Here’s the text of a good little post from Kim Lajoie on arrangement and the dangers of thinking vertically instead of horizontally.
I know I fall into that trap a lot and it’s killed the workflow on my current track as, when I had stripped parts out, it sounded pretty empty. So, it was good timing to read this.
Anyway, here it is…
“Don’t build a structure by just muting/unmuting parts
Kim Lajoie | August 15, 2011 at 12:00 am |
It’s pretty tempting.
You’ve spent days developing your utterly brilliant eight-bar loop.It sounds full and thick. All your EQs and compressors are perfectly set. It almost makes you want to get up and dance.
But it’s only sixteen seconds long.
And you didn’t want to make a sixteen second song. You want to stretch it out over five minutes. So first you duplicate your eight bars until it fills five minutes. That’s almost twenty repetitions. And your eight bars already has a lot of repetition in it. So you start muting parts. Let the intro be pretty sparse. Then bring in some more synths. Then the kick drum. Then drop it all away for a bit. Then build up and suddenly drop everything in. Sit on that groove for a minute or so, then tear back the layers until the track ends.
That’s how it goes, doesn’t it?
Except the end result is a bit lacklustre. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but it’s not special. Maybe add a few whooshes, a few risers, tweak things a bit here and there… And then what?
The problem is that you’re still thinking in layers. You’re hearing the music as a stack of simultaneous components. You’re arranging your musical ideas by layering them on top of each other. Most listeners, however, hear music as a sequence of sections or landmarks. They prefer to hear musical ideas one ofter the other. In other words, you’re thinking vertically and your listeners are thinking horizontally. You think you’ve got five minutes of music, but your listeners are hearing the same sixteen seconds twenty times.
The solution is not in how you mute or unmute your parts. It’s not in where you added your whooshes and risers. It’s not even in the way you set your EQs and compressors. The solution is in changing your workflow of building a track by stacking musical ideas on top of each other.
Try to build your initial musical ideas side by side. Think about developing sections (you don’t have to worry about the order at first). Give yourself more than sixteen seconds to express your musical ideas. Develop several different ideas, and then put them in the blender. See what happens when you mix and match them. Build some transitions from one section to the next.
And then - once you’ve got some reasonably well-developed musical material - you can start to assemble the structure of the track. Pay particular attention to the contour of the track. This is the time to think about rates of change, primary and secondary themes, listener expectations, momentum, etc. The key difference is that if your starting with a lot more musical material, you have a lot more scope for doing interesting things with your track. Your ideas are the building blocks. You don’t have to use all of them, but you’ll be glad you gave yourself the options.
-Kim.”
thanks man … good read!
Thats interesting… Cool for posting it Jon 
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On a side note though… am I the only person who doesnt get Kim?
Some of the stuff he writes strikes me as just a generic glueing of banal words & generalisations.
I often wonder what inspires the process of going to the trouble to upload some of that sh!t to the internet.
He gets google alerts - so I’m sure he’ll read this 
Just cos you CAN blog - doesnt mean you SHOULD blog.
I do agree with you there ICN 
That last line there:
[quote]You don’t have to use all of them, but you’ll be glad you gave yourself the options[/quote]
Wish to fk he had of started with that statement at the start, before I had to be cryogenically frozen to be able to get through that fkn stream of consciousness.
Thats exactly what I mean… so wishy washy. Totally dismisses everything thats been written before it.
“Eh… you know all that Sh!t that I wrote… yeah, well - it was just sh!t. Dont pay any attention to it”.
WTF!?!
Music is really one of the most difficult things to actually “write” about, and although I agree with you ICN about the fluffiness of the prose, I must admit there are some salient points in there. Especially that with regards to the “linear” (or horizontal) versus the vertical. It is quite easy to paint yourself into a corner by building a great 4-bar loop, with no easy way of getting out of it to make the 5 minutes worth sticking around for…
General rule of thumb for transitions: change the harmony, the melody, the texture, or any combination of the three and you’ll have a good start to a shift.
I know I keep quoting Stravinsky on these issues, but he said it perfectly: “Composing is putting into an order a certain number of sounds according to certain interval relationships. This leads to a search for the center upon which those sounds should converge. In contrast, if a center is given, find a combination of sounds that converge upon it.”
It really couldn’t be any simpler or better-explained than that.
J
Theres “some” good points there cos he opened the page & got the stencil out…
nice post. yeahh Kim Blog is really awesome.
I let Mozart speak for me:
[quote]Your work is ingenius. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.[/quote]
He once gave me feedback on a track as well:
[quote]JamieinNC (14/08/2011)[hr]“Composing is putting into an order a certain number of sounds according to certain interval relationships. This leads to a search for the center upon which those sounds should converge. In contrast, if a center is given, find a combination of sounds that converge upon it.”
It really couldn’t be any simpler or better-explained than that.
J[/quote]
Couldn’t be any simpler than that? Man thats complicated as hell! What does all that flowery talk mean? 
You should keep reading Kim so Gav! :hehe:
[quote]ICN (15/08/2011)[hr]You should keep reading Kim so Gav! :hehe:[/quote]
I don’t talk queer!
Awesome post Jon mate.
That’s why I’m always trying to make a tune that tells a story. A feeling.
Well, even though I’m not entirely sure if Slender and ICN thought it was a good read but still…
here’s a good example of a simple track with very few elements in that has been arranged very well as a journey
and another
Damn, I just noticed I’ve passed a 1000 posts? Do I get a prize?
[quote]jonsloan (16/08/2011)[hr]Damn, I just noticed I’ve passed a 1000 posts? Do I get a prize?[/quote]
Do you get “Supreme Being” at 1000 posts? Not really a prize though.
…
It’s prize enough for me. I am a man with simple tastes 
Thats enough?! Cool - We’ll keep the dwarves, stilton & cava that we were gonna send around to ya
Dwarves, stilton and cava?
That’s ok, I’ve already got something small, that smells of cheese and cheap wine! :w00t: