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12. Arrangement Workshop Part 2: Arranging a full track

1 Let’s now arrange our track using the parts we rendered, coloured and organised in Part 1 of this tutorial. You’ll find these audio files in the Track Stems 125bpm folder in the Tutorial Files if you’d like to follow along. Currently, all the parts will messily play at once, so mute all the channels except for drums, bass and piano. 2 While spontaneous arrangements are great, it can often help to come up with a strategy and plan out a rough structure that suits the style of track you’re making. You can use empty MIDI regions on an empty MIDI track to name and visually mark the sections on the timeline: we’re going for an eight-bar beat intro, 16-bar breakdown/build-up, 32-bar drop/chorus, 16-bar middle break, then 32-bar second drop/outro. 3 Once the MIDI markers have been placed and named to correspond to the different sections, quickly copy, paste and remove parts throughout the timeline. Delete the bass from the intro and breakdowns, remove the drums from the breakdowns, and place the snare roll and rises in the breakdown sections. Now it’s time to work on the ‘broad strokes’ and get the parts in place – we can focus on transitions and finer details later. 4 Our arrangement focuses on piano and vocal from the first breakdown onwards, as we’ll save the extra melodic parts for later. We then build the momentum by introducing other melodic accompaniments (such as the synth arpeggio and, later, the lead line) over the top, lifting the track’s emotional impact. Volume automation fades the high string sound in and out, rather than having it start and stop abruptly. 5 As the piano hook is the core element of the track, we can use filtering to both introduce the part and cool its effect down later. Load a filter plugin on the piano hook’s channel and automate the cutoff at appropriate points. We’re using Vengeance Sound’s Philta CM, as it features dual low- and high-pass filters. 6 Once the core structure is laid down, zoom in on the transitions between each eight-bar section, removing or manipulating the drums and other parts to create fills and gaps that keep the sections flowing. This can be as simple or intensive as you like – often simple muting is enough to provide a change, while other arrangements will demand that you program intricate fills and edits. 7 Although we prepared lots of usable material earlier, there’s no reason why you can’t quickly create a new part (or a variation on an existing one) if the arrangement dictates. Our track could make more of the vocal phrases, so we create a few extra processed versions. A new reversed reverb sound is also created, used to introduce the vocal more effectively. 8 Delay and reverb plugins, when placed on send tracks/FX channels, are highly useful tools for arranging. Send key elements to a wash of space or repeats to help them carry over through different sections. You can always bounce these signals down and manipulate them further with audio editing. 9 Once you think you’re nearly finished, go through the arrangement and finetune ‘micro-details’ like automation and level changes, with the aim of maximising the overall flow of the track. For example, we’ve automated a subtle 1.5dB EQ dip on the piano at 3.5kHz when the vocal and lead enter. You’ll probably get bored of hearing the same track so many times, so take regular breaks to ‘reset’ your ears.