Sound Engineering Tutorials From Sound On Sound -- Music Production - Composing & Arranging.pdf

ARRANGER PAGES
Tips For Pop Arranging
Published in SOS April 2000
Technique : Composing/Arranging

If something's letting down your pop tracks, it could be the arrangement rather
than the song itself at fault. Derek Johnson & Debbie Poyser offer some
advice on how to make sure your music gets the
star treatment it deserves.
You don't need us to tell you how important arranging is. If a song is a bare
room with plain walls, empty so that you can see its structure, the
arrangement is the carpet on the floor, the pictures and hangings on the
walls, the furniture that adds life fort to the room, enhancing its good
points and disguising its weaknesses. Sometimes you're quite happy to sit
on the floor in a bright empty room, but often you want to luxuriate in
beautiful or stimulating surroundings.
Training in proper classical orchestration takes a long time and lots of formal instruction, but training to be petent
arranger of pop music requires only your ears, your brain, and a pile of your favourite records. Some of the ideas in this
feature we picked up simply through careful listening mercial recordings. The validity of this approach is proved by
the fact that when we did some extra background reading and research we came across many of the same ideas in
textbooks. In addition, as an educated listener, you probably know what works in a pop track: you may just need to
identify your instinctive reactions and apply them to your own music.
Eric Turkel, at the start of his excellent book Arranging For Synthesists (available
from the SOS Bookshop -- see contact details on page 46), provides a set of
guidelines for anyone about to begin on an arrangement. He suggests first
ing acquainted with a song's lyrical content, and understanding it if possible.
If you haven't written the lyrics, this makes good sense, and even if you have
written them you should consider what atmosphere is evoked by them. It's going to
help you a