Find all the original articles on the UBK website
Part 1
I’ve been yammering on and on about arrangement for years, usually to the effect of ‘the better the arrangement, the easier everything else gets.’ That simple truth has long been exploited by the world’s most influential producers, composers, and songwriters, from A-Trak to Duke Ellington and all points in between.
But if you’re not totally clear on what exactly an arrangement is, then it’s not terribly helpful to be told ‘make it better’. What’s the “it”? If you’re not confident you know the answer, I can relate; there was a time when I had no idea what a ‘song’ was versus an ‘arrangement’ versus a ‘production’. Today I've got a solid grasp on the differences between all 3, but it can take a long, long time for that to happen, and I'm still a student as much as a master.
So rather than attempt to explain what an arrangement is --- a process that could easily encompass an entire book --- I’m going to skip over the conceptual stuff and give you a few very specific, very concrete suggestions you can apply to your productions right now, whether you're an engineer, a producer, a player, or all of the above. In the process, your arrangements will take a big step up in terms of movement, dynamics, and contrast… and if you hone the skills involved in implementing these suggestions, you’ll find it becomes easier and easier to craft mixes that grab the listener’s ears from bar one and don’t let go until the last note fades into digital black.
The subject of today’s arrangement study is, in my humble opinion, one of the most powerful weapons in the world of songwriting and production: dynamic transitions. A dynamic transition is exactly what the name implies: anything that creates a palpable shift, from one level to another, in the energy of the song.
Question: in a typical 4 minute song, how many dynamic transitions are you currently creating with the deliberate intent to forecast, announce, and execute a visceral change in the musical landscape? If the answer is anything less than, say, 14, I respectfully submit that you’re completely missing the boat.
Let’s take a very simple, contemporary pop-style arrangement; if you’re doing EDM, the section names won’t apply 1:1, but you likely have distinct musical sections so the principle is the same. The critical thing to realize is that each section of a song has a beginning and an end, but more importantly each sectionflows directly from one to the next.
Intro
Verse
Pre-Chorus (aka Bridge, aka Lift)
Chorus (aka Hook, aka Refrain)
Re-Intro
Verse
Pre-Chorus
Double Chorus
Outro (aka Coda)
So my question to you is this: how are you connecting all of these sections? Not just musically, but energetically? For example, is anything happening in bar 6 or 7 of the verse that clues my ear in to the fact that a whole new section is about to happen? Did that thing involve a technically implemented, artistically executed slice of drama that pulls the listener across an emotional bridge and melts the boundaries of one musical passage into one another?
That's a massive job. How well are you doing it?
If you were to draw a line across a page, and that line represented the energy level of your song from start to finish, where would the line step up and step down? Where do the shifts occur? Are any of them unexpected? What shape do they take? Are they seductive slopes? Graceful arcs? Fierce explosions?
Or are they simply abrupt little shifts on a tedious grid, middling little stairstep affairs with no precursor and no aftermath?
For many of the songs people send to me for advice and feedback, especially electronic and loop-based compositions, what I hear (energetically) is a flat line in the intro, no change into a flat line in the verse, a small and abrupt change into a slightly higher but equally flat line in the prechorus, and another small but abrupt stairstep up into a flat line in the chorus.
At that point it really doesn’t matter how impassioned the vocal melody is, or how cool the snare sound is, or how fat the bass is… you might have hooked my attention for the first few bars, but the arrangement is so flat & uninspired that I quickly lost interest. In the space of the first 60 seconds there were at least a dozen opportunities to craft one-of-a-kind, engaging, and (most importantly)visceral moments that instantly elevate a production from ‘mediocre’ to ‘compelling.’
Hopefully I’ve got some gears turning in that head of yours. Next week, we’ll dig into some very specific suggestions on the kinds of dynamic transitions you can create, the kinds of simple tricks and tools --- both musical/compositional and production/engineering --- that you can start injecting into your tracks right away and, in the process, take a serious step up in the game of creating art that inspires.
