it as introducing the characters of the story, right? If the song is the story, then this is the introduction is, like, the curtain opening, and we're seeing the set, right? If you've ever been to a play or theater, you know what I'm talking about. We're seeing the set. We're seeing that there's, you know, fog on the stage and some, you know, spooky old building or whatever. Um, so we're setting the scene. We're maybe getting some sounds cause typically, introductions are instrumental. So we might be getting some sounds that are kind of telling us that what kind of world we're in, right? I often think about a new piece of music as, like, getting dropped on a planet, and the introduction is just, like, introducing the rules of the planet, right? Like, here we are. So let's listen to our introduction for our song here. Okay, let's listen to our intro. I Is Okay, so let's say these first eight are our intro. Let's get rid of this marker. And let's rename this one. Intro. Well, let's take it all the way to here. Okay, intro. Okay, so we have basically just this kind of atmospheric sound effect. It sounds like somebody talking in, like, a cave or something like that. Interesting. It kind of works. It sets us up for something a little mysterious. I don't know if it really fits with this vocal when it comes in. I think it sounds like this is about rain or something like that. So we'll maybe re look at that when we get there. But let's move on and talk about the verse. 26. The Verse: Okay, now, typically, when we think about the sort of dynamic curve of the beginning of a song, the intro kind of ramps up and then drops down for the verse, right? Very, very, typically, right, more exceptions to that rule than there are uses of the rule, probably. But we're going to ramp up, and then the energy is going to drop down a little bit for the verse. So the verse has less energy but one of the reasons we want to drop the energy down for the verse is so that we have somewhere to go for the chorus, right? When the chorus comes, we want to be able to kick it up. So verse typically less energy and where the lyrics start if there are lyrics and where the story starts in earnest, where we start kind of unveiling the story. This is where our melodies come in, where we start to get the hook, right? The hook is, like, the part of the melody that people walk away like whistling and get stuck in your head. So let's see if ours kind of follows that pattern of going up and then down when we get to the verse. Kind of clack. I and here it comes down. So, ideally, maybe this kind of vibe is the beginning of the verse, and maybe this is our intro. So maybe we could fold this into the intro somehow. But, see, this is a great example of why this doesn't work because we have an intro that goes here. And then a verse where the energy we want for the verse starts here and goes to here. But what do we do with this? This is like this kind of weird part where the energy is still growing up and hasn't dropped down for the verse yet. So we need to deal with that. We'll come back to that as we work on it. But let's get back to our list of sections and talk about a pre-chorus. 27. The Role of the Pre-Chorus: Okay, a pre choruse comes before the chorus. You might want one? You might not. You don't always need one. In what case do you need a pre chorus? Have you ever wondered, like, why do I want one sometimes and not other times? I have an answer. I have an answer. I have two answers. One answer is, it's your song. Use one wherever you want. But probably a much more gratifying answer is think about how I was talking about the intensity, right? Let's say you've got a verse and a chorus, okay? And let's say these our intensity or, like, textures, right? Let's go with texture for now. Um, so no, let's go with intensity. That's better for this particular purpose. Okay, so let's say our verse is at, like, kind of a low intensity that's cool. And then our chorus is going to, like, slam, right? So we go up to the end of the verse, and then we have this big drum fill, and then we're into the chorus, and it's big, right? Big contrast there works great. Everybody's happy. No need for a pre chorus. You could still put one in if you want, but you don't need one. However, let's say you're in a situation where the chorus is nice and no, sorry, the verse, gets really big and loud. Like, you really big build that verse up, and that verse is going bigger and bigger and bigger with its intensity. And by the end, that verse is really slamming in energy, right? Then you've got this big slamming chorus coming, right? Now you've got big energy going on big energy. What are you going to do? If you just plow right into that chorus, it's not really going to land, how you want, right? Because the contrast isn't going to be there, and you're not going to feel that chorus really hit. So what do you do? Boom, insert a pre chorus, pull it back a little bit, give yourself a little bit of room, and then really slam into your chorus. Okay? That's a great use of a pre chorus. Let it kind of break up the two sections if you need something to give you some diversity in that texture. Now, there's other reasons to use a pre chorus. Let's say you want just a little bit of tension to come before the chorus. Let's say you've got a lyric thing that you need to do that warrants using a pre chorus. So there's a lot of reasons that you might want to do a pre chorus, but that's the one that I usually think about is the energy level. Like, do I need to break up the energy level? And if so, a pre chorus is a great way to do it. We'll see that a bridge is kind of a similar thing, but opposite. We'll get to that shortly. 