Music Arrangement Secrets, Part 2: Creating Contrast

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Music Arrangement Secrets Part two. In this class, we're going to focus on creating contrast in your arrangement. Now, in the first part, I talked to a whole bunch about why contrast is important and some of the fundamental principles of arrangement, like arrangement theory and stuff like that. In this class, we're going to focus on really getting in the weeds and making that contrast. We're going to start by playing around with our track just a little bit more. Then we'll go into kind of a quick study of the more traditional ways to arrange a piece of music. And then we'll go into contrast, creating contrast with harmony, creating contrast with instrumentation, creating contrast with sound design, creating contrast with dynamics, with effects, things like that. And that's going to be the majority of how we structure this tune. My hope is that by the end of this class, we have our song that we started working on in part one. In a completed form, we're going to have all our sections laid out so that we can head into P three and work on transitions and the finer points of making this thing flow together really well. So broad picture done by the end of this class. So without further ado, let's dive. Fantactict fantactic 2. Tools You Will Need (Software!): Alright, tools you're going to need for this class. Now this is gonna be the same list of stuff as we did for class one. So if you did watch that, you can basically skip this video. If not, let me just tell you my Spiel. Um, the nutshell version of the Spiel to save us all a bunch of time is, I'm gonna use Ableton. You don't have to. You can use anything you want. You can use notation. You can use Logic, FL Studio, anything. Uh, we're not learning how to use the software in this class. We're learning how to make a great arrangement. So that has very little to do with the software. So you don't need to use Ableton. That's my weapon of choice. But no matter what you're using, these concepts will apply, okay? I am going to give you the session again. So if you already have it, you don't need to download that. We'll talk about that in just a minute. But before we get into that, let's do a quick review of what we learned in part one. 3. Review from Part 1: Okay, so quick review of what we covered in part one. So first of all, we talked about the super magic word a whole bunch. And what is the super magic word? Say it with me. Contrast, right? Okay, so everything's about contrast. Well, not everything. A lot of stuff is about contrast here. We talked about arrangement theory. Thinking about arrangement as a narrative tool, and also thinking about how what we do in the arrangement plays with our expectations, our listeners expectations, actually. So we can do what they expect us to do. We can go verse chorus, verse chorus. That's what they expect, and that's fine. We can also do not what they expect. We can do something totally different. And we have to know that that's going to kind of keep people on their toes a little bit because it's not what they expect. But our job is to play with the expectation. Alright, we also talked about my big six rules of arranging. Let's go through those really fast. Rule number one, no rule is universal. There are more exceptions to rules than there are rules, especially in any art form. Rule number two, that thing I was just talking about that all of these rules are going to tell you what the audience expects, but you don't have to do that. Some of the best music just thwarts expectations. Rule number three, economy of ideas. We're going to see that a whole bunch more in this class. But that means that your track, even if you only have a chorus or even if you only have a verse, you have enough ideas in that track. You don't need more music, probably. You probably don't need more music. Everything you need for this song is right there. Most a lot of people, when they start working on an arrangement when they're stuck because they have one or two sections of a song, they just start adding stuff and adding stuff and adding stuff, and that gets you farther away from the original vibe of the song. So instead of doing all that, let's look at what's already in the song, and can we pull anything out and make a new section out of this or make a new section out of that Economy of ideas. Rule four, density fluctuation. If you've got a big thick part and you go into your next section, it should contrast. It should be smaller. If you've got a small part, go to a big part. Rule five, clarity. At any point in the song, we need to be able to say, we are in the chorus. We are in the bridge. We are in the pre-chorus. It should feel right. If it doesn't feel right, it's not clear enough, and it's not going to be clear enough to our audience. And Rule six, the golden ratio. Keep in mind, we as pattern seeking people like that big moment right around the three quarters point of the song. Again, that's an expectation. You don't have to do it, but that is kind of what we like. Alright, we also went through a bunch of the songs structured terms in the first one, tags, choruses, pre-chorus, things like that. And then we started working on our track here, and we got sort of intro verse and chorus shaped up a little bit. We're going to keep working on it in this class, and hopefully we can get it in a fairly finished state before we go onto Part three. 4. Here's a Track to Work on, Or Use One of Your Own: Okay. Now, some source material for you to work with. This is the same as last time. So if you've seen all this, you can skip this video in the next two. Because on the next two, I'm just going to talk about how to install this. So, you're welcome to use any project that you're working on and use that to follow along with this class. You should totally do that if you have something that you're working on. However, if you want to use the same track that I'm working on, you can do. Because I'm going to give it to you. This is a full session. You can play around with it, do whatever you want, but know that it's intentionally flawed. It's not a great track, but we're going to try to turn it into one. That's the whole process of this class. Now, I'm in the download that's going to come up in a few lectures from now. I'm going to update this track. So it is the current version, as in where we left off after Part one. It's different than where we started Part one. So I'll give you that. If you want to go all the way back to the beginning, then go back to part one and download it there. But this will be kind of where we're all starting from so that we're on the same page. Okay, so in the next two videos, I'm going to walk you through how to install this. If you're using Ableton, there's an easy way to I'm going to give you the set and you can just pop it open. If you're using any other DA, I'm going to give you the stems, and I'll walk through how to install that. Okay? In fact, I'm going to cheat a little bit here. I don't think any of you will mind where I'm going to use the same two videos from part one to explain how to install this. So let's do that. And then in the download that comes up after that, you want to update to the version that we're on, you can do that. But if you follow it along with P one, you should be in the same spot, more or less. All right, here we go. 5. 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 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 that's a little confusing. So I'm going to put it on my desktop, and it's gonna 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 going to have to do it with stems, which we'll talk about doing right now. 6. How to Download and Install it Using Anything Else: 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 fine. 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 track. Just audio tracks. Make my window a little smaller here. 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 Stem. 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. It go. I take one of them, 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 work for us in this case. Okay, so we're going to do that. It's gonna 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. The next one. The next one. Just gonna 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 grouped by percussion, bass synth, vocals. And somewhere, there's going to be a full bounce too. 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 Gosh, I don't even 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. 