Part 2
Last week I asked if you were exploiting the art of arrangement in order to wring every last drop of drama from every square inch of every transition in your productions. (I recommend catching up if you missed last weeks Museletter, it lays a good foundation for today’s rant.)
To refresh your memory, I’ll sum up Part 1 in one long sentence: a tightly crafted, cleverly assembled arrangement can elevate an ordinary song into a timeless one, and nowhere do you get more opportunities to deepen and solidify a listener’s attention than the dynamic transitions that carry them from one section of the song to the next. And to flip it on its head: nowhere do you have more opportunities to lose their interest, by failing to leverage those moments, letting them slip by without a trace or spark of individuality.
So today, as promised, I’m moving beyond the philosophical and offering up a tasty selection of some of my favorite tricks, devices, and rules-of-thumb for magnifying the impact of dynamic transitions. The more I've made a habit of implementing these kinds of things in my arrangements, and the craftier I've learned to implement them, the more engaging my productions have become.
Step #1: New Things Come and Old Things Go… in Pairs
This rule is ideally a compositional device, but for songs that are already tracked and ready to mix, it can be an engineering device if you leverage the power of your mute button. The idea here is that for every major transition from section to section, I advise having 2 new things enter the soundfield and/or 2 old things disappear… or, for maximum drama, shift the soundfield in both directionssimultaneously, with one direction doubled.
In other words, if you really want to make a statement bring 4 new things in and make 2 old things go, or vice versa.
I say ‘things’ because they literally can be anything; obvious ‘new things’ would be a completely new instrument, or a new layer of an existing instrument stacking a new part. Less obvious ‘new things’ would be effects like reverb, delay, etc, or a doubled vocal; it's ok if the thing doesn’t jump out as an obvious new sound, as long as its presence has the effect of noticeably changing the shape and feel of the soundfield.
So imagine we’ve got an intro with drums, bass, guitar, rhodes, and a synth pad. When the intro becomes the first verse, ‘old things that go’ could be the ride cymbal, rhodes, synth pad, and the long reverb they all feed into, while ‘new things that come’ could be the lead vocal and the hi hat.
Then, halfway through the verse, bring two new things in. Maybe a vocal harmony comes up while the Rhodes re-enters, playing a simpler part than it was in the intro. That small arrangement shift will lift the dynamic and maintain interest through the verse while keeping the energy light and the spaces open, giving you plenty of room to keep growing… because there’s still a lot of song left, a lot of story to tell.
Most underarranged songs blow this step in one of two ways:
- nothing meaningful ever comes or goes, or (possibly worse)
- things just keep coming while nothing goes, until everything suddenly goes
The former tends to feel lifeless and weak in very short order, and is the scourge of a great many pop and singer-songwriter productions; the latter tends to feel very cluttered and unfocused in very short order, and is the most common pitfall of EDM and loop-based tracks.
Strong arrangements aren’t just ways to flex your compositional muscles, they also pay hefty dividends when it comes time to mix. Your job as a mixer (IMHO) is twofold: to make it clear to the listener what the point of focus is at all times, and to keep moving that poing of focus around in interesting ways. If the arrangement always offers up new and interesting combinations of sounds in all the right places (and a few of the wrong ones), then most of the hard work is done before the faders are touched. At that point, mixing is about highlighting the drama that’s there (a simple process with powerful results) rather than manufacturingdrama that’s not there (a tedious process with limited results).
Put one last way: when the drama of a song is organic and flows from the composition, it tends to engage the heart and hold up better over time. When the drama of a song flows from production and engineering tricks, it tends to engage the mind, which falls in love fast and gets bored even faster. If you can pull off both, you’ve got a deadly combo, but that requires a strong arrangement and slick mixing skills… which brings us back to today’s subject.