28. The Chorus (or Refrain): Okay, the chorus. The chorus is, you know, usually the biggest section of the song or the most memorable section of the song. It's the main hook of the song. It often uses the title of the song in the lyrics. It's designed to be the most singable often. Again, if you are using lyrics, then this is, you know, the part that we want people singing. I kind of want to say, like, if the song was a movie, then the chorus would be like, the theme of the movie. You know what I mean? Like, like, the moral of the movie. I watch a lot of kids movies cause I have a little kid. So there's always, like, a moral in the movie, right? Like, B yourself. Be true to yourself is like the moral of the movie. That's kind of like the chorus. Like, it's the thing you're going to say over and over. So like, choruses usually have a line that's repeated a lot, or a melody that's repeated a lot. And that's how we get that hook. Um, now, refrain refrain is another word for chorus. I usually think of refrain as, like, it means the same thing. But usually, when I see refrain, I think of, like, older, like, a church singing. Like when I was a kid, we sang, like, out of the hymnal. The refrain is, like, the part where everybody sings, you know, like, like, the pastor sings the verse, and then everybody sings, blah, blah, blah. But it's the chorus, right? Like, everybody sings. That means it's the chorus. So, um, Refrain is just basically another word for chorus, just kind of in a different style of music. 29. The Tag: Okay, a tag. What is a tag? This is maybe not one of the most common things. You may not have encountered this. A tag is like, something that is usually a lyric thing, but it could be a melody thing just by itself. But it's usually a lyric thing, and it's some short little phrase that gets said or sung at the end of a section and just kind of, like, repeated over and over and over for a little bit and maybe, like, fades out, um maybe has some variations. Maybe if there's, like, a really good singer, maybe they do some improvisation on it. But it's like if the line is something like let's say a good example would be, there's a chorus, and the chorus, the last line of the chorus is something like, um, You're the best. I love you so much or something. This is why I'm not a lyricist, but you're the best. I love you so much. Then the tag might be, as the chorus ends is just, I love you so much. I love you so much. Do he. I love you so much. I love you so much. Do. I love you so much, you know, that kind of thing. So that's a tag. So, it can be used to kind of, um, extend the end of the chorus. It can be used as sort of its own little bridge. It actually can get used a lot as kind of a dovetail technique, which is something we'll talk about later, but to kind of extend a section over into another section, right, to make two sections collide. So it's a great technique for that. So a tag. 30. The Bridge, or "Middle 8": The bridge the bridge or the middle eight. The Middle eight is a term that we still see used mostly in Europe, I think. Some people still use the term middle eight, but middle eight and bridge are the same thing. I'm going to use the term bridge. So let's think about bridge from a texture point of view. So most typical typical song in the world, you've got, you know, verse chorus. In the chorus, let's say you've got a cool, big chorus, right? Then you go into another verse, so you come down. Then you go into your second chorus. Now, this chorus is going to be big, even bigger, right? Your second choruse usually you add another layer to it or something. You've got, like, a big, big chorus. So now you've got this big chorus. You come out of that. And what do you want? You want to go way down, right? You want to go way, big, way down, make that huge contrast. That's where our bridge comes in. So it's just a way to kind of take a big breath, just to go with this song, right? So, usually in the bridge, we get a big texture shift usually down, um Usually we have some sort of harmonic shift, not a radical harmonic shift, but a different re progression, often kind of switching to a relative minor key or something like that, but usually not an actual key change. This is something I see a lot of younger or a lot of more inexperienced songwriters doing. A key change in the bridge is actually pretty rare unless it's to the relative minor. But what I always tell people is a great rule of thumb for a bridge is take your reverse chord progression. Let's say it's got four chords in it, pick two of those chords, keep those, and then pick two other chords that are in the key, use that for your bridge, that'll probably sound great. So just use different chords that are in the key. You don't need to do a key change. An actual key change will sound kind of silly. I mean, you can do it if you want, but it'll sound a little like 80s Whitney Houston, probably. Which is great if you're in the 80s Whitney Houston. I'm not dogging on Whitney Houston by any means. Okay, so that term middle eight, going back to that, we often get that term from just kind of what it is. It's often in the middle of the song, and it's often 8 bars long. However, modern songs play with that, you know, it doesn't have to be 8 bars long by any means. Some songs, it's only 4 bars, some songs, it's 32 bars. So don't worry you don't have to stick to 8 bars at all. Yeah, Bridge, Middle eight. 