The Song Fight Bulletin Board

How do you arrange a song in a traditional DAW?

I've been using Ableton Live for years now, and with that I always work on one chunk (4 measures or so) at a time, and then chain them all together. This has worked fine, but I think it's been somewhat limiting.

To try to move beyond this, I just bought Sonar 6 (studio). It seems quite awesome, but I'm at a point where I don't really know how to translate my techniques. My inclination is to just slide a loop through the song and work on one chunk at a time like always, but then I haven't really evolved much.

Thoughts? Is this a stupid question?

Craig

I'm old school. It's from start to end, and if you f**k up, you re-do it, lol.
But in all honesty, because of the drum program I use now only works in a pre determined loops, 4/8/16 etc. I program my drums in loops now. It's kind of nice seeing the changes on the screen as you are playing along or singing along. I've done it a few times where I do my vox in loops, but they feel cold and phoned in. I believe that lead vox and lead guitar and rhythm guitar need a "start to finish" approach to feel right, but that's just me.

I know this didn't quite answer you question, but I got to say f**k with asterisks.

starfinger wrote:How do you arrange a song in a traditional DAW?

I use Adobe Audition 1.0.

I perform one instrument all the way through. Usually guitar, 'cause I'm that kind of guy. But sometimes piano, sometimes a drum. Very occasionally a loop of some sort (our "Brand New Car" is based entirely on the looped bass vocal). But always one WAV that runs the whole duration of the song.

Then I start adding live performance to that. I don't bother recording long stretches of silence, or I cut them out if I'm too lazy to punch in and out. I save a lot, too. So I end up with tons of little WAV files.

HINT: Don't tell your favorite audio player to search your recording computer for song files. You'll end up with all these stupid little track recordings in your media library. Which can be embarassing at the party where your wife thinks she'll just put the media player on shuffle all...

When I mix, I sometimes start by mixing groups of similar tracks together into files, including all the silence spaces, so each file's duration is the same as the initial first track. Then I mix those together. It makes the ultimate mix job a little easier on my CPU and my eyes.

I usually have a song mostly written before I get into recording it, though major changes often occur at some point.

My recording methods have changed drastically since my last job. I get down ultra-clean loops of everything I'm using, and move from there. That way, I can step back and think more globally, and do better arranging in the middle of a project.

Try different stuff. If you're feeling like you're stuck in 16-bar verse, 8-bar chorus, ABABCB-style writing, then do something completely different. Try sonata form (sonatina, for our sake ). Try a big jazz-chart style arrangement, regardless of instrumentation. Listen to completely random music and focus on the arrangement styles you find.

Trying a different program is a good first step.

Probably easier to chunk various instruments in different ways. For example, you'll always want to chunk your drums in shorter sections than your synth line.

I wouldn't shy away from performing the chorus all at once, and reusing it later, and doing the same with the verse. But underneath, when you're reusing a chunk, you can vary it somehow. On the drums, add an extra cymbal crash or something. On the second verse add another harmony part, a shaker, a little synth doodle-- something new.

That's how i've built up my big rock pop songs in the past.

jb

Oh, one thing that I have been doing, is playing the chorus in loop to add my back up vox. This is a great time saver because I can copy and paste the back up vox to each chorus section. Which is fine as far as I'm concerned because back up vox are always going to be consistent through out a song whether it be live or studio. I let the lead vox make the variations. This is one of those things I was talking about when I said that Song Fight has made me much more efficient.

I usually do it in chunks, too, and then sew the whole thing together. Very unfortunately Cubase's Play Order functionality (which you can use to define sections of the song, then re-arrange those sections easily) seems really buggy, and if you want to use it you can't freeze tracks anymore. So, basically, I need another way of doing it too.