7. Where Do You Start?: Okay, so let's start by taking a look at our little arrangement here and deciding what we need. Now, I want to first talk about kind of conceptual thing that when you dive into arrangement, where do you start? A lot of people ask me this after the first class in the series. And the answer is unknown. Here's why. When you start working on an arrangement, you don't really know if the part that you're working on is going to become the intro, the verse, the chorus, the bridge, the pre-chorus. And you should be open to that. You might think that you're working on the verse, but take a step back and say, Now, wait a minute. This feels like a chorus. Maybe that's the chorus. You know, I was recently reading an article 0F someone. Oh, it was a singer. It was an interview with a singer for Tool, the band Tool. He was talking about how their writing process is basically the three instrumental players in that band, guitar bass and drums, basically like work out a long song by just kind of jamming it out, finding parts. And then they record it and edit it together. So here's the song, and then they send it to the singer. And the singer will sometimes completely rearrange it. And he'll say, Well, what you guys had is a chorus. Once I put lyrics on it, felt like a verse. And what you guys have as the bridge actually felt like a chorus because I came up with this cool melody for it. So he rearranges the whole thing sometimes. So you don't really know if what you're doing is going to end up with what you started. So that's a long roundabout way of saying Start wherever you want. Usually, when I'm sitting down to arrange a song, I start at the beginning. I start at what I think is the intro and I start working on it that way. But yeah, sometimes it changes completely. So you can start anywhere you want. I know some people that always start on the chorus and just say, like, how can I make this chorus work as a chorus and then move on. I like to start at the beginning, and then just see what happens. Sometimes I start I jump forward to the end. Sometimes I jump to the middle. Sometimes I just do it from beginning to end. So Uh, if you don't know where to start, start at the beginning, but just be aware that you might be starting at the end when you think you're starting at the beginning. 8. Where We Left Off: All right. Let's go back to where we left off in this track. So if you remember right, we have this is kind of how we started. I haven't messed with that too much in the last class, but what we did is we popped some stuff out over here, and then over here. So this is the track that I actually want to work on. This is where we got to a point where I kind of liked this as an intro. Okay, so I'm still kind of into that as an intro, and then it goes into what we called verse one. So let's go back just a hair and see if we can feel it going into the first verse. That felt okay. I think I can make that sound a lot better with some help on the transitions, which we'll get to later. For now, I'm gonna be okay with that. So then we have this. So this is our chorus out here. Let's hear just a little bit of it to remind us. Okay. So obviously, you know, it's using the intro material or actually the intro is using the chorus material because Economy of ideas, right? But I left this big gap here because what we talked about was the way this ends, this verse ends. M. There's not enough contrast for me to go straight into the course. Right? So I drug out this gap here, and we put some stuff in it just to be silly in the last class, but now let's really work on it. And so what goes here? A pre-chorus. We need a pre-chorus because if you remember, the role of the pre-chorus, one of the roles of the pre-chorus, the biggest to me is to help with the texture shift. Right now, we don't have enough contrast for me. We're in kind of a similar texture here and similar texture here. It gets a little bigger, I guess, on the chorus, but not very much. So when the chorus hits, it's not as impactful as it could be if we used a pre-chorus to bring everything down, and then when the chorus hits, we get back up and it's going to feel nice and big again. Oh, let's write ourselves a pre-chorus. 9. We Need a Pre-Chorus: Okay, let's look at what we can put here. Now, I haven't done this in advance. So, I want you to see my whole thinking process here, okay? So I might fast forward if I just sit here and think for a few minutes. But my initial thought is, we know we need to bring it down. So I might take so the first thing I'm going to do, my just gut reaction is to look through the track and see if there's something I can use for a pre-chorus. There's this, like, ambient thing, which I am using in the chorus, so that's not awesome. Oh. Yeah, we're gonna use that same melody in the chorus, but this one's different. So we could use that, put it there. However, um, I don't love the tamber from here to here doesn't change. The tambor is the quality of the sound, it's that same synth. I wonder if I if I still had this as midi notes, I would do something. I might change that synth, but maybe I can use an EQ to effect it. I'll come back to that in a minute. Let's also think about entering the high hats here, leaving the snare off, and maybe keep the kick going. So no snare, high hats, and kick. There's a fill base. Let's leave the base off for now. Then this pad. Well, let's leave that alone. Let's see if we can get by with just these three things. Let's just hear it by itself first. It's not bad. Actually, let's go back a little bit and get into it so we can really feel it. Oh, well, I didn't turn this off. You want to leave that off. Now I'm thinking we might want those kicks gone too. I didn't like the lack of kicks. And I still don't like this. So here's what I'm gonna do. I like what that is. I just don't love the sound of it. So I'm gonna duplicate this track. Get rid of all of this stuff. Because I want to leave this track alone, but I just want this riff on its own track. Now, let's go to that. Let's add some effects to this that might do something interesting. Oh, I have an idea. What about that plug in that I made and gave to everyone on my site? This one Pulse Maker. Let's try it. So, if you haven't seen this, this is a plug in that I made, and it's available to anyone who's a member of my site. Let's go to 16th Notes and just play around with that. So we're just gonna hear it on this. Kind of like that. Jake. Chaos is good. Chaos is gonna just kind of randomly scrub through all these. Maybe leave that. So now it's on an eighth note. Okay, that adds a little bit of rhythm to it. That's okay, but I also want to change the tone of it. So I'm going to go and just get myself an EQ eight. Just a good EQ. I'm going to put a little telephone filter on it. So a telephone filter means we're going to go up to about 100 hertz. Let's make that a little sharper. Go up to about there, and then Sorry, my cameras in the way. Whoop. That put that about 1,000 Hertz. Put that out about 1,000 hertz. And now, now let's hear. Hey. It's not bad. Let me Let's hear us getting into it. I feel like we lose the groove a little bit. What if we took our snare? Okay, I got an idea. Let's take our base and do this. Let's try that. Now we're getting somewhere. Okay, so I'm gonna call this Good for now for our pre course. It still could use a lot of help with transitions, which we'll get to later. But for now, it's a pretty good placeholder. 10. Let's Add a Second Verse: Okay. Up next, let's see if we can add another verse. Here's our chorus, and here comes our verse again. I copied the whole verse. I'm going to paste it right there. Let's call this locator Verse two, and let's label our bridge here. Or pre-chorus. Here's our pre-chorus and here's our verse. Let's feel out if we can get from the chorus into the verse and how that feels. He Okay. A little bumpy there. Let's try adding a bridge. I think we can do it. Let's just give me four. Let me do four or eight. I did four for a pre-chorus, so maybe we need eight. Let's do eight. Okay? Now, I had kind of an idea. Oh, yeah. This isn't for the bridge, but what if I took this choppy thing and put it into the second verse, right? Because then we get to use it again. And that might feel kind of good. When we get back into the verse, now we've got this extra choppy layer, just to give it some new life. Again, remember to think about how is this verse different than the first time, right? Like, the first time it happened, and then we went to a pre-chorus, then went to a chorus, and then we went to a bridge, and then it comes back. So the verse shouldn't be exactly the same when it comes back because it went through all this stuff, right? Like, think of it like a story. The verse is a character who just went through this crazy stuff in the chorus in these other sections, and now it's back. It's changed. Something's happened to it. So let's try adding this in and maybe even something else. Like, these high hats might be good. Maybe they come in halfway through. Now the big problem I'm creating here is that I'm making this verse a lot bigger, and that's going to make the chorus entrance hard if we go back to the chorus after this. But we'll see, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. So now that we've kind of tightened that up, let's add a let's move this over and add a bridge. 