Step #2: If a Change is Coming, Let ‘em Know
Once you’ve got your major comings and goings mapped out, the next step is to set the changes up so that they don’t just ‘happen’. Few things in life are as unsatisfying to me as a song that abruptly yanks me out of one section and drops me unceremoniously into another. Even when songs come suddenly to a grinding halt, when everything slams on the brakes and goes from 60 to 0 in an instant, there are usually audible cues that signal what’s about to happen.
This is because, on a basic psychological level, the anticipation of an event is half the fun, and without anticipation there will be no fun at all. If the roller coaster had no slow climbs before the fast drops, if the movie had no creepy stillness right before the zombie attack… there’d be no point. Without some kind of buildup, there is no satisfying payoff, there’s just a slap in the face.
So 1 or 2 bars before each major transition, I recommend bringing something in that cues the listener to the fact that we’re changing trajectories and heading towards something new and different. Here’s a shortlist of ideas, none of which are revolutionary, all of which are effective and time-honored ways of building anticipatory tension and priming the listener’s brain for an upcoming shift:
- A big, fat, tasty drum fill
- A guitar, bass, or other melodic fill
- Have the main instrument(s) change rhythm, either playing more/faster notes, or playing fewer/slower notes, or noticeably changing up the riff
- Have the main instrument(s) change chord voicings, going to higher notes/denser voices when building energy, and vice versa
- Strings (or pad) that swell, or a synth whose filter opens or closes
- Bring in vocal ooohs, ahhhs, mmms
- Add a vocal harmony (or, if there’s already harmony, stack more harmonies or voices)
- Double/triple/quad stack lead vocal
- Drum fill (what can I say, I’m a drummer!)
Another way to build tension before a payoff is, counterintuitively, to take things away momentarily. Have the busy strumming guitar ring out a whole note chord for the last bar of the verse. Have the bass stop and drop out entirely. Have everything but the lead vocal or topline drop out, with some kind of swell underneath pushing everything into the next section.
Personally, I find this particular challenge (how to alert the listener to a coming change) to be one of the more interesting and challenging things to pull off artistically. But at the end of the day, you don’t need to break new ground or blow any minds with your cleverness, you just need to get the job done. There’s a reason 5,000 companies have made 50,000 collections of nothing but sweeps and rises… they’re simple, and they’re effective. At the end of the day, I’ll take ‘effective’ over ‘clever’ every single time!
Next Week – Engineering Trickery
This week I focused on things you can do with the composition to take your arrangements to the next level. But half the fun of a great arrangement is mixing it, so next week, in Part 3, we’ll dive even deeper into this topic and take a look at a few specific engineering tricks you can do to make your transitions even more dynamic, generating the kinds of contrast and movement that catches people’s attention and deepens their emotional response to the ever-unfolding song.
Part 3
This week, in Part 3 of our series on improving your arrangements through simple, time-tested techniques and approaches, we’ll be taking a look at the manipulation of ‘space’ as a means of adding emotional impact to the transitions among and between musical passages. (here are Part 1 and Part 2 for those who need to catch up).
But before we dive in, I'd like to ask a favor: if you dig free info like this, pleaseclick here and, on the top left, Share the Museletter with your peeps on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you!
To the matter at hand: at any given moment, all the sounds that make up whatever song you’re listening to reside inside a space. Mixers who are in the early parts of their journey often become obsessed --- and rightly so --- with creating interesting spaces via reverb, distance mic’ing, frequency balance, and panning.
Width tends to be the most obvious aspect of space, and also the simplest to create (but as with all things, there’s an art to getting it to the next level, and the best mixers can do things many only dream of). Height is almost never talked about, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, but we'll be talking about it today. And depth, well… depth is one of those ‘holy grails’ in music production. Right up there with warmth, punch, tight bass, and silky treble, almost everyone covets it, yet few know how to achieve it.
But here’s a notion that you’ll either find exciting or discouraging, depending on where you are in your journey: it’s not enough to create a mix that’s wide, tall, and deep. To be clear, crafting that kind of palpable sense of space in a mix is a serious accomplishment, and anyone who does it has a right to be proud. But a ‘space’ is no different than anything else in this game, once a listener has heard a specific space for a while, they’ll start to ignore it.
