Composition and Arrangement
Arranging Dance Music
A dance track usually has a looser structure than a hip-hop or pop song — but it does have a structure. Following a structure when you’re arranging your track makes it more DJ-friendly — and therefore more likely to get played out in a club. Using a structured arrangement for a house (or trance, electrohouse, techno, or pretty much any four-to-the-floor genre) song can also help build a collection of loops into a proper track. The most important rule to remember…
Tune Synths to A432
The idea that the note A3 should correspond to the frequency 440 Hz is a fairly recent one; although A440?s been in use since the 19th century, it’s only since the 1950s that it’s been accepted as the standard tuning. Before that, A was tuned to anywhere from 415Hz up into the 480s. Composer Giuseppe “Four Seasons” Verdi was a fan of tuning A to 432Hz; in Italy, this tuning was made the legal standard. Some say that A432 is the natural tuning of the Earth…
Ableton’s Scale Plug-in
A musical key defines the relationship of the notes in a song. Without going into too much music theory, keeping the different elements of a track in the same key is essential to making them fit together musically. Ableton’s Scale MIDI plug-in automatically shifts the notes in a MIDI track into a specified key. Let’s set the Scale plug-in to use the key of C major.
Smoother Chord Changes
When a group of instruments — like a string section — plays together, each instrument starts and stops each note at a slightly different time. Digitally programmed instruments, on the other hand, will start and stop exactly where they’re told to; this can make chord progressions sound choppy and robotic. Make your MIDI-programmed chords sound more flowing and realistic by adjusting their notes’ start and stop times in the piano roll editor.
Generative Music in Ableton
“Generative music” refers to music that’s randomly generated, rather than composed. Well, not entirely randomly, or I could close my eyes, bang on the keyboard, and call it a symphony. More specifically, it’s music that’s created by a system: you could create generative music from a mathematical algorithm, for example, or from a natural phenomenon (a set of wind chimes is the best-known generative musical instrument). To create your own…
Track Maps
One of the best ways to learn about arranging tracks is to analyze other artists’. Pick one of your favourite tracks, then listen closely to it, noting how and when each element enters and leaves the arrangement. Here’s a track map of Steve Bug’s “Smackman” (click on the image for an enlargement). Each square in the map represents four bars. Looking at the map, you can see that “Smackman” is divided into six roughly equal sections, separated by short breakdowns, and that the percussion…
MIDI Chords in Ableton
Ableton’s Chord MIDI effect automatically creates a chord from a single MIDI note. The Chord plug-in is really only useful in conjunction with the Scale plug-in, so start by dropping a Scale effect before the synth. Drop the Chord plug-in to the left of the Scale effect (if you put it on the right of the Scale, the chords will be out-of-key).
Using Multi-Layer Synths
Using MIDI tracks to play the different instruments inside a multi-layer synthesizer plug-in can potentially save you massive amounts of CPU power. Instead of loading a new copy of the VST instrument for each part, you can open several instruments inside the same plug-in, then play each instrument with its own MIDI channel. I’m using the freeware DSK Virtuoso here, but the technique is the same for other multi-instrument plug-ins like…