11. I Think We Need a Bridge: Okay, so it's actually a little early for a bridge here. We've only gone through a verse and a chorus, but we're going to try to do it anyway. So my big thought here was with the bridge to take advantage of this rhythmic thing, this pad, right? So that's this. So what can I do to that to build a whole section around that? I'll try reversing. Oh. Basically the same. Just add a different part of the beat. That's probably gonna trip us up if we do that. So maybe we can. Okay, here's what I'm gonna do. Let's try taking this baseline. Actually, this one. Just go to take one beat of it, right? So I'm just gonna have this. Okay. I don't know if this is going to work, but I'm going to try. I actually want that last thing out of it, too. So I'm just gonna do that and then join those together. Now, if this was a mini track, this would be a lot easier. But with an audio track, I can kind of piece it together. So I just want one note happening here. Okay. Little accent there. That's cool. Okay, so here's what I'm going to do. I want to make a nice harmonic shift here. So what I'm gonna do, I'm going to try ye Old supertonic. What here's what that means. Whenever I'm in a situation like this, I'm like, I need a new harmonic idea, take the base note, drop it down a whole step. If your root is here and you put your and you're working on a note that is a whole step under the root, theory wise, we would call that a flat seven, or if you want to be super fancy, a supertonic. So I'm going to just go to my pitch here and go down to semitone. And then copy this out. Let's hear that feeling. Okay, it's different. Let's try it with this, too. Let's try taking these down two semitones and seeing if we can feel that. A little bit. That's boring. Let's imply a whole new core progression. So 2 bars of that. Let's go down another two beats for that one. Now, let's go up a fifth from here. So I get rid of everything. And we go up four semitones. No. So this is down to this. So that was down four. I need a piano to figure this out. That's down to A flat. If we're starting on a C, we'll just assume. So we should go up to an E flat, which would be up three semitone. Let's try that. That's getting pretty far out of key, so that might be kind of ugly. But you never know what you're gonna try. That's good. Okay, now, see if I can go here. On this last one, I'm going to go up one semitone. That's going to make it a leading tone. It's going to make it a sour note, but it'll really push us into the verse. I think. Here's the end. Hey. And it resolves into the verse. So a nice harmonic push with that leading tone. Leading tone means the note a half step under the key. Okay. So now I need to know what notes those are and add some kind of stability to them, like pad or piano or something. So let me do a quick little analysis, and I'll be right back. Okay. Here's what I came up with. So, keeping the kick going, having this snare entered just at the end, that'll kind of make sense when you hear it. It's kind of got a swoop right at the end that sends us into the verse. Baseline is how we left it. It's going through or is it how we left it? I can't remember if I changed that while it was paused or not. But basically, the baseline is going through a little chord progression. Oh, yeah, we talked about this. Then we're going down. Okay, et cetera. We talked about that. So I added this little line. This is I put the pitches that I'm using up here just to help me keep track there's, like, a fun little counterpoint between this and the baseline. So basically, they're kind of going in opposite directions, but each of these notes works nicely against that. Let me just play you the baseline and that little melody. Okay. Then I added this chord progression, which is based on this pattern. It's based on this chord and similar rhythm. So it's kind of pulling from that same sort of idea, but it's different. So here is that with everything else and the baseline. We're not. Where do my bassline go? So, okay, so here's the chords. Okay, now, I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking, Hey, that's not really in the economy of ideas, economy of ideas, right? Because I added two whole new sounds here and a whole new core progression here. Yeah, I did. So the economy of ideas is real, but that doesn't mean you can't add new stuff if you just really feel like you have to. I couldn't find anything that really nailed what I was looking for here. So we did keep the bass sound and added a couple new notes. This is a new sound. We might change it later. This is a new or progression and a new sound, but it's based on this rhythm and this harmony, and it's not very different in the timbre of it. So we kind of have uh new stuff, but based on old stuff. So sorry, I had to do it. So let's listen to the whole thing in context. Just our little bridge here. I'll get into it and out of it. And then you've got the little pulse maker here helping to add a new layer to this new verse. So I think it works pretty good. That's a fun little bridge. So let's leave it for now, and we'll tweak it later. 12. Here We Are, For Now: Okay, we're gonna move on and talk about some more conceptual stuff, and then we'll circle back to this and keep working on it after we talked about a couple of things. But before we do that, I just want to take one listen to the whole thing just to get a feeling for where we're at. Here we go. I can no Seas. Sex Sauce He Okay Alright, something funny around here getting into that first chorus. Is like maybe something wasn't dragged over or something. Let me hear that one more time. That's weird. We'll take a look at that later. For now, let's move on. How 13. A Fast Trick for a Quick Arrangement: Okay, I want to take a little pause from where we were and talk about something a little different, and it's only different because I can't really demonstrate it with the track that we're working on. So I'm going to switch over to a different track of mine and show you this idea there, and then we'll go back to our track that we're working on. Trust me, it'll make sense. So here's what I want to talk about. Reductive arrangements, okay? This is kind of my own term. Don't you know, don't go to your college music theory teacher and say, tell me about reductive arrangements. It's not a real term. I'm just making it up, but it's something that I think about a lot, and it's a way that I will arrange something, especially if I'm in a hurry. Sometimes I get tasked with having to write something for someone or something, and I only have, like, a day to do it. And so I have to work really fast. And this is a great technique for that. It's not even necessary for working fast. You can just do it you'd like to do it. So, so here's what it means. So obviously, reductive means pulling things away, right? Like reducing things. So what we do what I do in a reductive arrangement is I make one section of the song. That's all I do. As I go, I say, Okay, I'm going to make a track, I go in and I make it. And I usually I think of it as a chorus. It may or may not end up being the chorus, but I think about it being a chorus. I make one chorus, a big chorus, really dense chorus, right, with a lot of stuff going on. One really banging chorus. Then I take that chorus and I copy it, move it back to where the verse will be, right? Then in the verse, I have the same material, but I delete some stuff. And then I move it back to, I don't know, a bridge and delete some stuff. Move it all the way back to the intro and delete some stuff. Now, what you've done is you wrote one section, but there was so much material in that section, you were able to use that material for the whole rest of the song, right? Because economy of ideas, right? This is a way to really take advantage of that. So, let me show you how it works in practice. 14. Using a Reductive Approach: Okay, so this is a track that I put out just last month. I'm going to kind of squeeze it down to be as small as possible, just so that we can see the whole thing well. Alright, that looks good. Okay, so here's this track. Now, I didn't actually do this on this track, but I think I can demonstrate the idea in this track. What we're going to do is, let's say we have this section of this track. So let's take all of this. I'm gonna copy it and go like way out here and paste it. Okay, so let's say all we have is this. Just pretend that there's no other track there for Let's even get it out of view. Okay. So there's no other track here. All we have is this. Here's what it sounds like. Alright. So that's it. I totally forgot about that guitar solo. That's fun. I put that guitar solo in this to kind of be funny, and I just loved it. So I kept it. That's right here. Okay, so, actually, we don't even need that much. I'm gonna trim this out. We only really need that first little bit before the guitar solo. So let's say it's just this much, 4 bars, okay? That's this much. Okay. That's all I'm going. Now we're going to do is we're just going to take it and try to build other sections out of it. So let's look at what we got. We have this baseline. Does not change. Okay, so let's see what else we have. We have this buzzy thing. This. And then we have this choir thing. Oh, kind of like that. Okay, so let's see if we can make a verse. What if we just take our kick and our snare I'm just going to put them back here, okay? So we're gonna make this our verse. Maybe it looks like I have two kicks here. Let's maybe thin that out. Get rid of that high one. And then maybe we'll use this choir sample. And I don't know what that baseline. I might chill on that baseline. Let's try it with just that. Oops. Still soloed. Mine up. Okay, not bad. It's definitely missing something. Oops. Can we get Can we get this? I guess let's try to use this baseline, but I'm going to do I'm gonna try to change it