What’s a mixer to do, then? It’s simple, you do the same with space that you do with everything else: you keep changing it, in the right ways, at the right times. And while you’ll ultimately be creating and manipulating space in the mixing stage, the extent to which you can do artful and engaging things with spaces depends heavily on how the song has been arranged.
And so we come to this week’s arrangement topic of choice.
Device #3: To Increase a Song’s Energy, Increase It’s Width, Height, and Depth… and vice-versa
This arrangement device is extremely powerful yet, more often than not, completely overlooked. It also occupies a unique place in this discussion because it can be accomplished purely through composition or purely through engineering. But (surprise surprise) it is most formidable when the two worlds combine, when a masterful arrangement meets masterful engineering.
Here’s the general idea: whenever a sparser part of a song morphs into a denser one, or an energetic section recedes into a mellower one, or a heavier part lifts into a lighter one… these are all your cues to play with width (via panning), height (via bass and treble extension), and depth (via ambiences).
The goal is to continually reshape “the space of the song” as the arrangement unfolds, and in so doing usher the listener through a continuously unfolding series of psychological environments which keep them engaged about what’s going on, and eternally curious about where they’re going next.
Beethoven did it, Daft Punk does it, I do it, and my guess is once you get a feel for it, you’ll be doing it too.
Each aspect of space --- height, width, and depth --- has its own unique considerations and approaches, and we’re going to look at all of them in turn. For each aspect I’ll offer concrete examples of things that are constantly being done in songs you know and love. Once you start to notice these kinds of tricks in play, you’ll start hearing them everywhere, and in all likelihood you’ll start hearing how much you haven’t been doing them.
Personally, I’m addicted to sleuthing out the millions of ways that the masters have been slipping this stuff right under my nose all along, pulling my puppet strings while I was none the wiser. Now it’s your turn. Game on!
Height: as with all the good tricks, this is compositional as well as engineering. For this discussion we’ll consider the verse our baseline, the space against which all other spaces are judged.
For starters, when the chorus hits, whatever was happening in the verse, make the bass go deeper and the treble go higher. The simplest way to do that is to write the bass part so that it drops in pitch to a register that’s below the verse. Likewise for the treble, bring in a shaker or other percussive sound that’s got more HF than whatever was in the verse.
Dropping the bass down and lifting the treble up has the effect of stretching the space in two directions at once, making it taller. But it can also be effective to lift the bass up from the verse; coupling that with a treble lift has the effect of elevating the song, which can literally help to give it an uplifting feel, as if everything got lighter and started floating. Do it again in the bridge and the effect can be soaring.
Also, pay attention to the directional movement of other instruments and their frequencies/registers. Bring in new parts an octave higher, and/or shift the existing instruments up to higher chord voices, or lower ones... or both. But always remember to keep things out of the way of each other; don’t stack up instruments that are all playing the same register. ‘Slot’ your parts so they don’t conflict, that will help you preserve the empty spaces even as you fill up the soundfield.
If you have no control over the instrumentation, there’s still a lot you can do as an engineer. Goosing the extreme lows and highs with some choice shelving filters is the obvious choice, as is simply pushing up the level of the bass and any HF percussion. Layer in another kick sample that hits deeper, and a snare sample that snaps brighter. Even if all you do is add a little sparkle to the lead vocal and push it into a brighter reverb, you'll be on the right track.
A classic engineering twist on stretching the space taller is to have a parallel buss with drums, maybe bass as well; use eq to crank the bass and treble aggressively, and smash it all back down with a fast attack, fast release, pumping compressor. Then ride that buss fader up and down whenever the song needs that flavor of extension, excitement and texture shift. You can also do the same with the vocal(s). A little goes a long way with this technique!
