Tips on song arrangement?

S

StanleySteamer

New member
Hey guys quick question as the title says, I am looking for some standard kind of rules or guidelines when it comes to laying out beats and songs. I already know about 16 bar verse and 8 bar hooks and stuff but I am trying to get more intricate and detailed with my song arrangement and I have been having a hard time getting different layouts to work and sound good. Any feedback appreciated of course
 
Honestly what I learned about arranging music, is layer your chords in different pitches sometimes with different instruments/sounds. Layer your melodies too. But try not to over crowd the track with too much. Choose the right sounds too. The idea is to try to make the arrangement/beat sound interesting so the song will sound stronger and effective. Arranging is really big and it's like the most important part of music production. All though. It's just one part of production. It's still the first part. The recording, editing, and mixing plus mastering is all part of production.
 
Put a song you love in a track. Then put markers just like "Intro", "Build up", "Drop A", etc (Also depending the genre). Now you can delete the song if you want it, and arrange your track following the markers.
Hope this helps.
 
Just listen to what you really like. And I mean CONSCIOUSLY listen, maybe write down the structure of the song you are listening to and jot down each and every single part of the song. You could make a timeline and draw when every part is coming in.
For modern Hip-Hop this is mostly simple as producers oftentimes just add/subtract layers on top of their chord progressions/melodies.

Don't shy away from REMOVING elements from your song either. That is a nice way to add structure to your music and it is quite often preferable to adding yet another element to your crowded arrangement.
 
One thing you could try is taking into account both “top down” and “bottom up” approaches. Top down would be to start off with ideas about what things like verses are and how many there should be and so on. Bottom up would be to just start making sounds and building them off one another and seeing which ones sound good when they transition into one another and which ones don't. If the song ends up sounding good, it doesn't matter how abnormal the structure is. One drawback is this can get kind of overwhelming to work on.
 
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Outside of the verse/hook/intro/outro kind of thing, try to add stuff at one point in your song that doesn't appear anywhere else, this way you make your beat sound much more complex than it actually is, and you seem to get a more authentic feel to your beat
 
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