a little bit. So let's take just a piece of it. Maybe I can get away with just doing this. Let's try that. Great. Now let's try a bridge. Let's see. We could use this we haven't used yet. Could probably use this. Go back a little bit more there there. Let's maybe just use our kicks. Turn off our snare. My me turn off our base. Maybe add this too. Let's see what that gives us. Okay, I can hear that I want the onset of this note to happen again right there. That's right. So what's really great about this is that because you're using all the material that you already have, everything's gonna work. Like, nothing's going to sound really out of place because you liked the way it sounded when you made that big chorus, right? So we're just gonna peel away layers of it and use that what's left for the different sections of our song. So like I said, I do this all the time, when I have to work fast, just make one section of the song, and then piece together all the other sections by just scraping away layers. Works really well. 15. (It Doesn't Always Work): Okay, so another point about this reductive idea is that it doesn't always work. It won't really work in the track that we've been working on here, right? Because we don't have that big thick section where we can pull things out of to make other sections. We don't really have that here, because we've been kind of building it as we go. But we've also been kind of doing it, right? We've been looking at the material we have and how we can use that throughout the track, right? And I know it sounds like I'm trying to find an easy way out, but that's really not it at all. The reason this works is because the material all works together. It's all in the same key. It's all the same tempo. It's the same vibe. It just I already works in that big section. So when you peel it apart, it's going to work really almost no matter what you do. And again, I'll say that one of the biggest mistakes I see in young people's music or young writers in inexperienced writers, composers work is they have too many ideas, and it just gets cluttered, right? You probably in that track that you can't finish, all the material you need to finish that track is already in it. I promise you, all you have to do is make better use of the material you have, and that will work because we are pattern seeking humans, right? I think it is the second time I've said that in this class. But it's true. So if you reuse something, especially in, like, a different way than you used it the first time, our ears perk up. It's familiar and we like that. So this is a great technique, and it works a lot of the time, but not always. 16. Use This Formula!: A Okay, here's another technique that you can use to help with your arrangements. This one is a little different. This one is for when I hear people saying, I just don't know what to do next, okay? This is your solution. This is how you get out of that rut. Okay? It's very common to be working on an arrangement, and you get to a point where everything sounds bad, right? Because you've been listening to this song 500 times. So, if that's happening to you, turn off the session. Go take a walk. No headphones, don't listen to music, listen to the wind and trees and whatever. Then come back, fresh years, keep going. But this technique is for when you say, I don't know. I could go this way, I could go that way. I don't know. So I call this the archetype arrangement. What we're going to do is we're going to identify a perfectly normal track, right? The archetype of a track, a track that does everything we expect it to do. Okay. Here's how we're going to do it. First, I'm going to give you the archetype. Okay? Here's what it is. It is Intro. I can't type. Verse one, Bridge Chorus. Maybe a tag. Verse two, Bridge Chorus. Chorus two, let's call that a big chorus. And then Outro. Okay? This is our thing. So intro, verse, bridge, chorus, verse Bridge chorus, chorus to Outro. Now, there's probably no song in the world that does exactly that. Actually, I dig that back. There's probably 1 million songs in the world that does exactly that. And this is a little bit of a weird form because we have Verse Bridge chorus, Verse Bridge chorus twice, and then a double chorus, like a bigger chorus, and then out. And, you know, you could put a third verse in here. You can change this however you want. But the idea is to use this as an archetype or a template, okay? So let me show you how I use this in the next video. 17. How to Use it: Okay, so you can use this a little Choose your own adventure thing, if you remember those. So I want you to think, Where am I in my track? Where am I? I'm on the bridge, okay? That's cool. I made maybe I made a verse and a bridge, and now I don't know what to do. So you've got two options, okay? And only two options. This is the first thing to think about, okay? This is going to get you over your decision fatigue when it comes to finishing these tracks. Your two options are do the next thing in the archetype, chorus or not. Okay? I know that sounds like a cop out, but just trust me. So you're on the bridge and you say, What should I do? The obvious thing to do, chorus. But you don't have to do the obvious thing. But if you want to do the obvious thing, it's probably going to work that's the archetype, right? That's like the template for a song. So, go to the chorus. If you don't want to go to the chorus, skip it. You could say I could go to the verse, I could go to another bridge. I don't know. That's weird. Might be fun. I could go straight to the Outro. Or I could just make some other section that's not even in here. But if you're just stuck and you're like, I don't know what to do next, follow this list. Go to the next thing on the list. Because the last thing I want you to do is have an excuse to not make a decision. So if you can't make a decision, just do this, right? Easy. 18. Harmony: Using Chords In and Out of the Key: Okay, in this next section, we're going to talk about creating contrast in a whole bunch of different ways. Okay. So just to remind you where we're at, we're going to do a lot of how to create contrast for basically the rest of this class, I think. And then we'll also work on finishing up our arrangement, and then the next class, we're going to talk about transitions and all the little stuff that helps our arrangement work. So first, we're going to start with harmony. This one will be fairly easy because we've already done it. So here's why this can work to create contrast. It's because if we're in one key, then we can do the exact same stuff, the exact same material, just in a different key, and it'll really contrast a lot, especially if we shift modes. So, how up to speed are you with your music theory? If you're not super up to speed, I suggest you check some out. You don't need to be like a theory whiz to understand all this stuff, but a little bit of music theory will go a long way if you're not comfortable with it. So if you're not comfortable with music theory, maybe, take a music theory class or two. I have like 21 of them here. And then circle back to this. But this will mostly make sense, even if you don't understand music theory. So, the key we're in right now is probably E major. I say probably because it kind of feels a little bit like G sharp Phrygian, but let's call it E major. So here we are. H Okay. No. Okay. Cool. E major. Nothing fancy. Now, when we got here, we changed it. Oh, no, sorry, when we got here. Now, when we got to here, we switched to a B minor, okay? That's a little different. Okay? That's There are seven chords in a key. Okay? There's like in the key of E major, we can do E major is a chord that's in that key. F sharp minor is in that key, G sharp minors in that key, A major is in that key, B majors in that key, C sharp minors in that key, D sharp diminished is in that key, and then E major, again as we get to the top of the octave. So all those are in there. B minor is not a chord that's in that key. It has one note that's a little out of the key, and it is D. There's no D in this key, but that's okay. But that note is in the B minor chord. So of the three notes in a B minor chord, two are in this key and one isn't. So I wouldn't call this necessarily a key change. We'll talk about key change in a minute. Hold off on that. This is just using different chords. Using a chord we haven't used before and one that's a little bit out of the key. If you take a music theory class, look up, find a section on borrowed chords or mode mixture, okay? And that will explain what we're doing here. We've taken one chord that's not quite in the key, but it's pretty close, and it's going to sound great. So that gets us this nice kind of shift. Let's hear it. All right. And now, A major, we're back in Key. Now we're back to E E major. Still, we're back to E major. A. B major. Hey. Okay. So the important thing to note here is that we used different chords, but we didn't really change the key. When I said we're back in E major, key, I shouldn't have said that. We're back kind of centered around E major. In actual key change, a lot of people think they want to do a key change here, and that's not usually what you want. A key change a full key change can sound really kind of hokey. More than that in a minute. But we did a nice harmonic shift here. We went to a chord we haven't used before, and we went to a chord that's not even in the key, but it's pretty close. So that makes a great contrast. 