Width: panning is the obvious weapon of choice here, but bear in mind as an arranger that your job is to give the engineer things to pan in the first place. So keep things lean and tight in the verse; imagine a drum and bass foundation with vocals and, say, a single guitar track just off-center. Where are the overheads panned? If it’s electronic, where is the hat panned? Keep everything near the middle. Got a reverb? Keep it narrow, not hard L-R where everybody defaults. Hell, make it a dark mono verb, that will leave you room to grow it upwards, outwards, and backwards.
With a sparse baseline, when the chorus hits and you add two or four sounds (changing in pairs, remember?)… pan the new sounds out. Not necessarily hard panned, even 9 and 3 will be dramatic coming from a mono-ish verse like the one described above. Maybe two percussive elements come in as well, pan them even farther out. If you have overheads, pan them farther out than they were in the verse.
Maybe strings or a pad come in… make those wide, possibly even psychoacoustically widened so they extend beyond the L-R boundaries. New vocal harmonies? Yep, pan ‘em out.
The idea with width is simple: when the song changes and the energy ramps up, everything grows outwards. Just as critically, when the energy recedes the whole song pulls back in again. This is contrast, the essence of drama!
Depth: Depth is most often accomplished through engineering (through the capturing and/or generation and balancing of ambiences, both real and artificial). But that doesn’t mean it’s a mix thing. Indeed, if your productions involve the recording of real instruments in real spaces, you might want to consider getting clever about recording more ambient tracks of more instruments from more perspectives.
That way, when that almighty chorus hits, you can ride up the smashed drum room mic and the distant mics on the guitars and lead vocal. Beyond the mics, don’t forget the reverb sends, pushing harder into them is rarely a bad thing when looking to create moving into a new section.
And here’s yet another simple option that so many overlook: introducing entirely new reverbs and delays into the mix at key points. If you were restrained enough to keep that verse tight and up the middle with a dark mono verb, then the injection of a brighter, longer, hard-panned stereo verb in the chorus can create an incredibly dynamic shift.
Another tasty little depth trick is to introduce new sounds, like strings or an arpeggiated synth or guitar or whatever… at low levels and nearly 100% wet. So even if you had a long stereo reverb in the verse, if everything was going into it subtly, it was more about glue than ambience. But if a new sound or two enters the picture drenched in that same reverb, with lows and highs filtered out and balanced low in the mix, the whole picture morphs as you create the illusion that everything stretches back into the inky black depths and beyond. This is an advanced trick because those new sounds generally have to be tucked into the mix with a deft ear, otherwise things just sound swampy rather than deep.
So let’s take everything we envisioned above, give it a form, and take stock of what all of it can actually look like.
But before we dive in, I'd like to ask a favor: if you dig free info like this, pleaseclick here and, on the top left, Share the Museletter with your peeps on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you!
To the matter at hand: at any given moment, all the sounds that make up whatever song you’re listening to reside inside a space. Mixers who are in the early parts of their journey often become obsessed --- and rightly so --- with creating interesting spaces via reverb, distance mic’ing, frequency balance, and panning.
Width tends to be the most obvious aspect of space, and also the simplest to create (but as with all things, there’s an art to getting it to the next level, and the best mixers can do things many only dream of). Height is almost never talked about, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, but we'll be talking about it today. And depth, well… depth is one of those ‘holy grails’ in music production. Right up there with warmth, punch, tight bass, and silky treble, almost everyone covets it, yet few know how to achieve it.
But here’s a notion that you’ll either find exciting or discouraging, depending on where you are in your journey: it’s not enough to create a mix that’s wide, tall, and deep. To be clear, crafting that kind of palpable sense of space in a mix is a serious accomplishment, and anyone who does it has a right to be proud. But a ‘space’ is no different than anything else in this game, once a listener has heard a specific space for a while, they’ll start to ignore it.
What’s a mixer to do, then? It’s simple, you do the same with space that you do with everything else: you keep changing it, in the right ways, at the right times. And while you’ll ultimately be creating and manipulating space in the mixing stage, the extent to which you can do artful and engaging things with spaces depends heavily on how the song has been arranged.
And so we come to this week’s arrangement topic of choice.
