Hey, guys, so today I want to talk to you about one of the biggest problems that producers
struggle with, and I know this because I asked you the other day on the YouTube poll and you
told me; and unanimously arrangement was one of the biggest things. I'm dressed like this
because I'm back in England at the moment and it's really cold. So, first, let's touch upon what
arrangement is, why it's so difficult to get right and step by step how you can get from
that dreaded eight bar loop out into a fully arranged track. This is the technique I haven't
seen anyone else teach and this is what I teach my students in the Accelerator program. I'm going
to be using Ableton Live for this example but it really doesn't matter which the DAW
you use, this is still the best way I've found to arrange music so firstly let's talk about what
arrangement actually is well if you think about it we are storytelling I'm going to liken this
to a roller coaster Journey if you think about a roller coaster Journey it's really a combination
of building tension and then the release of the tension when you go down the slopes around the
corners and the people on a roller coaster are going through this ride of highs and of lows
and that's exactly what we're doing when we are creating a piece of music now again following
along with the roller coaster analogy despite all the ups and downs there aren't any really abrupt
crazy changes that happen like really instantly because if they did they would jar everyone's
neck on the ride probably injure people give them Whiplash stuff like that so even though you
you've got these massive ups and downs you've got smooth transitions between all of them and that's
exactly what we need to work out with music when it comes to Arrangement the usual technique that
I will teach people is to map out the arrangement of another track and that's all fine and well I'm
about to show you exactly how to do that but the travel with stopping at this technique is that
by definition you are analyzing a snapshot of time within your reference track and what I'm
going to show you towards the end of this video is how you can actually take that into a fourth
dimension so we're not just looking at snapshots of time for actually learning how everything flows
together with the ebb and flow which I know is a big struggle for a lot of producers so without
further Ado let's hop into the door I'm going to show you how to reference other music in the best
way to get your Arrangements sounding professional and keeping your listeners interest so the first
thing to note is collecting reference tracks that are in your genre and in other genres that
you just think really well produced is a really good idea because using reference tracks helps
in so many areas of production and Arrangement is no different so what I do is I actually have
reference track playlists in my Apple music but it doesn't matter which media player you use but
just every time you hear a track that you really like and you think is really well produced just
save it into that playlist into your reference track playlist and you can draw upon it whenever
you get stuck okay so assuming you've done that you'll need to download the reference track that
you want to use for your Arrangement if you're listening to it on something like Spotify you'll
probably have to buy that track from beatport and just download The Wave or the MP3 version so once
you drag it into your door again as I said I'm using Ableton it's important to then synchronize
it to the project Tempo now the way to do that is to just double click you can actually find out
the tempo of most tracks by just doing a Google search but this is another way that you can do it
just make sure that your marker starts at the first transient you might have to zoom in to do
that to make sure it's nice and accurate and if your track starts with a slow intro that doesn't
have a beat on it just fast forward to wherever in the track does now we need to work out what
tempo this is now you can actually do it visually by changing the tempo of your project until the
grid lines up so if we zoom in we can see those kicks are going off the grid so you can see here
it's drifting out of time so we can just do this by I and I know that this is now 124 BPM and if
we zoom out and then go back in further along in the track it should still be in sync bang on the
grid so yeah I know just visually that this track is 124 BPM if you want you can double check it by
putting your metronome on I'm just going to take the volume of the track down so it's not too loud
and I can hear it's in sync okay perfect so once that's done now we can start marking out what
the different parts of this track are and don't worry we're going to get into the more in-depth
Arrangement stuff soon but this is the first thing that I would recommend so once you've got
your track in when you visually see different things happening that's a clear indicator
that's a different part of the arrangement so here would be a break somewhere around here
let's just see so I'm just going to split it there like so here there's something happening
there's something happening there's something happening probably the final drop there's
another break there main break okay build up starts there and there's a drop there
okay so once you've split it out into a few different sections it's much easier
by the way if it's a pop song you've got the chorus you've got the verse you've got
the intro you've got the break the build up or the middle eight so it can be a bit
harder with something like techno but it doesn't really matter what you call them
just as long as you know what it means so here I might put main break foreign
I can put just kick and bass although it's not just the kicking bass I can hear there's
a Melody there as well but the idea is you basically make it easy for you to see what
part of the track are happening and when now each section is probably going to be 8 or 16
bars long but it depends on whether you've got the radio edit or whether you've got an
extended version but once you've spent a bit of time marking this out you can either just