19. Deceptive Harmonies: Alright, for this next concept, this is a little heavier in the theory. But I want to encourage you to use deceptive changes on your for your contrasting section. Okay? Here's what a deceptive chord change means. It means that you make it feel like you're going to go someplace, and then you don't. You go somewhere else. Specifically, usually you go to a relative minor or major. Okay? Here's what I mean. If you are Okay, so we're in the key of E major, right? If we got to this section and we went to the relative minor of E major, it would feel pretty good. It would be I would contrast harmonically and it would fit, and it would work. That deceptive thing is kind of a feeling of, like like, we're going somewhere, and then all of a sudden, ooh. Ooh, we're not where I thought I was. Ooh, that's nice. Let me show you an example. Well, let me just do it here really quick. If I take this, so we're E major, go here. So let's go to C minor. I'm just gonna adjust this to be C minor. C sharp minor. Sorry. Let's get rid of that. C Sharp E G. Sharp. Okay, so now we're on C minor. I'm going to have to change the baseline too. I'm just going to mute it. It's not mit. Okay, so here's what that's going to feel like. Major thought we were going to go, right? So that's a deceptive chord change where you're giving the idea that you're going to circle back around Teutonic, E major, in this case, but instead, you go to the relative minor. That's called a deceptive cadence or a deceptive chord change. It can be a great way to create contra. 20. Stop the Harmony?: Okay, another idea for using harmony to create contrast between sections of the song is to just stop the harmony, okay? There's two ways we can do that. One is, let's try it here. One is just to have no harmonic element. I'm going to mute all that stuff. Okay? So we get here. Let's turn our bass line back out. Already did. Selling deal at this room. Okay? See, no harmony, the bass line. It's not bad, right? Like, this is kind of a cool way to do this. So just stopping the harmony can do it. If you've got a song where there's chords going all the way through it and you need something different to do, stop doing chords. Another way you can stop the harmony, so to speak, is hit one chord and then stop moving. So I'm going to turn these back on, and I'm just going to go like that. Okay? Now, we're just going to sit on this chord. The bassline is going to keep moving, though, and that'll keep this interesting. Mike Black Baseline. Way. Okay, not bad. I didn't love that one. We might find a different chord to sit on all the way through here. But two methods of just stopping the harmony to create a great contrast. 21. Play with the Bass Note: We can also do sort of the opposite of that. And that's just play with the base note and leave everything else. So here we have our new re progression. Let's fire that back up. And let's take our core progression or let's take our baseline and Stop that. Let's just keep it going on one note. So now the bass is just gonna sit here on C Sharp while the chord progression keeps going. This creates something that has a technical term. It's called a petal. So C Sharp is just gonna be in this petal. Do doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, go, do go, do. While this chord progression moves above. This can give a feeling of, like, kind of walking in place or running in place, which you can kind of use programmatically in your song, if you want, meaning you can, if you're writing a song, and the lyrics are something about, like, not moving forward or being stuck, this kind of a sound fits that really well. So here's what it sounds. Holding that. Let's do this. Oh, this is my melody. So here's my base note. Yeah. So this is what we want to do. Sorry, I used the wrong track for base note. Here we go. One more time. So that works really well in the right context. So what I had here is at the top, I call this the baseline, but this is that little melody note. So I'm just letting that top note sit still. The chords underneath it are moving, and the bass note underneath that also sitting still. So there's just not much happening. But it has that great sense of just stasis and purgatory, whatever you want to call it. So it's a nice effect. I 22. Key Change: Are You Sure?: Okay, last thing on this topic, let's circle back around and talk about key changes a little bit. Because I do hear a lot of people say, Oh, I want a key change there, and you don't don't want a key change. Probably. Maybe you want a key change. But if you do put a key change in there, you're going to sound like Whitney Houston in the 80s, which is great. In the 80s music, we used a lot of key changes. What a key change was going to do is it's gonna give you that big, like, like, after school special feeling. And that can be cool. But it's usually not what you want. Usually what you want is different chords from the same key or a nearby key. But not a full key change, right? A full key change is like that last chorus of living on a prayer by Bon Jovi when they finally hit the Wow, we're halfway there. Wow. You know, that last one where they just really push it over the top. It gives it this, like, really triumphant feeling, which is cool, but very 80s. So you would make a key change. If you wanted to make a key change, you would make one by essentially changing out all the chords. So we're in E major. Let's pick a different key, like I don't know, G major and change your whole chord progression here to be in G major. Okay? That's going to sound probably not the way you think it is. You're welcome to try it. It's your song. But usually, you want to stay really close to where you were so that it doesn't give that, like, big 80s feel. 23. Instrumentation and Samples: Alright. In this next section, we're going to talk about creating contrast with instrumentation, which is a fancy way to say, adding a new instrument, okay? Now, an instrument in our case, if we're working on a track, an instrument could be, you know, a new synth, a new drum sound, a new layer, anything, but something new. Now, not really new, right? Like, new but not new. And here's what that means. We want to make when we can't just keep adding and adding and adding instruments, right? That's kind of a no no. It's not going to feel familiar. It's not going to be homogeneous. It's going to sound like the kitchen sink, right? You can have a lot of stuff if you have a really dense track. But when it gets to the arrangement, you want to make sure that there's some kind of glue holding everything together. And often that the instruments, right? Like an orchestra sounds like an orchestra, right? No matter what you do to it, it sounds like an orchestra. You can add another rumpet. You can add some more percussion stuff, but it still sounds like an orchestra. So that's kind of what we want to be thinking about here. Like, we still want this to be using a similar palette of sounds, but we can mix things up, right? So we think about instead of, like, adding a whole other sinth here, can I take a sinth I already have and modify it to make another variation of it? That's going to hold together a lot better. So instead of a second sinth, think about, can I like, put an EQ on one I already have? Can I put delay on it? Can I put some effects on it? That's going to work better than just adding more stuff. Usually. If you're working in the acoustic world, so you're just thinking about, you know, acoustic sounds and not electronic sounds, try to think about families of instruments. This is true in electronic, actually. Um, I wrote, like, a whole paper on this like a long, long time ago about the correlation between electronic music families and acoustic music instrument families. But basically, what that means, a family is like string sounds, brass sounds, wind sounds, synth sounds, buzzy sounds, dark sounds, drum you know, like big groups, families of stuff. And you can also think about the same thing in any world, but especially the electronic world as materials, right? I think about this a lot. Like, materials would be like, metal sounds, sounds that have some metallic feeling to them, Wood sounds, sounds that feel more like wood, like kind of a hollow, natural tone, strings, like, even synthetic things, but things that sound like synthetic strings. So there's families there, too. So we want to so we want to try to keep the thing homogeneous by not over adding instruments or sounds to it. But we can still use variations on the sounds that we have to create contrast. Okay, so let's look at a couple of ways we can do that. 24. Modifying an Earlier Instrument or Sound: Okay, so let's see if we can find a spot where this might work. Um, let's go to so we're out here. I really think we could do something with this. Like, I could use this kind of a sound again later, but doing something to it, right? So, you know, I haven't even set myself on this sound yet. It's kind of I think it is the default analog sound. So I should maybe do something more interesting here before I start playing