Device #3: To Increase a Song’s Energy, Increase It’s Width, Height, and Depth… and vice-versa
This arrangement device is extremely powerful yet, more often than not, completely overlooked. It also occupies a unique place in this discussion because it can be accomplished purely through composition or purely through engineering. But (surprise surprise) it is most formidable when the two worlds combine, when a masterful arrangement meets masterful engineering.
Here’s the general idea: whenever a sparser part of a song morphs into a denser one, or an energetic section recedes into a mellower one, or a heavier part lifts into a lighter one… these are all your cues to play with width (via panning), height (via bass and treble extension), and depth (via ambiences).
The goal is to continually reshape “the space of the song” as the arrangement unfolds, and in so doing usher the listener through a continuously unfolding series of psychological environments which keep them engaged about what’s going on, and eternally curious about where they’re going next.
Beethoven did it, Daft Punk does it, I do it, and my guess is once you get a feel for it, you’ll be doing it too.
Each aspect of space --- height, width, and depth --- has its own unique considerations and approaches, and we’re going to look at all of them in turn. For each aspect I’ll offer concrete examples of things that are constantly being done in songs you know and love. Once you start to notice these kinds of tricks in play, you’ll start hearing them everywhere, and in all likelihood you’ll start hearing how much you haven’t been doing them.
Personally, I’m addicted to sleuthing out the millions of ways that the masters have been slipping this stuff right under my nose all along, pulling my puppet strings while I was none the wiser. Now it’s your turn. Game on!
Height: as with all the good tricks, this is compositional as well as engineering. For this discussion we’ll consider the verse our baseline, the space against which all other spaces are judged.
For starters, when the chorus hits, whatever was happening in the verse, make the bass go deeper and the treble go higher. The simplest way to do that is to write the bass part so that it drops in pitch to a register that’s below the verse. Likewise for the treble, bring in a shaker or other percussive sound that’s got more HF than whatever was in the verse.
Dropping the bass down and lifting the treble up has the effect of stretching the space in two directions at once, making it taller. But it can also be effective to lift the bass up from the verse; coupling that with a treble lift has the effect of elevating the song, which can literally help to give it an uplifting feel, as if everything got lighter and started floating. Do it again in the bridge and the effect can be soaring.
Also, pay attention to the directional movement of other instruments and their frequencies/registers. Bring in new parts an octave higher, and/or shift the existing instruments up to higher chord voices, or lower ones... or both. But always remember to keep things out of the way of each other; don’t stack up instruments that are all playing the same register. ‘Slot’ your parts so they don’t conflict, that will help you preserve the empty spaces even as you fill up the soundfield.
If you have no control over the instrumentation, there’s still a lot you can do as an engineer. Goosing the extreme lows and highs with some choice shelving filters is the obvious choice, as is simply pushing up the level of the bass and any HF percussion. Layer in another kick sample that hits deeper, and a snare sample that snaps brighter. Even if all you do is add a little sparkle to the lead vocal and push it into a brighter reverb, you'll be on the right track.
A classic engineering twist on stretching the space taller is to have a parallel buss with drums, maybe bass as well; use eq to crank the bass and treble aggressively, and smash it all back down with a fast attack, fast release, pumping compressor. Then ride that buss fader up and down whenever the song needs that flavor of extension, excitement and texture shift. You can also do the same with the vocal(s). A little goes a long way with this technique!
Width: panning is the obvious weapon of choice here, but bear in mind as an arranger that your job is to give the engineer things to pan in the first place. So keep things lean and tight in the verse; imagine a drum and bass foundation with vocals and, say, a single guitar track just off-center. Where are the overheads panned? If it’s electronic, where is the hat panned? Keep everything near the middle. Got a reverb? Keep it narrow, not hard L-R where everybody defaults. Hell, make it a dark mono verb, that will leave you room to grow it upwards, outwards, and backwards.
