Arrangement Techniques for Electronic Music: 5 Tips for Your Workflow
Simple ways to add life to your tracks.
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Arrangement Techniques for Electronic Music: 5 Tips for Your Workflow · Source: Marcus Schmahl
Are you looking for new ways to add depth and character to your productions? We’re discussing arrangement techniques for electronic music.
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Arrangement Techniques for Electronic Music
When we think about sequencing in electronic music, the lack of boundaries and rules can often make it quite daunting. However, there are a few foundational ideas that are common threads throughout all the different styles of electronic music available today.
Arrangement Techniques for Electronic Music: Live Arrangement
Breaking free from the boundaries of perfection and arranging your music live can be creatively liberating, as your focus shifts from microscopic details to the energy and flow of each track you produce. Naturally, the same aspects such as the building and releasing of tension remain key structural elements, but the way you explore this is different in a performance context.
For this reason, music that is arranged live is often more functional, stripped down, and minimalistic in its presentation. While the 20 layers of textured synth pads you created in your DAW may have been fun to make, it’s not necessarily something that will keep the dancefloor at capacity.
Whether you use it within a DAW like Ableton Live or a hardware sequencer, clip launch is a powerful tool for arranging MIDI and audio loops. If you can master live drum arrangement, the rest of the song fits into place remarkably easily, especially in different styles of dance music.
Arrangement Techniques for Electronic Music: Transitional Effects
In pop music, we usually create transitions in the arrangement through chord changes, but electronic music works a little differently. In most cases, we are either looking to heighten the level of tension or release it, which means introducing drama into the composition. However, it’s important to note that the use of risers, sweeps, and hits to punctuate transitions is a completely stylistic choice.
Whether it’s determined by the artist or the genre of music being created, some electronic music has hardly any use of transitional elements except for a drum fill or two, while other styles are littered with dramatic effects at every turn. To gauge how many elements to add, we can take our cues from the section of the song we are moving into.
For example, if you shift from the main drop into the most intense part of the track, this calls for some serious hype. Alternatively, if you’re simply introducing a vocal or melodic element for the first time, you want to understate the transition so as not to take away from the hook. Also, using a bar of silence in a major transition can add anticipation and unpredictability.
Arrangement Techniques for Electronic Music: DJ-Friendly Intros and Outros
As we’ve mentioned, creating a track for DJs to play at festivals and in clubs has slightly different hallmarks compared to a pop song you’re trying to push on streaming platforms. Because DJing involves mixing one track into another for a continuous dance marathon, most producers create intros and outros to make it easy to fit their tracks into the playlist.
Luckily, this is quite a simple process. All you have to do is consider that there will be two tracks playing over each other during the intro and outro. This means that the bassline sits this one out, along with any of the track’s melodic parts. Essentially, we only want a skeleton of the rhythm section to be playing.
This consists of the kick, the hi-hats, and a groove element or two in the midrange, as well as the clap/snare if it fits the arrangement. With this sparse scattering of instruments in your intro and outro sections, it’s easy to play another track underneath without elements overlapping and peaking the sound system too much.
Arrangement Techniques for Electronic Music: The Endlessly Evolving Pattern
In the 1990s, a peculiar but effective sequencing technique evolved through various styles of underground electronic music, including minimal techno, dub techno, and IDM, and later found its way into genres like micro house. Because electronic music is loop-based, this necessitated musical variation in the patterns that make up the rhythms and melodies.
Another key aspect is a concept known as metric dissonance that becomes apparent when we introduce polyrhythms into a song. For instance, when two repeating rhythm patterns of different length are playing, we experience different levels of tension and release with each step of the pattern. This phenomenon is rooted in repetition, and gives many styles of techno a hypnotic quality.
Although this may sound complicated, it’s far easier to implement than you think. Every electronic track – particularly in dance music – has a basic rhythm signature that repeats throughout its duration, similar to a drummer’s backbeat. Once you’ve found the core rhythm pattern, all you need to do is add a subtle variation with each repetition.
Arrangement Techniques for Electronic Music: Filters and Delays
Because the entire musical composition of a dance track can often amount to nothing more than a 4-bar loop, there are a few tricks we can use to create a sense of movement. For example, almost every electronic track has a main synth lead or bassline that remains a feature throughout. By using a gradually climbing or falling low-pass filter, we can slowly shift the focus of the sound in the mix and give it the sense that it’s evolving.
Using high-pass and low-pass filters on drum loops has become a standard in so many styles of electronic music, so much so that the listener knows what to expect when we hear it. As with any art form, we can use this cliche to our advantage, and the filter sweep can become a tool to build a sense of anticipation.
Delay is also a simple but powerful effect that can be used in several ways. You can use it in a subtle way to add dimension to a rhythm pattern, lead, or vocal. Then, by automating the mix amount of your delay plugin, you can introduce tension through the metric dissonance we discussed earlier. Meanwhile, automating the delay time can be used as a sound design secret weapon.
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