with it. Let's do that really quick. So here's my sound. I do like that sound. But let's do something a little more interesting. Well, let's stay with the built in live stuff. I don't want to get too out there. Let's go to an operator and something that you probably have Harpsichord. Let's try this. I like that. It was a little too much delay on it for me. Oh Plato tense. Okay, cool. So let's stick with this. Let's just say this is what it is. I could mess with this all day, but I'm not going to. Okay, so let's do this. Let's duplicate this track, okay? Now I'm going to let's put this over here and then delete everything else. So let's hear what we have in this verse. Okay No Okay. So the sound here is kind of cool, but we need to change up the notes that it's playing. Now, we can change the notes all day long. So I think we're in E major. So let's try just to do an E major chord first inversion. Let's get some of this extra bouncy stuff out of here. And let's give it a little more color than just to triad, so maybe add A ninth to it. Ooh, I have an idea. Let's add a few more notes, actually. Let's make it nice and dense. Put that in there. Put that in there. Sure. One, two, three, four, five, six. Perfect. Alright. Now I'm just gonna try that didn't sound right. Well, I was gonna try stretching this out for the whole thing, getting rid of that last note. Actually, let's leave that in. What the heck? Happy accident. Okay, now let's throw well, first of all, let's change the Tambo this a little bit. I want to tighten up this filter. I think that's probably all we need. Now it's gonna be a lot more subtle of a sound, less buzzy, more dark. I think it'll fit here. And then I want to add an arpeggiator. All right. Let's go up and down. Oops. And then eighth note probably too. Okay, so I'm gonna change it to 16th. And I'm gonna change this filter cause we can't hear anything. Uh huh. Uh huh. Tighten this gate down. Huh. Okay, let's see if this works. I'm not sure our harmony is right here, 'cause it doesn't sound quite right, but let's hear it. No. Stat's fun. It's almost not the right chord. And it clashes with the vocal a little bit, but I kind of like it. Woo. Okay Okay. I'm gonna try one more thing, and then move on. I guess switch this all to G sharp minor. So G sharp, B D sharp. Oh, that was our problem. Okay, let's leave it on E, but we had a G natural in there. To Okay, so after all of that, here's the point. The point is, now this synth is connected to this synth. These are the same thing. So, one's a variant of the other, but it's still, like, matches, so to speak, right? It's like, it matches. So it's a nice technique to add some variation and contrast. 25. Variation by Changing the Register: Mmm. Okay, another thing we could do is take an instrument we already have and change its register. This can often give us a new, sort of new sound that still has that glue connecting it to the sounds we already have. So let's try that with, um, maybe this bridge thing. So in this bridge, we have Oops. Actually, that's fine with that bass. That's not midi. O. Okay. Here's what I want to do. I want to take this base for this section. So I'm going to duplicate this track. I'm going to get rid of all of this. Okay, so now I have this and I'm going to take this and get rid of it. So for the second verse, I wanted to really contrasts the first verse a little bit. So here's my crazy idea. Let me just hear this one time. This is going to be weird. Frey size, make a little slice right there. Oops. Coming on E. Bret slice right there. Okay. Now, I think I know what I want to do. Okay, so I'm going to take basically the third beat here and throw it up in octive. This is going to be weird. Four, one, two, three, go up and octave T. Three up and octave. If this was minty, this would work a lot better because I could put a little glide to it. So this upper register of the base, this bassyths a whole different tone, right? So let's see what we can get out of it. Let's loop just this. I want to take that, put it to Complex Pro and really give it some juice. So it sounds as good as possible. This is going Normally, when you transpose, buy an octave like that, it sounds pretty weird, so we'll see how weird it sounds. Free free. Almost, not as bad as I thought. I want to take this up two octaves. This is gonna sound pretty crazy. That's actually pretty good. I think, in order to control this a little bit, let's add a compressor. No. Okay, so we've added another kind of contrasting thing, just by flipping up into a new register an element we already had. Another good example of that. Let me just forget. D D. Sure. Of that. Okay. Um, that's right. Somewhere else, Yeah, we could take this and say, like, what if we did it down in octave? See, it's the same tone, but it's not. So it doesn't feel like we're throwing the kitchen sink and stuff. It feels like more homogeneous and connected together. So experiment with range in your sounds. 26. Variation of an Instrument: Okay, so it doesn't so much work in our track here, but I do want to point out another possibility, and that is variation by family. We talked about this a couple of videos ago. But basically, if you have a guitar in something in a different section, in order to create that contrast, maybe consider using a different kind of guitar. Maybe it was an acoustic. Now using an electric. Maybe it was an acoustic in one section, and it's a mandolin in another section, right? Like a different kind of stringed instrument. It'll be connected but not. And they'll create a good comparison or a good they'll create a good contrast without being too distracting. So that's another great technique. 27. Doubling: Okay, another kind of contrast idea is doubling. So when we get to the second verse, what if we doubled something? Like, we took probably not the bass, usually not the drums, something melodic. Maybe this. Oops. Okay, let's try doubling this. So let's take Let's duplicate this pad, get rid of it there. And here's what I actually want to do. No, let's not duplicate that track. Let's add a new mini track. I'm going to take one of these down here. Shoot. Okay, and let's put, like, a put um actually, what would be really smart is to put this also where we have something happening, like this. See if it can figure it out. That's weird. Oh, it's monophonic. Okay. So let's take it maybe it's not monophonic. Oh, it's got an arpeggiator on it. That's right. Okay, so let's duplicate this track again. Get rid of this. Get rid of this and turn our arpeggiator off. Okay. Now we have Okay, so the same thing, but in a different register or a different instrument. So we took the same material and put it in another instrument. Let's try that. Let's just duplicate that out all the way. And then maybe we tighten that up a little bit. We could use our Pulse thing again. If we go to plug ins, we could use cool little plugin I made to give this a little more life. Oops. Okay, and I want this really tight. Is that right? Okay, let's use that. Now let's hear how this adds contrast to this section. Okay, sound feels pretty cool. I like that. So concept here is doubling. These two are doing the same thing but with different sounds. And what I did with this one was I used a sound we were already using up here, which is a variation of this one. This all makes this for a very nicely compact sound or piece of music, right? Because everything's connected and it feels very I keep using this word homogenous, but that's really what it is. 28. Watch Out for Overcrowding Your Instruments: Okay, one last thing about this kind of kitchen sink idea, not adding too many instruments. Here's kind of another way to think about it. When you're writing acoustic music, let's say you're writing orchestra music, right? So when you're writing music for an orchestra, one of the things that happens is you've got your traditional orchestra, right? And let's say you want to write a piece where there is something strange in the piece, like like electric guitar, right? Like, there's not electric guitar in an orchestra traditionally. So you're writing an orchestra piece, and there's this section in the song in the piece, where you want this electric guitar to come in. But it's only got like you know, 30 seconds, 20 seconds of music. This in the orchestra world is not an awesome thing because what's going to happen there is an orchestra is going to look at it, and they're going to say, Okay, we got to hire this guitarist, and they're just going to come in and play for 20 seconds, right? That's not what we want. Like, that's a waste of money. But if your guitar player was playing throughout the whole thing, it's more likely that they're going to want to hire someone to come and play the part. Now we can transfer that idea to any kind of songwriting to say that if you're going to use something, make sure that you're getting your money's worth, right? That's what this is all about. So it's kind of another variation on this economy of ideas concept that we've been talking about for this whole thing. Now, this doesn't mean you can't add new sounds, right? You totally can. Add a new synth, do something totally different. We added new stuff in our bridge, right? These were new The trick is to not have too much different things happening. Try to connect them and make new sounds or new instruments by some kind of variation of what you already have. If you have to add something new hoop, then add something new. That's fine. But we're designing a palette here, right? Like a palette of instruments. We're not going to use every color in the world. We're going to, like, define what kinds of colors we want to use. And those colors are your instruments and sounds. 