With a sparse baseline, when the chorus hits and you add two or four sounds (changing in pairs, remember?)… pan the new sounds out. Not necessarily hard panned, even 9 and 3 will be dramatic coming from a mono-ish verse like the one described above. Maybe two percussive elements come in as well, pan them even farther out. If you have overheads, pan them farther out than they were in the verse.
Maybe strings or a pad come in… make those wide, possibly even psychoacoustically widened so they extend beyond the L-R boundaries. New vocal harmonies? Yep, pan ‘em out.
The idea with width is simple: when the song changes and the energy ramps up, everything grows outwards. Just as critically, when the energy recedes the whole song pulls back in again. This is contrast, the essence of drama!
Depth: Depth is most often accomplished through engineering (through the capturing and/or generation and balancing of ambiences, both real and artificial). But that doesn’t mean it’s a mix thing. Indeed, if your productions involve the recording of real instruments in real spaces, you might want to consider getting clever about recording more ambient tracks of more instruments from more perspectives.
That way, when that almighty chorus hits, you can ride up the smashed drum room mic and the distant mics on the guitars and lead vocal. Beyond the mics, don’t forget the reverb sends, pushing harder into them is rarely a bad thing when looking to create moving into a new section.
And here’s yet another simple option that so many overlook: introducing entirely new reverbs and delays into the mix at key points. If you were restrained enough to keep that verse tight and up the middle with a dark mono verb, then the injection of a brighter, longer, hard-panned stereo verb in the chorus can create an incredibly dynamic shift.
Another tasty little depth trick is to introduce new sounds, like strings or an arpeggiated synth or guitar or whatever… at low levels and nearly 100% wet. So even if you had a long stereo reverb in the verse, if everything was going into it subtly, it was more about glue than ambience. But if a new sound or two enters the picture drenched in that same reverb, with lows and highs filtered out and balanced low in the mix, the whole picture morphs as you create the illusion that everything stretches back into the inky black depths and beyond. This is an advanced trick because those new sounds generally have to be tucked into the mix with a deft ear, otherwise things just sound swampy rather than deep.
So let’s take everything we envisioned above, give it a form, and take stock of what all of it can actually look like.
- We have a minimal verse, drums bass and vocal, with guitar just off center and a dark mono reverb gluing everything. A simple, narrow, intimate space.
- Then the chorus hits and our bass drops deeper while some sparkly percussion flies up and to the sides.
- A higher guitar part goes to 9 o’clock, a piano at 3 o’clock. Both feed a new, longer, widepanned, brighter reverb.
- High strings also come in, buried in that longer reverb, tucked in the back.
- Finally, vocal harmonies come in, bright and dry, hardpanned L and R.
Can you see how dramatic that much change can be? Setting aside the actual musical parts and sounds and performances, the amount of movement that’s embedded in that simple set of arrangement choices allows the mix engineer to really lay it on thick. The degree of contrast is stunning; new sounds emerge and assemble into an entirely new shape that stretches up, down, back, left, and right.
If you do it right, the listener cannot help but be mesmerized.
Just as powerful is the shift back from that taller, wider, deeper space into the familiar and comfortably intimate space of the verse. Yes, the explosion into a well-orchestrated hook is a major payoff, but having the dust settle and the tension begin to build all over again is an equally big payoff. It’s the roller coaster ride, beginning the slow climb to yet another round of excitement.
Granted, the composer has a bit of work to do to bridge all these sections, to make the transition from ‘empty’ to ‘full’ not only seamless but effortless. Likewise, the mixer has to do the same, creating fader rides, automation, and all the other things we do to bring sounds to life, only in this case we get to highlight and expand all this magical movement that’s already encoded in the arrangement, which is infinitely more rewarding than trying to inject life into a static lump of sound.
And so it is that we conclude part 3 of this series on Better Arrangements. Next week, we’re going to take some of the simple ideas outlined so far, the things designed to add contrast to a production, and I’m going to show you how to make all these various devices contrast with one another.
Yes, that’s right, we’re going to add contrast to our contrast.