Remix Yourself
Get some self-induced inspiration by taking one of your own songs, stripping away the music, then coming back after a day or two and remixing it. Listening to the vocal acapella after a while may help distance you from the original version enough to come up with something new. As it’s your own song, you can then choose to either keep the original vocal or replace it, then write a completely new song over the top of the new backing track.
Jam Session
Inversion Therapy
Chord inversions are your friends – you can fashion a decent prechorus by inverting the verse chords so that they play higher up the keyboard as the section progresses. Simply playing the same chords in different positions on the keyboard provides variety without actually changing the chords themselves.
Building Bridges
Make a whole new section for your song by copying an existing section, dropping out the drums and just changing one chord. This worked well for the Chainsmokers in their recent hit. Side Effects: they took the prechorus chords swapped a Cm7 for an Fm7, and hey presto! – a bridge section was made! When the chorus re-enters, a new vocal melody over the existing chorus track keeps things fresh.
Sound Advice
Riser Above It
When it comes to getting hold of risers and transition effects to keep your arrangement moving, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with plundering sample libraries and other resources. What’s more, you don’t have to use straight-up risers as-is – instead, try using a sample of a long cymbal crash or noise ‘downlifter’, flip the audio back to front with your DAW’s reverse function, then nudge the reversed audio into place on the timeline. Fade and shape the swell’s volume for instant ‘whipping’ effects.
Take It Away
Kick it old-school with subtractive arrangement! This tried-and-tested method dates from the very earliest versions of Cubase and other linear-based DAW’s, and it still works just as well today. Start with a looping section of four or eight bars that represents the busies section of your song – usually the chorus. Duplicate this region along timeline to form a grid of regions lasting the length of the song, then work through from the intro section, removing or muting unwanted parts. Keep going until a defined arrangements starts to appear, then refine the transitions.
Make a Pass
If you’re using eight- or four-bar sections as building block to sketch out the foundations of your arrangement, run a few single-pass overdubs all the way down to ‘cement’ them together. These could be things like drum fills and cymbal crashes, vocal adlibs, keyboard riffs, live know twiddling on an analogue synth or MIDI controller, etc – basically, any track recorded as a continuous performance that infuses your song with unique, one-off moments, contributes to the development of the track and makes it evolve as it plays. This will keep the listener interested and reduce the repetitiveness that block-based arrangements can sometimes suffer from.
Get Your Hands-on
Pare It Down
Writing a seven-minute song isn’t necessarily a bad move, but there’s often no need to go to great lengths – literally – to pepper your track with loads of different sections if it doesn’t need them. Many current chart hits are edited down to the bare minimum, coming in at under three minutes long. Don’t need that intro? Bin it and just start the track with a synth noise leading straight into the first verse. And having only one singalong chorus at the end has the effect of making your listeners want to play the whole thing again just to get to that bit – and that can’t be bad can it?
Dynamic Impact
If your drop is lacking in impact, try varying the dynamics of the track subtly between the drop and preceding build. Use automation to drop the overall level of the track by 1-3dB at the start of the build, maybe increasing the volume of the impact effect on the first beat to compensate for the sudden change in level. Then ramp the level back up by a dB or so during the build, before snapping back to the original level on the downbeat of the drop. Boom!
Kitted Out
Skip Cycle
A quick way to check out an arrangement idea without actually changing anything is to use your DAW’s ‘skip cycle’ mode. This is where, instead of looping the cycle range, the playhead jumps over it, missing it out entirely – a good move if you want to see how the chorus sounds coming in straight after the verse, skipping the prechorus for instance. Most DAW’s have a version of this – for example, in Logic Pro, just hold down the Cmd key while dragging to set the range; or in Cubase, just swap: the left and right loop locators around.
Listen and Learn
Finally, analyse the arrangements of some of your favorite tracks. Listen to what other produces have done and try to figure out the mechanic’s of the track and why it works the way it does. The more you do this, the better you’ll get at pinpointing the minor details that, when added together, make a big difference. To get super-analytical, import an audio file of the track into your DAW, and use markers to mark out the sections. Then you can flick between them to see how the song develops and which extra elements appear in which section.