31. The Outro or Coda: Alright, The Outro or the CODA. So the end of the song. We all know what the end of the song is. Things tend to just kind of piddle out. But there are a couple important things to think about for the end of the song. Think about the narrative of the song, think about the texture of the song. Um, one thing that I like to think about in thinking about the narrative of this song is you kind of want a similar texture to the you often want a similar texture to the intro of the song, right? It's usually spinning down texturally in the same way that the intro is spinning up. So it's usually texturally the intro backwards. So you can use some of the same material from the intro, however, not exactly, because what you need to do is think about the intro happened. Think about the intro is a character, right? The character just went through this whole thing, right? It just went through this whole experience of this song, right? And now it's come out the other side, and it's changed. It's gone through this dramatic thing. It's different now. And so it's got to reflect what it's just been through. So you can't just copy and paste the intro back onto the outtro. Have to just really be able to say, it really should kind of acknowledge what it's gone through. There are other things you can find in your piece for the Outro. That's something I really like to do is just say, you know, what's an inner element here that's maybe underused that we can bring forward for the outtro. That's usually a fun technique. What did I do here? Okay, kind of no Otro here. We just kind of let it go and stop with the reverb just being in the delays being the Outro. Okay? It's okay. We could do something a lot more interesting, although that's not terrible. That's an option. The one thing I'll say about Otros while we're on the topic is fade outs. Don't do fade outs. I mean, you can do fade outs. You can do whatever you want. But I'm just telling you, personally, I won't do fade outs. Fade out fading out a track is kind of it's very old fashioned. Like, modern songs don't do that very often anymore. And whenever I hear a fade out, I'm like, Come on, man. Like, come up with an ending. You got it. You know how to come up with an ending. You don't need to fade it out. You can do it. So come up with an ending. Don't fade it out. 32. Solo or Instrumental Sections: Alright. The solo. The big guitar solo. Yeah, if you're going to have solos in your songs, this is kind of where you do it. Typically, if you're going to have a solo, it can go where the bridge goes. That's a common way to do. And you can use the same material that you would use for a bridge. So do that core progression thing that I just talked about. That's something you can do. Also, sometimes verse, the material that you use for the verse can work for a solo. Although I find like switching it up a little bit from the verse is more interesting. Also, if you are going to do a solo section, keep in mind that the solo section itself can be narrative. It doesn't need to be static in terms of its dynamic. To say that another way, the solo section can start off at one dynamic and grow. You know, I can do something. It can expand into something big. While the soloist is playing, it doesn't need to just be like, you know, the whole band is just going to, like, chill on this chore progression while the soloist, like, does its thing. You can really develop a really nice solo section. So keep that in mind if you're going to write solo sections into your music. Okay, let's move on and talk about our tune. And particularly, let's dive into the intro verse and chorus. 33. Finding the Chorus: Okay, so let's go to our song and see if we can improve this arrangement at all. Now, we're not going to solve this whole song right now. We're going to use this, I think, for the whole class, the whole multip class. So first, I want to see if we can find the chorus. So usually the chorus is kind of the easiest to identify for me anyway. So that's what I'm going to start with here. So I was just playing around with this trying to decide what is the chorus, where is the chorus. And I kind of landed on two things. It doesn't really have a chorus. That's one of its big problems. There's no real chorus in this. This right here is kind of a chorus. Uh, option two is this is kind of chorusy. Yeah, none of those are very good for horas. So I think So I think I'm going to go with this one. So I'm going to say this is our chorus, and I'm going to try to turn this into a chorus, okay? This is going to be a little bit of tedious work, so I'm going to pause it and see what I can do, and then I'll come back and I'll show you what I did. All right. That was hard. So here's what I did. I took let me zoom out here. I took this section here, I think. And I did as best I could to turn it into an actual chorus or something like that. So instead of doing it in here, because I think what we need