29. Let's Look at the Second Chorus: Okay, in this next section, we're going to talk about sound design using sound design to create contrast. And this will be really similar to the instrumentation one. So maybe we'll do the next section of our song in the same way. So let's think about what comes next. We have intro verse, pre-chorus, chorus. Bridge, verse, which is twice as long as the first bridge the first verse. But it's got some breakup in it. So let's use that second half to kind of replace the pre-chorus. Let's go to the chorus. Oh, we never tightened up this weird So let's go. Let me get rid of this and this and that and just tighten up this whole thing. By selecting everything and pushing it there. That snare looks off. Yeah. See? It's actually fine. But it looked funny. We want to get right on the grid, remember. Okay, so now we go right into from our pre-chorus to our chorus. Remember, we still need to work on the transitions here. We'll get to those soon. Then we want to take this chorus. Copy it. Let's put it at the end of our verse. Let's say, add locator. This is going to be chorus. Let's do a double chorus. And then probably an outtro. You probably don't need much more than that. That's a pretty long song already. Um, we'll get to our outtro soon. But let's just feel how it feels getting from verse two into this chorus. Sucks. Okay. So that works. Now, let's talk about that palette some more, right? So if we want this to contrast this chorus to contrast with this verse, right? About the same density. So we need to do something to make this really work. We could make this chorus land a lot bigger or a lot smaller. Or we could adjust our sound design palette a little bit more. So if you're working in electronic music, this is kind of the same thing that we just talked about with instrumentation. Sound design is just kind of the electronic term for instrumentation. In my opinion, that's an opinionated thing to say, but I think it's pretty true. So let's see what we can do here. In order to make a contrast, I might scale it back. That's kind of opposite of what you'd expect. But what if we took out this And this. So now it's gonna drop down, subido is what we call that suddenly. Smell. Here. Now, this could be quieter still. Maybe we can a little break from the drums. What if we took What is something we could use to give us a little maybe this with the arpeggiator off. Let's try it. What happens if we turn our peggiaor off? S. So. Kind of fun, but not really what I want. What if we took the register of this way down? And we made this be our new baseline temporarily. That's cool, but it doesn't but it doesn't thin things down. Let's do 2 bars, no drums. And this. B smells. Sense. Okay, so now we've got a little bit of a contrast. We're gonna drop down when we get to this new con. Se. You think the drill should come back in right there. So sweet Sz sense. Co sense. So a nice contrast using some of the sounds we already have. 30. Change Your Oscillators or Samples: Okay, a couple more, sound design specific things you could do is if you really want to get into weeds, go to any of your synths, and a good way to create some amount of contrast without it being too much is to find your main synthesizer, consider changing one of the oscillators, right? Let's solo this. Right? We can change the way it sounds by adjusting Oscillator. Let's go to maybe a sine wave will be much smoother, less buzzy. Very kind of atari So that's an option. Gonna undo that. Changing the oscillators, changing the filter or changing the samples. Now, if you're working with drums from a sample library, this is another great option to find contrasting elements because often, not always, but often sound in a sample library, there'll be a lot of similar things that work together really well. Like if you have drums in a sample library, you might have a snare sample, maybe two snare samples, some Toms, some high hats, some symbol if you want a variation, maybe use one of the other snare samples, right, because they probably work together well. That's why the creator put it into one sample library. This is not always true, but sometimes. So consider looking around in your sample library for other things you can use as new material to create this contrast that we need. 31. Using Envelopes in your Synths to Create Contrast: And of course, one last thing on this topic, don't forget about your envelopes on your instruments. That would be things like this. So, changing the envelope is a great way to change a sound because the sound will be still the same, but it'll be shorter or longer or slower or faster or something like that. So if we look at Right, so now it's a very different sound, right? This really emphasizes those kind of out of time higher notes that I like. It's really tight. Maybe the lower one longer. Alright, let's hear that in context. Let's see if that works. But it often is a great idea. 32. Adjust the Mix on a Different Section: Alright, so in this section, let's talk about creating contrast through dynamics, which is another way to say mostly through the mix, like, how can we create contrast by just changing the mix? So when I say dynamics, what I really mean is volume, right? So, going from quiet to loud, we've already talked about that a little bit. But I want to do a little bit more of that here. And especially, talk about the dynamics of individual parts, not the whole section, which we've already talked about and is a great way to do it. Making one section, you know, a bunch louder than the next. That's a good way to make contrast. But here we're going to talk about individual sounds or individual tracks. Okay? So, like, something that's in the background, when we go to the next part, it becomes in the foreground and something else moves to the background, right? That can help create a nice Contrast. Okay, so let's do it. Let's dive in and let's go. Let's find an element that we can bring to the front that wasn't in the front before. 33. The Return of the Pre-Chorus: Okay, so let's go to this moment. We kind of actually already have this, but let's go here anyway. So, what we have here is coming out of our bridge. We're going back into a verse. But we're going to bring an element forward that wasn't forward before. There's a few things that are different already. So I don't want to if I keep doing, like, everything I'm talking about, this track is gonna get really kitchen sink like, which is the opposite of what I'm trying to do. But let's just pretend for the sake of doing everything I'm talking about that both verses have this sound in them. Let's take it out of the pre-chorus. Hear what that sounds like. No no strang to I think I see now why that extra bar was there. That was our pre-chorus. So we still actually want a pre-chorus. I think at some point in doing all of this, I annihilated our pre-chorus. So let's add it back in. So what I want here is like that much space, chorus, pre-chorus. Okay. I don't remember what we had there, so we have to make a new pre-chorus. That's okay. I'll be fun. Let's do this thing we were just talking about. So let's take this and see if we can add. Ooh. That's not what we wanted at all. That got way off the grid, didn't it? Okay. Okay. That's nice. And where did that pulse fg Yes. Okay, now let's maybe lead in with this base a little bit. Let's maybe get our snare happening here. And we'll introduce our high hats. Okay, just a quick little pre course to get us back. Let's Man, that grid just really This is why it's so important. You know, I told you, keeping things right on the grid is important. Okay, one more time. Okay. Now we have our pre-chorus back, okay? We'll keep working on that in a minute. Now, let's talk about the adjusting our mix to create contrast. 34. Bringing Something Forward That Was in the Background Before: Okay, now we've got this thing here in our pre-chorus. That's right. So we're going to use it again here in our chorus. Right? So here is gin. Of course, I could bring it up to make it more obvious in our mix. Let's try that. So I'm gonna go into automation, automate my volume just a little bit too much. Get it up. Okay. Okay, so what we did here is we made some contrast between these two sections by using this sound again. It was over here, but now when we're using it, it's a little more upfront, and that's making things feel a little different. What another thing that you can do, and the most simplest version of what I'm talking about here is if you take two sections that are side by side and have the same thing and adjust them, but we don't actually have that. There's nothing except for the baseline. So this baseline. All right? This is, like, way down. So the baseline goes down in volume moving into this next section, which definitely helps, right? Create a contrast. It's not real base forward like the previous section is. So that adds a nice contrast. 