label these different sections or in Ableton at least you can put markers in the timeline above
add locator and then you can name that so we could just put verse
and you could do that for all the other sections now this is going to give you a framework of how
to lay out your music then once you've done that go and analyze each of these sections you can just
now your track is synced with your Arrangement you can just Loop that particular section of the
track and if you are doing so I recommend doing it after the impact if there's a symbol graph
it can slightly distract you sometimes so just move on a couple of bars from there
so you can hear there's white noise fading out there
so every single sound that you can hear just make a note of it I use Post-it notes just write
it down by hand with a pencil and once you've analyzed one section go to the other sections
and analyze those two now what you're going to find is that there are going to be commonalities
between them so they're probably use the same Kick Drum they probably have the bass sound and that's
usually as far as referencing tutorials go when it comes to Arrangement now the extra Dimension that
you need to take into account is the fact that over time different sounds change especially if
you've got genres like melodic house for example you could have some kind of developing landscape
that takes 32 or 64 bars to fully come in so this next step is what I recommend when you get to this
stage link the commonality between one section into the other that's the first thing so here
foreign we've got the base we've got the kick the hi-hats the snare
and there's a melodic synth just bouncing left and right and the base which has got delay on it
so I'll jump forwards okay so at this point you've got
you've got the top synth coming in there
and then I'm gonna see did that come in beforehand No it didn't it just comes in
there so when you've got tracks that just have things that suddenly come in it's much easier
and as I said with some sounds they're going to develop over time and open up so we can hear
a pad coming in now
and then we've got this melody that comes in there as well but we've still got that
if you listen carefully but it's filtered down so that is the key when you have determined what one
sound is doing skip ahead to the next section of the track and listen out is that sound that you're
focusing on in that next part of the track okay if it is how has it changed now there
are three main effects I don't care which genre you're producing there are three main effects
that might have been applied to change the sound that you're focusing on the first is volume has
it been taken down in volume is it getting louder in volume the second most popular would be filters
is there a low pass filter taking out the high frequencies or is there a high pass filter taking
out the low frequencies and remember these are tools that are used over time to create smooth
transitions the third of these tools is Reverb is there a wet Reverb that's going to dry if
it's introducing something or when something's going out quite often the Reverb will be going
from dry to wet so it kind of bleeds out and Smooths out over time so those are the three
things that you're really really listening out for and then you apply that to all of the main
elements of the track so let's have another example okay so we're going to focus on that
lead synth the dun dun dun dun dun dun dun so let's see when that comes in okay still playing
okay now you can hear that syncopated it's actually part of that same synth
that was playing the melody listen very carefully just focus on that one sound
foreign so by analyzing your reference tracks you're going to learn all these little tips
and tricks that you can then apply in your own music and remember you're not just trying to
have a block and then a block and then another block unless you're creating a pop track but
even then you need to introduce elements beforehand and you need to smooth them out
afterwards because you don't want a roller coaster that just does this because everyone would die
now the last Arrangement tip that I want to touch upon is using effects now effects like
sweeps and risers and downsweeps are super important especially in dance music but if
you can get everything to flow well before even touching any of these extra effects then your
music is going to be even better because you're taking people on a journey just with this simple
grammar of arrangement now when you add the transitions like the reverse sweeps and the
downsweeps and the crashes and things like that they are very important to get that final finish
polish they again will help ease people into the new sections of the track and ease them out when
you get towards the end so this is really the key difference in this technique yes you are analyzing
each snapshot of a track but then you are focusing in on one particular sound in the track that you
hear in one snapshot and in another and then analyzing how it's different there how it's
different there and what kind of automation has occurred between those two points to create that
smooth transition and for your homework I want you to analyze one track in your chosen dronner
that you produce in really really in-depth spend a couple of hours on it and you'll be surprised
at how much you pick up and how much you learn when it comes to Arrangements we do this exact
exercise in the first week of my accelerator program and the more you do it the better you
get in fact I'm going to link to a couple of blog posts where I've analyzed tracks in depth
to show you the kind of detailed analysis that will really help you so anyway I hope you found
this video useful do let me know in the comments if you did give me a hell yeah or an army brother
if you're feeling holy and let me know what else are you struggling with I really want to focus in
on those pain points that are stopping you from getting your music to a professional level and
released so anyway thank you so much for watching if this is the first time on the Channel Please
Subscribe it really helps me out and I will catch you soon until then cheers and happy producing
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