to do is kind of just reconstruct this track. So I pulled it out here to out here. So here is the new chorus. So all I did here was I shifted the vocal a little bit so that it starts at a different spot. I lined up the background vocal Oz a little bit better. I added a new Sythline in. I mixed the vocals a little bit better, new Synthline high hats, and then just a little bit better mixing. That's all. That gets us to this. Oh. Sun. Okay. Not bad. No great. I certainly could have made this a lot easier on myself by not giving us such a crazy track to work on, but I think we're okay. So let's use this as our chorus, at least for now. And let's move on and try to make a verse from what we've got here. Okay. 34. The Verse: Alright. Let's see if we can find a verse in all of this mess. I think we can. I think this one might be a little bit easier. So the verse, I think we can use this in way But I actually think if we use this up here, we'll be in a little bit better shape as Iraytt more put together there. So I'm going to use that. So I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to take that, to copy it, put it out at the end of the track, and try to build a verse from it. So, here we go. Okay. So I think I found something kind of okay. So what we did is we took this, no, we took this. In ray. Okay, so we took that and what I tried to do here is turn it into a chorus by actually thinning it down and tightening it up. So less muddy. There's just a ton of reverb about everything here. So I turned down a lot of the reverb. I tightened up the vocal by, like, kind of, you know, warping it a little bit more. And then got rid of a bunch of the background vocals, thinned out the drums, and that got us to this over here. Let's put it there. This. So here we have just kick and snare. High hats are muted, the FX thing is muted. It's a little drum fill at the end. Just bass. The only harmony thing here is bass and this little thing, which is just a bomp, bomp on the keys. Bop, bop. It's just this here. Oh. It's just the same one. So the chord changes, but that little chord works with everything, and it's just going to go over top of the bassline. And then the vocal, this top vocal, these are all the rest of these are muted. So it's just this top vocal. This little chord and the bass line, and then kick and snare. So it's very thinned out. It's still kind of thick because of there's a lot of reverb on that vocal because it doesn't sound great. So but it's very it's verse. It's verse. Verse ish. That's hard to say, Verseh. So let's hear it. Hey. That works kidding? In a No no streng I Hey. Okay. Cool. So we have a verse and a chorus now, okay? So verse and chorus. So notice I didn't just line them up back to back 'cause I want to think a little bit more about that first. This isn't normally how I would do this. This is kind of the, like, save a track way of doing it. Meaning, like, I'm trying to turn this into something interesting. Normally, I would do it kind of in place. And just kind of fix it as I go. But for this one, I'm just going to try to pull things out and turn them into, like, a proper verse and chorus. So let's do one more. Let's do our intro. Let's see if we can tidy up an intro and then we'll move on. 35. The Intro: Okay, let's see if we can find an intro here. Now, we have one. We have this thing. And that's kind of okay. That could work. But while I was making the verse, I had another idea. So we'll keep that as a standby. Maybe that's an okay idea, but I'm gonna play around with something else and see if I can find another verse. So again, I'm going to kind of pause for a minute. Experiment with something, and then I'll be right back. Okay. I'm back. Alright, so here's what I did. I didn't use this. I didn't use this atmosphere thing at all. What I did is I went to this new little Sythine that I put in for the chorus, because here's what I'm thinking. This is something I like to do a lot. I have this chorus Sythine and I don't want to use that chorus Syth line in the verse, right, because then the odds are, it's going to go we're going to hear that in the verse and then in the chorus, and then it's going to go right into it. That's not going to be very dramatic, but I could use it in the intro because then we'll hear it in the intro. We'll have a break from it, and then it'll come back in the chorus and that'll feel nice. We always like it when we hear something for the second time, that humans like familiar things. So when we can bring something back, that's a very important thing for us as humans. We like patterns, right? We're pattern people. We're pattern species. So, what I did is I grabbed that and I modified it quite a bit. I just tightened it up. I brought out a little melody notes in it. Um, and then I brought in the baseline, this baseline, and the kick and snare and a couple of little drum fills, and that's it. But it makes a nice little arch that builds, and then I think we'll be able to connect it to the verse nice and easily. So here's what I came up with for our intro. Okay. Not bad. I think it's got a nice shape to it. It's a little too much bright stuff here, so maybe we'll think about softening that up later. But for now, I'm gonna go with it. 36. Putting It Together: Okay, now let's see if we can put it all together. So we have an intro over here, and this was