Last year, we furnished you with four tips to help you along in your arrangement efforts, and here we’re adding to that edifying cache with five more essential song construction pointers.

Start As You Mean To Go On

It really goes without saying, but you must always strive to make the intro to every track you produce as memorable and ear-catching as it can possibly be. If you succeed in hooking the listener in right from the word go, their perception of the song as a whole can only benefit in terms of subsequent enthusiasm.

There are countless ways to begin a track, so we can’t provide a prescriptive set of rules, but we can suggest a few general styles of intro to think about. You could herald the kicking in of a very full-on mix with something delicate and understated, à la ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, or confound the audience with an intro that flips entirely when the verse kicks in, such as that of Harry Styles’ ‘Only Angel’. Note that this involves an element of jeopardy, however, as you might not want to risk putting anyone off with something that isn’t fully representative of the song before it gets into its stride. Or how about starting with a solo vocal, along the lines of Led Zep’s ‘Black Dog’? Alternatively, you could do away with any form of intro altogether and just pile straight into the verse, as The Beatles did with ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, or even the chorus, like Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’.

Explore Your DAW’s Arrangement Tools

No matter which one you use, your DAW affords access to a wealth of arrangement-assisting features that not only make your life easier, but can also be hugely inspiring from a creative angle.

Obviously, the fundamental ability to switch synths and samplers out on MIDI instrument tracks provides infinite scope for a establishing instrumental roles, and we looked at Arranger Tracks in the previous collection of tips, but there are plenty of less obvious tools baked into your production platform of choice that can greatly speed up the arranging workflow. Pro Tools’ Shuffle Mode (and its equivalent in other DAWs), for example, makes it easy to shift song sections around in blocks, while the grid-based Session View pioneered by Ableton is now a standard feature in many DAWs, enabling arrangements to be created in a non-linear format and performed on the fly. And when it comes to non-destructive experimentation with alternative parts and takes, the playlists and content-switchable tracks found in Pro Tools, Logic Pro, FL Studio et al are nothing short of a godsend.

Don’t Copy And Paste The Chorus

We would very much hope that you’re not doing this anyway, but it’s not unheard of for time-pressed producers to simply copy and paste choruses or other repeated sections throughout the course of a track, rather than recording and editing each one individually. Although such repetition might not be blatantly apparent to the listener, who knows what effect it might have at the subconscious level? And it’s just lazy!

Although a case could be made for copying certain structural elements between choruses – the drums, bass or rhythm guitar, say – the vocal and any other top line material should always be a one-off, captured specifically for that part of the song. Beyond that, it’s always a good idea to differentiate choruses in other ways, too: slight changes to the mix (widening the backing vocals, or cranking up the distortion slightly, for example), melodic or harmonic variations of some kind, the addition of a string or synth pad, etc. Essentially, you want to keep things constantly interesting and develop the track organically as it progresses.

Try Unexpected Instrument Combinations

Musical genres are strangely resilient in their standardisation of instrumentation – by and large, rock is defined by guitars, dance music is all about drum machines and synths, etc – but great things can happen when such assumptions are subverted. Take inspiration from the adventurous likes of The Beatles, Ministry and Zappa and get experimental with your sonic selections: try a violin or harmonica in place of a guitar; flip your conga pattern to a tabla line; substitute your lead synth with a lead guitar. It doesn’t have to be a complete swap, either: you could just let layer the substitute sound over or under the element it’s looking too supersede. Sitars on top of guitars, or… er, a digeridoo under a bass guitar.

Of course, the instrument in question needs to actually sound ‘right’ in its unexpected context, but that will be largely down to the way it’s mixed, as long as the part itself is appropriate and deployed with taste and judgement. It should be pretty obvious whether or not a given swap works, so be honest with yourself and abandon the idea if it doesn’t immediately makes sense.

Anything But A Fade-Out…

There are no two ways about it: ending a track with a fade-out is a wholly unimaginative option that should only be taken when, for some reason, you have no other choice, or if it somehow actually sounds good. Indeed, it’s become quite a rarity to come across fade-outs in today’s musical landscape, so consider yourself in an anachronistic minority if you do decide to go that way.

Look, there are so many alternatives to the terminal fade that to not at least try some of them for any given track would be remiss. Stop dead on the last beat of the chorus, leaving guitars and reverbs ringing out – or not. Drop everything but the vocal for the last bar. Drop the drums and bass for the last few bars and bring things to a gentle melodic conclusion. Or go for the big finish, like a live band – rolls around the drum kit, histrionic guitars, sliding bass notes, the works. Okay, so that last one isn’t at all original or contemporary, but as we said, anything is better than a fade, surely.

Share your go-to arranging techniques in the comments.

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