Arranging a track

Interesting topic and surely a battle for all of us, let me rant a bit.


My process is to stay in 'creative' mode for a long time initially.

What I mean by this is...Consider a full and fine sounding arrangement...
Things move in and out of each other, linking together perfectly, they communicate and touch each other like age old friends.
To achieve this is the goal, and it's a hard one, especially if your hands are empty, and your mind's eye/imagination is severely limited (like most of us humans) we have to dig deep to find this connection. As stated, throw things at a wall and see what sticks.

So what do I do? I try to fill my hands and imagination as much as possible before I enter the process in the first place.
This can be deconstructed to infinity, an important notion, but not practical.

So, creative mode, instead of trying to make entire songs that all work together beautifully in the first place, I disconnect myself from the end goal initially.
I just jam, I dick around, I make tiny little chunks of audio-time?? space-time matter in the form of frequencies/waves???  whatever, sound I make chunks of sound, 1 bar, 2 bars, 8 bars, looping or not, I make patches, grab and make samples, etc (deconstruct to infinity).
The goal is to fill my hands, to use my DAW or hardware etc. as a storage device to help my sad limited mind, help my imagination along.

In other words, I make notes, a whole bunch of notes, little sketches, knowing in the back of my mind they are intended to one day become a whole, but not forcing them.
Live or bitwig is great for this process with their little clip launchers, in more practical terms, I just make a shit ton of clips.
I Jam, I play, I do stuff that is totally nuts, stuff that is very straight forward, I am in creative mode and just vomit ideas onto the canvas.
I stay here for a long time.
Then I toggle to cleanup mode, where I take what I made, and try to puzzle things together more consciously, I stop squirting shit all over and instead start 'ordering my desk' find clips that fit together, make short loops a little longer maybe, whatever, put clips in the naughty clip corner to sit out the day (I will get back to you later naughty clips and we will see if you learned to behave)
After cleaning up, maybe I have enough, maybe I don't, if I don't or just want to dig deeper and throw more shit at the wall I go back to creative mode, back and forward I go.

After some time I will have a ton of material, some of it works really well, some of it is odd or even horrible, but most of it works well together one way or another, because I cleaned up every now and then.
My hands are now filled up, my imagination is sparked, my brain can remember and very important, can 'see' the links(this clip and that one, that was the shit)

Only now do I start so called arranging, either doing it live or just placing clips here and there.
It's really the same process as before, but more zoomed out if you will, the synths and vst's and effects were the building blocks I used before.
In arranging mode my building blocks are the clips I made, yes I still add and use vsts/gear if I feel like it but my mindset is what matters here...

I find this process helps me a lot with not getting 'stuck' because creative mode is freedom, it is vomiting on the canvas no matter if it works, I do what I enjoy and can fit in my mind easily, I am not bothered by the dread, feeling that things have to fit and work and form an amazing whole.
And it also helps me make far more creative and inspiring connections, I find that if I try to just dive in and arrange in a linear fashion, I fall back to old habits, to memories long made and known, to tricks learned long before, I find myself limited to my limited mind and end up making very mediocre and honestly boring arrangements. The 'pop' factor I suppose, I make what has been made before because my stupid brain only initially see's age old links,

Actually a good read and it mirrors my process quite a bit too, but put a bit more eloquently than I could.

I'm in a state of pause right now so i'm using the time to listen to all my "canvas vomits" and making notes. 

yeah, great ideas there. I'll give this a try when I start writing prog stuff again. It's worked for me in the past but I felt a bit bad about recycling old unused material.. but why throw away old stuff just because it doesn't fit in at the time?

My process at the moment is to mangle/iterate one pattern/loop slowly while recording, then edit down later so the changes are a bit quicker. Or only edit out mistakes so I end up with a slowly evolving megatrack lol. 

  On 6/13/2017 at 12:25 AM, modey said:

It's a difficult one, for sure.. especially since there are really no rules to follow unless you're aiming for something traditional like a straightforward pop song or EDM banger.

 

I've found that Eno's Oblique Strategies cards have helped, even by suggesting something so ridiculous that it's inspired me to do something else entirely. Some of my suggestions though:

- Start big and collapse down; deconstruct and rebuild with a different idea/chord/bassline etc

- Never repeat a bar/pattern without at least a small amount of variation. I like copying the previous pattern, pasting, changing one thing, copying that pattern, pasting again to change another thing etc.. ties in well with the first point

- Don't be afraid of sudden changes. I think something like this was in Oblique Strategies but it's a good one. Build up your first section, sudden jump cut to a completely different key, or tempo, or instrumentation.. and then figure out how to get back to the first section. Or not! I do this all the fkn time with my prog tracks, most of them are made up of a few completely different ideas that I've tried to smash together, sometimes it doesn't work but when it does, it's a good one!

- Saying all this, don't be afraid of repetition/minimalism. I've found this works best with sparse arrangements, but could work with the right chord progression (cf. a lot of Lorenzo Senni's music)

 

This is an excellent post.