my verse. So let's grab that. Now, just because we have an intro whoops and a verse and a chorus, doesn't mean we're gonna be able to slap them right next to each other without any finesse. But let's try it anyway. So here's our intro and our verse. Should we do two times through the verse or just one? That verse is, well, it's quite long. Let's leave it, but we will do two times through the chorus. Oops, I left off my little pickup note there. That's okay. I can get it back. Um Here's my pickup note. Look. There. I think that sounds nice. Okay, so let's see. Oh, yeah, and then we're going to do a second chorus. Okay, so let's see if just without any transitions or anything, let's just see how this feels. Okay? We're going to go right here. Let's do this. Let's go Intro to here. Let's call this verse one. And let's call it course one for now. Okay? So, this is what we have so far. Here we go. Okay do No strang so Oh, smitOh Okay, not bad. A pretty good start. So we need probably some transition help here to get from the intro to the verse. I Going from the verse into the chorus, I think we do need a pre-chorus, though, 'cause our energy levels are just kind of similar. It puts up an energy there, but it's still quite washy. I think a pre-chorus right there would help us, even just 4 bars, something where we can kind of scoop down even, like, an out of time one. You know what we could do? We could do this. These out of time, things are kind of fun. Just like that? Like, watch this. I so Okay, maybe not. But we do need pre course here. So, we'll tackle that soon, but let's move on. We definitely have this song in much, much better shape already. And we will be working on transitions a lot more soon. So standby for transition stuff. 37. The Breakdown, or The Break: Alright. So now we've got a little bit going with our track. So, you know, we're getting a little happier with it. We're improving the arrangement. I want to do one more thing before we wrap up part one here, and that's to go back to our kind of definitions of the different sections and pick up something I left off in the first chunk. And that is some of the sections that are unique to electronic music. So if you have no interest in electronic music, you can skip over this part. But I just want to put these out there so that they're on our radar. Oh, there's just a few of them. Now, it's important to note that all of the sections in electronic music, you know, use verse chorus, you know, all the same stuff. And if you're writing a folk song, there's no reason you can't use any of these sections. In fact, I think it's kind of a brilliant creative move to do that, just to get you out of, you know, the normal things that people usually do. So these aren't like, strictly speaking, electronic only sections. But when we think about dance music in general, we do have a couple other things that, you know, parts of the arrangement that we think about. So let's talk about the breakdown or the break. So this kind of goes all the way back to, like, the origins of hip hop, the origins of dance music. And it's, you know, that part of the tune where it's that part of the tune where there's a huge contrast, right? Where it really strips down to oftentimes just drums. And, you know, obviously, this goes back to, like, 70s funk, right? Like, this is like an acoustic thing. It was like James Brown said, you know, give me the drums, and everything stops except the drums, and that's the break. But in, you know, modern, electronic music, hip hop, whatever, we really like those brakes, and we use them a whole bunch. And especially in a DJ set or something like that, those breaks are really fun. So it might be where the track goes down to just drums. There might be pads in there. There might be bass in there, but the important thing to call it a break is that the intensity level goes way, way down. It's like a bridge the thing that separates it from a bridge to me, and this is an opinionated thing is really the intensity level being lower on a breakdown or a break where we're almost always down to something close to just drums. So that's the break. 38. The Buildup: The buildup. Now, this is all about contrast, because in a buildup for a dance music track, it's basically like a transitional element, but it's so long, it gets its own kind of section. This is a part of a tune where it starts building up and it builds, and it builds, and it builds. And eventually, we're leading to a drop, which we'll talk about next. But it's building building and building to that point. It's going to build up so high that we're basically going to walk up to the edge of a cliff and then jump right off, and that's the drop. This is, like, the most stereotypical thing we get is this rhythm idea of A, like, a bunch of quarter notes and then eighth notes, and then 16th notes, right? That's the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bup, bup, bup, pop up, pop pop pop, pop, boom. You know, like, that kind of, like, escalating rhythm thing. But also, this is where you might get, like, like, noise swells, just, like, white noise. You might get, like, sirens and, like, crazy sounds in there, pads building up, all kinds of stuff. You see these, like, really epic build ups. And some of the big like arena deja sets like Tiesto and those kinds of things. They do these really long ones, because especially in these live shows is where they get really interesting. For recorded tracks, they're not as long. But their sole intention is to create this sense of Contrast, right? 