Song Analysis - Arrangement
Lesson 29 from: Music Theory for Electronic ProducersTomas George
Song Analysis - Arrangement
Lesson 29 from: Music Theory for Electronic ProducersTomas George
Lesson Info
29. Song Analysis - Arrangement
Lessons
Introduction
00:58 2Basic Music Theory Terms
08:07 3Keyboard Layout and Octaves
06:19 4Working out Major Scales
08:58 5Perfect 5ths
06:42 63rds - Part 1
08:05 73rds - Part 2
07:39 8Perfect 4ths
04:36Chords and Inversions - Part 1
10:05 10Chords and Inversions - Part 2
09:13 11Chord Progressions - Part 1
10:22 12Chord Progressions - Part 2
08:26 13Inversions
08:53 147th Chords
09:48 15Chord Extensions
08:09 16Suspended Chords
02:40 17The Circle of 5ths
04:30 18Minor Scales
08:09 19Chords in the Natural Minor scale
09:56 20Harmonic and Melodic Minor
09:30 21Write the Chords, then the Melody
09:03 22Write the Melody, then the Chords
18:01 23Arpeggios
08:00 24Writing Bass Parts
11:35 25Writing Bass Riffs and Adapting Melodies
14:10 26Song Analysis - Chords, Part 1
10:17 27Song Analysis - Chords, Part 2
05:58 28Song Analysis - Melody
08:55 29Song Analysis - Arrangement
07:30 30Song 2 Analysis - Arrangement
05:04 31Song 2 Analysis - Chords
08:55 32Song 2 Analysis - Melodies
06:34 33Song 3 Analysis - Chords
11:41 34Song 3 Analysis - Melodies and Arrangement
06:55 35Create a Song from a Drum Beat - Part 1
10:22 36Create a Song from a Drum Beat - Part 2
18:47 37Create a Song from a Drum Beat - Part 3
18:49 38Create a Song from a Drum Beat - Part 4
08:21 39Create a Song from a Chord Progression - Part 1
08:16 40Create a Song from a Chord Progression - Part 2
08:07 41Create a Song from a Melody - Part 1
07:27 42Create a Song from a Melody - Part 2
09:05 43Modes Intro
04:10 44Ionian
00:43 45Dorian
04:31 46Phrygian
02:09 47Lydian
01:35 48Mixolydian
02:13 49Aeolian
00:39 50Locrian
01:50 51Dorian Mode Example
09:12 52Pentatonic Scales
12:27Lesson Info
Song Analysis - Arrangement
Hello, this lecture is all about arranging your track. Of course, once you get your chords and then you get your melodies, you really want to arrange your track and just not have the same thing repeating all the time. There's certain elements you can repeat like the chord progression, the melodies and certain points. But you do want to kind of create a mood and create a journey for your listeners when they're listening to your music. Really, if it's just the same thing all the way through all the time, they're gonna get bored quite quickly. So arrangement is extremely important. This doesn't necessarily fit under the music theory kind of hub. But arrangement is as important as anything else. When you're writing music. If you haven't got a good arrangement, it's gonna get a bit boring or might be a bit strange, which is why I think arrangement is super important. You have to go through and create different arrangements for your tracks. Cos it's not always gonna be perfect. The first tim...