When I first started making electronic music I was into all the Ibiza trance stuff around at the time (late '90s), and I stuck with that formula for a while. Build up -> breakdown -> bigger build up. Even when I started working on fairly dark, percussive ambient/illbient type stuff I followed the same formula, which led to some fairly idiosyncratic stuff I suppose. But after a while I realised that I was basically doing the same thing over and over, structurally, and challenged myself to move away from that. Although I've returned to it from time to time since then, a lot of modey's ideas above are great. Starting with a 'climax', rather than building to one, always makes a track interesting (as it's generally done very rarely) - think of Rae. And starting in one place and moving elsewhere is another one that works well. I was working on a fairly slow track a few years ago, and although it had started well, I threw in a drum loop and it just ended up sounding really stodgy no matter what I did. So instead of building the track up further, at the point the bassline came in I dropped out everything else, punctuated it with a couple of discordant piano stabs, then threw in an Amen break at twice the speed and turned it into a jungle track. The lesson was: if the obvious route doesn't work, do the complete opposite.

That's kind of the approach I tend to take these days. Unless what I have is SO good that I can keep a fairly obvious 'build up' formula without it sounding stale and predictable, I'll try my hardest to take the track to a place that I wasn't intending when I started it. I tend to just jam with hardware now, so it's obviously not exactly the same, but most of my tracks now are cut down from 25 minute pieces; quite often I'll get to the end of a banger and tit around with some effects and end up turning it into a really gorgeous ambient track somehow, and end up only keeping that ambient outro in the final cut, discarding the entire section that started the track in the first place. There's a real sense of liberation in cutting stuff out of a track.

My current plan is to work on long, evolving jams like these, which often end up in me recording several very different takes, and then cutting the best bits out and smashing them together to make strangely structured suites. 

Oh, and as several people have said now, don't be afraid of short tracks. There are some gorgeous 1-2 minute pieces out there, and you never know when a nice 30 seconds can be incorporated into the outro of another track. I've whacked together tracks recorded years apart like that and nobody would ever know.

  On 8/15/2017 at 12:21 AM, purlieu said:

quite often I'll get to the end of a banger and tit around with some effects and end up turning it into a really gorgeous ambient track somehow, and end up only keeping that ambient outro in the final cut, discarding the entire section that started the track in the first place. There's a real sense of liberation in cutting stuff out of a track.

 

My current plan is to work on long, evolving jams like these, which often end up in me recording several very different takes, and then cutting the best bits out and smashing them together to make strangely structured suites. 

yes! I've been coming to terms with the first point; in a way I find it a little disappointing that I sometimes can't get things as bangin' as I want, but then the end piece ends up being interesting in a way that was only possible by fucking up a techno track lol

and I'm all about the second point as well.. I just need to get better at giving tracks a few "sessions" rather than trying to jam it all out in one sitting.

  On 6/13/2017 at 12:25 AM, modey said:

It's a difficult one, for sure.. especially since there are really no rules to follow unless you're aiming for something traditional like a straightforward pop song or EDM banger.

 

I've found that Eno's Oblique Strategies cards have helped, even by suggesting something so ridiculous that it's inspired me to do something else entirely. Some of my suggestions though:

- Start big and collapse down; deconstruct and rebuild with a different idea/chord/bassline etc

- Never repeat a bar/pattern without at least a small amount of variation. I like copying the previous pattern, pasting, changing one thing, copying that pattern, pasting again to change another thing etc.. ties in well with the first point

- Don't be afraid of sudden changes. I think something like this was in Oblique Strategies but it's a good one. Build up your first section, sudden jump cut to a completely different key, or tempo, or instrumentation.. and then figure out how to get back to the first section. Or not! I do this all the fkn time with my prog tracks, most of them are made up of a few completely different ideas that I've tried to smash together, sometimes it doesn't work but when it does, it's a good one!

- Saying all this, don't be afraid of repetition/minimalism. I've found this works best with sparse arrangements, but could work with the right chord progression (cf. a lot of Lorenzo Senni's music)

I like your advice. I find deconstructing and rebuilding can be a great strategy. I also find I almost always need to put a track aside for a bit and come back with fresh ears, in a different mood etc...It can be an an hour, a day, sometimes a year, but if I'm stuck I need to get away from it to let my brain work on it, even if subconsciously. Tracks I have almost thrown away sometimes become tracks I finish after coming back to them and arranging them later. I tend to work to the point of creative fatigue when creating new stuff, jamming, writing beats etc...then come back in a more reasonable state of mind and letting my logical side try figure out the arranging or finishing. It's tough, though. I also start dozens of unfinished tracks for each one that I actually attempt to arrange. So I guess that is my strategy...I've made peace with having hundreds of unfinished tracks hanging around so I have a lot to choose from when I am in the right frame of mind to develop something. Think of starting the track as mixing paints. Once you have a palette full of colors mixed, i.e. beats/melodies/textures made, then you compose and paint the image. Or something like that. So many musicians I know claim arranging as a least favorite thing to do or a weakness, so you're not alone. Try to trick your brain into thinking that arranging is as fun as writing a beat.