'cause we're going from, like, a dance music track to this huge build. We're gonna make it this thick, trying to get it all on the screen. Ah, Okay, this thick. And then we're gonna drop it down to nothing in a section called The drop which we'll talk about right now. 39. The Drop: Okay, the drop. So in the buildup, usually, we're building up to the drop. So we're building up up up up up, up, up, up, up. And then we get to the drop. So what happens at the drop? Does it fall down in intensity or stay up in intensity? Either one, actually, it could go either direction. So drop is usually, like, the big explosive moment, right? Sometimes there's a big explosive moment right on it, and then it pulls back, and then you're just like in the jam. Sometimes it stays up there in intensity and just really cooks for a while. So it could go either way. So the buildup could be to get us to the intensity that we want for the drop, or it could be to throw us up really high and then kind of let us fall down to where the drop is going to be. So the drop could be either one, but it's going to be a very climactic moment, no matter where we are. This is the heaviest, danciest point of the tune. This is where you want, like, full forces out. This is what everyone's been waiting for. Um often, for the whole buildup prior to the drop, you might do something like hold off on some element, like holding off on the base, holding off on the low end, just so that when you get to the drop, you bring the base back, and it just really hits, right? Because we've been kind of neglected of the base, and then it comes back and it really feels amazing when it finally lands. So that is the drop. 40. The Middle Break & Second Drop: Okay, so after your drop, your song is cooking along, it's doing awesome. Everybody's dancing, everybody's feeling great. As the song progresses, you may get to a point where the buildup starts happening again. And if you want to start building it up again, you may get to a point of a middle break and second drop. So you're going to go to a break, build up and second drop. We would call that a middle break and a second drop. It's basically not really any different than the first break and the first drop, although playing with time on them is a common thing to do. So making them longer, making them shorter, experimenting with the second one so that it's not as predictable, right? You don't want it to be exactly the same length or exactly the same, like, anything. You don't want to be perfectly cut and pasted because then there's no um It's too predictable, right? Everyone will just kind of know what's coming. You want it to be a little bit less predictable. So nothing particularly fancy about the middle break or second drop. But there are terms you should know. 41. The Beat Outro: Okay, one last term that I want to put in your head is just beat Outro. I think this is kind of like a not super common term, but it is something that you hear every now and then. So the end of a tune in any tune, I guess, it doesn't really need to be electronic. But when you strip everything down to just the beat and the beat just kind of goes by itself, you can call that a beat Outro. You can also do the opposite and have a beat intro where just the beat starts and then everything goes. Um, I think this is kind of an old and outdated term, but it is one that I come across every now and then. So somebody to think about, I wouldn't necessarily sit down and say, Oh, I'm going to create a Bat Otro, because I think that's a little strange. But maybe you'll be encounter someone who still likes this term. So keep an eye out for it. Beat Otro and beat intro. 42. What Comes Next?: He. Alright. We're going to stop there for part one. We're going to continue on to Parts two and three, very soon. What's coming up? Part two is going to be about is going to be more about contrast and working on this track. And in particular, when we've been working on contrast so far, we've really focused on kind of textural and density contrast. That's what we've really been talking about. But in the next section of the class, part two, we're really going to focus on other ways we can achieve contrast. In particular, creating contrast with harmony, with instrumentation, with sound design, with dynamics, with effects. So there's a lot of other ways we can create contrast to make a great arrangement. So we'll be working on that in part two, as well as applying all of those techniques to this track to try to get it shaped up. Part three, we're going to really dive into transitions. How to do all of the nitty gritty work to make every transition flow into the next section to make sure nothing is stagnant. Everything in this song is moving into the next, and it's really telling the story that we're trying to tell with the song. So join me for the next two parts. They'll be available probably already. So look for those around this site. Stay tuned. I got a few more things for you. O. 43. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my email list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there, and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.