e in Ableton Live nine, we have two kind of views. We have like a session view where we can trigger clips in and we have an arrangement view, but other digital audio workstations just use the arrangement view, which is fine. You don't have to use different clips. Um A lot of the time when creating music, I use different controllers and modular to create sounds and launch clips. But you can just do it all with your musical typing just by drawing it and you don't need any keyboards as long as you know, your music theory and you've got your arrangements sorted. You can still create great sounding tracks just like this. I know Dead Mouse uses Ableton Live Nine doesn't use many midi keyboards just types it in same as Rill X. So loads of the big name, producers create music just by typing it in. So don't worry if you haven't got the latest push or you haven't got the latest ABC controller, you can still do it all in the box. So this track is really arranged. Fru D's different sections are the A section and then the A one section, a one section has kind of a, a weird chord in there which I think makes it sound a bit more mysterious, more moody and the track is called space raider. So when I was creating this track, I imagined a spaceship flying through space kind of landing on other planets and robbing them and going back in the spaceship and being a space raider. That's what I envisioned when creating this song. A bit strange, but a lot of the time when I write music, I have an image in my head or kind of a mini clip of, yeah, a lot of time. It's weird, spacious things. A lot of people write love songs. The songs I write are normally about aliens, spaceships, monsters movies, that kind of thing. So it really depends on the kind of thing you're into. If you're into a lot of sci fi and this kind of thing, it can be quite interesting to write music like this. So I really wanted the journey to, to go through space and have different ups and downs, which is why I've got this strange chord in there. And I've also have another section where we use an Arpeggio which basically just plays through the notes of the chord. So let's just have a look into this section just to kind of mix it up a bit. I thought I'd add an Arpeggio just to make it a bit more interesting and stop the same thing repeating over and over again. What? And then the riff plays over this Arpeggio. And we also have stuff like washes sound effects, sym reverse symbols just to kind of make it a bit more interesting to listen to. And then I chop up the riff at the end. So it doesn't play all the way through. It's just part of the riff. So we're kind of hinting the riff from before and then the listener can tell the song's going to end and then I bring back this, the original chords. So there's certain things we can do. This isn't really a lecture on how to use Ableton Live. It's right. It's about really arranging your track and knowing that you want to create your music. So your listener doesn't get bored. It's something exciting. You can use visions um or imagery. When you're writing, you can even use visual score so you can write out on the piece of paper, what you want to happen and then you can follow that and you can use your arrangement to follow that. So if you write a bit crazy bang, you know, the music's gotta build up and have a lot of tension and you can use the chords and the melodies to add tension and then you can release the tension by using the predictable notes and you can build up the tension by using the stranger out of tune out of key weirder notes. But really arrangement is about experimenting and just creating music that you find interesting. And you also think a listener will find interesting, of course, orchestration. You don't want to just use the same instrument in every single track. You want to change it, mix it up a bit, add percussion. If you hear the drum part on here, there is a roll on the high hats and they only really have this roll when there's space in the riff because if there's too much going on. The listener won't know what to latch on and they'll just be muddy and mess in your music. So, a lot of the time if you have space, then you can add something. There cos there's space for a new instrument or if there's a lot going on, just push back and allow this riff or melody to s stand out and shine so the listener can latch onto that too. So let's just have a listen to the drum beats and here you can hear the high hats and when there high hats are playing, you can hear that the ref isn't really doing much. So when the notes are held do do do, then we have the high hats. So it's little intricate things like that, that most people won't really realize there's the hats playing a, a rhythm like that and the space in the melody they just think, oh, this sounds good. I like this. Most people don't really realize this stuff and they listen to music. They just let their emotions take over and dictate what they're feeling cos if you ask a non musician, what they think of a track, a lot of the time they will say, I like the lyrics. It makes me feel happy. It makes me feel sad, really generic terms. That could mean anything. But they don't really listen to what the chords are doing. They won't listen to this and be like, oh the, the first chord creates tension. The second chord releases the tension, but it also modulates to a different key like this. They won't think that they won't think the first chord has a lot of tension. The second chord releases attention but modulates a different key. They think this sounds spacey. This sounds weird. This sounds nice or maybe this sounds horrible. They won't necessarily know this stuff. But as a music producer, electronic music producer or a composer or musician, whatever term you want to call yourself because they all kind of fall into the same bracket. Nowadays, if you write your own music and you produce it, you are an electronic composer and electronic producer and a musician. If you any of those terms, you really have to be able to deconstruct and analyze music in general, your own music's easiest to analyze because you can go in and you can look at the project and you can see what's actually going on. Of course, you can download Midi files for other projects or other songs or maybe just ask one of your friends if they can send you one of their tracks and you can have a look at it just to analyze what's going on. So this is the easiest way in my experience is get the midi file and work out what the notes are doing. When you get a bit more advanced, you can do it with audio files and you can do it with tracks and try and work out what different parts are actually doing by ear, but it's a lot easier to do it in a midi track. So, thank you for watching this lecture. I hope you found it useful. It's mainly about arrangement and how you can use different arrangements and different patterns and techniques to actually create some interesting music.
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Electronic Music Production