35. Silence is Golden: Okay, now, when it comes to this idea of creating contrast with dynamics, don't forget that the most dramatic dynamic change you can make is to go from something to nothing. In other words, silence. So is there something that we can just silence to add a nice contrast? We've actually already done that. See, verse two, we have this section, where we've taken out the snare and the high hats. All right. So we silenced those, and that makes a great contrast to the previous section. Just take out an aliant, leave it silent. It almost always works. 36. Terraced Dynamics: Okay, one last note about this, and that's that your dynamics don't have to be terraced, okay? Terraced dynamics are something that, you know, people used in the way, way, way, old days, and we often use in arranging. And we can. It's totally okay, but we don't have to. So here's what that means. Terraced dynamics are like this. So it just went quiet, right? Terraced dynamics means you're loud, quiet, loud. You know, there's no curve to it, right? The opposite of terraced dynamics would be something that starts quiet and gets loud, right? I like, kind of, you know, there's a crescendo and it gets loud at some point, or something that's loud and gets quiet, right? Right now we're doing mostly terraced dynamics here because, you know, that's a common thing. But as we work on the transitions, we'll start really kind of tightening up those things, making, you know, like a ramp into the next spot into the next section or let something delay over into the next section so that it helps kind of blur the line a little bit between the dynamic changes. So stay tuned for that for when we do transition stuff soon. 37. Adding an Outro: Alright, let's go back to our track and finish this sucker up. Now, I don't love where we're at. This isn't I'm going to do, like, a little bit more work on this and try to get it good. First of all, my least favorite thing is this vocal, so I'm just gonna mute it for the moment. I'll deal with it more in a minute. Now, for the end, we're on this kind of double chorus. Okay. So we could do a few things like this intro thing could be a good Otro. This bridge thing could be an okay outtro. There's a lot of options. But I think what I want to do here is use the verse material. Maybe even just bass and drums. How about that? Because we can just scale back really slim. Feels like an intro. Stop it. Okay. Looks pretty cool. Sometimes it's fun to let something drift over just a hair. That's kind of fun. What about that. I kind of like that. I'm going to leave it for the moment. So now we have an outtro a simple outtro. But outtros don't need to be long. They don't need to be complicated. They can be. But in this case, we're just going to use a teeny, tiny bit of the verse material, plop it there. We'll use it as our kind of decompression for the end of the tune. Great. Okay, so now we have a finished version of a song. In the next video, let's dive deep into the state of our song and see what needs more work. 38. A Few More Adjustments: Okay. This is probably going to be a long video. What we're gonna do in this one is, you know, listen through the whole thing, and we're gonna maybe tweak, maybe see what it needs. But I'm going to just try to do this in real time for the moment and see how long it gets. So I'm going to keep the vocal muted because I've got kind of a weird idea for the vocal. For now, I'm just gonna leave it muted. So here we go. Let's I'm gonna hit play. I'm gonna stop it as soon as I say, Okay, well, we got to work on that. Merger? The drum film Mergers placeholder. We'll work on that in the next part on transitions. For Phil. Chorus. Melody. That's nice. Distance there with the basal wrap up. Loop. We need a kick right on that down beater. It doesn't work. Okay, so we'll do a big build up here going into the chorus. I'll make that a little smoother. That is not a bridge. So we just plowed right through that bridge, but I'm not sure we need a bridge here. Now that we're kind of seeing the whole picture because this chorus material goes into this next verse, okay. Oh, no, this is the sorry. This is the bridge. Why did my markers get all messed up? Okay, wait. This is our bridge. And then what is this next thing? Yeah, so this is the next verse. Of course, without any drums. But if the lyrics are I think we need this right there. Okay. I have an idea. What if I use this sound, but this material? Check it out. Where did I want to put that? One to here. One to here. Okay, so I'm going to take this copy it and paste it down here. Now, remember, this has an arpeggiator on it, right? Yes. Oh, but it's off. W is that? Oh, because it doesn't have a arpeggiator. It has my pulse makeer. Uh, that's okay. We'll use the pulse makeer. But I'm gonna change this around a little bit, so it's a little more just holding down chords and not kind of, like, repeating notes the same way. Because once we do this, this sound will have constant chords, and it'll be a lot smoother. We've been questioning these, but let's leave them for now. Okay, so now this is a little tighter, and let's just deploy it out. Let's see what happens when we hit it. It's going to add another element, another layer that's going to create a little bit of contrast and help keep pushing us forward. S. Let's see if we can make that a little more different. What if we turn this arpeggiator back on? New idea. Let's turn that off. Let's go here and let's move this whole thing up in Octave. Getting it into another register might help. Where is the arpeggiated track we had? Is this one. Let's put it there, too. Okay? Just copy that up to there. Now, this has an arpeggiator. Yes. So let's hear what happens when we do all three of these at once. Cool. I like that little hangover of the bassline. You don't have to do those. I just kind of like it. Okay. So we made some good adjustments to it. This is feeling like an okay song. I do want to work on this vocal a little bit. So here's what I'm going to do. Let's go to a new video, and in between those two videos, I'm going to play around with the vocal a little bit. If it works, I'll come back. I'll tell you what I did. 39. A New Vocal Take: Okay, so I took another look at that vocal. It's been driving me nuts through this whole couple of classes because it's just bland. So I tried to spruce it up a little bit, and then I found a great solution, which is, get rid of it and find a new one. So I have a new vocal now. This is a vocal stem that I got off of freesound.org. If you're not familiar with that site, check it out. There's a lot of great royalty free samples to use. You just have to sign up, but it's totally free site. Um, so once I got this new vocal in here, I had to change the key of it a little bit and mess around with it a little bit. And then I just felt like the whole song felt a little slow with this new vocal. So I beefed up the tempo just a little bit. Sped it up just to touch. So let's hear what we've got and where our track is right now. So let's start at the beginning. Here we go. The truth? Tried to sneak up on you. Yeah, the truth. Sure to sneak up on you. You got your own skin so batting? You waking now You thought you see him. The truth? Soy to sneak up on you. That's true. That's true. True. True? I say, see, see, see, Lee. I win goo keep. See. A. It's the same gonna send you to them. It's the same win p to Function to issue Only waiting. Only waiting. Only waiting. Only waiting. Cleon living room. True I'm ashamed you ran too. I'm ashamed snake. Shu snake. True. So swap. There we have it. It's a little repetitive. It's not the best song you've ever worked on, but, you know, we definitely improved it a whole bunch from where we started. Okay, I'm going to give you a link to redownload this if you want to get my vocal version. And then we're going to wrap up and move on to the next part of this class where we're going to work on tightening up all these transitions and making this thing work better. I 40. What Comes Next?: Alright, we've reached the end of Part two. So moving on to Part three, we're going to start working on transitions. We're going to talk about transition theory, rules of great transitions, preparing every instance, preparing every exit, keeping things moving, and making sure each section leads into the next section. So I hope you decide to join me for that. We will see you there in the next class, part three of our arrangement class. Stick around. I got a few more things for you before you go. 41. Thanks for Watching!: Alright, last but not least, just wanted to say thanks for watching. Thanks for being a part of this very fun online education experiment. I appreciate you being here and buying this class. Sometimes, you know, I think I just have the best job in the world 'cause I get to sit here and just make these classes all the time. And I talk to myself, and hopefully people watch them and listen. I don't know. It seems like they are. Okay, um, depending on what platform you're at, there might be another little text blurb after this one, but hopefully you'll get that and read it, and I will see you in the very next class. Thanks for watching. Thanks for being here. Bye.