Lessons

Lesson Info

Demo Arrangement Notes

for. We start going to a bunch of little exercises that just want to cover a couple things that we didn't totally get to in the last section, which basically just taking some of the ideas a little bit further. But just another example of song analysis for those of you who were wondering, uh, how to do this or why it's important you notice I'm picking the same band a lot, and I think that it's important to note that you should be studying the music that you like. Uh, like this band, therefore, a study their music. I'm not going to pick songs that, um, other people told me to check out. And, uh, I don't think you should either. So just a recap song analysis. What you're basically looking to do is internalize um all the different ways that a song evolves or exists over time that you like and one of the, uh, one of the big flaws in, I guess crappy er. Metal writing is not developing sections and just having too many ideas in one song, and that comes from not learning how Teoh how to proper...

ly take a section and recycle it and but bring it back in a whole different way. So I'm gonna show us another example that I got from another muse song and this is a single uprising. And basically, all I want to show here is if I was doing a song analysis. Um, nothing I key and on is that the courses air different every time in very subtle ways. But for those of you who want to write songs with three choruses that get mawr interesting every time, well, there's ways to do that. If you just copy paste your courses for in a sense, by the time it gets to the end, people might be sick of hearing it. Like, for instance, when we did the young song critique last night. One of things that we all kind of got to on the first song was that that last chorus is just stuck on there. The course has happened too many times, and by the time you got to the end is like, Do you really need to be hearing this again? Well, there's ways to get around that through arrangement and through being crafty. So check out the chorus Teoh to this song broke up with me. I find it. Here's the 1st 1 Noticed the arrangement. Get the idea just loud enough for you guys, by the way. Okay. Cool. Um, so you basically have the distorted baseline playing the main theme from the song of the drums vocals singing the melody and you have sent and that's it. And, uh, like Pat was saying before, if you soloed out any one of those elements of the interesting and of itself but put together makes the course, but that's fairly stripped down. There's a heavy guitars or harmony vocals or anything. It's just the main themes of the song being presented for the first time in the first time through the the structure of the song. That's fine. But if you were to hear it exactly the same way the second time through, you might and it might get sick of it, you might be bored by that time. And, uh, so second time through the chorus is just a little bit different, Theo. 1st 1 again and, uh, and and once I'm gonna ask you what you hear differently. But so here, check out what's behind door number one. So what do you hear a different there has gotten a little more busy and sort of our pay. She ate it on the second chorus. There are electric rhythm, guitar is in there. And then there's a harmony on the vocal line. Those air, the the things I noticed. Yeah, that's what I picked up a swell, um, as opposed to, um, sense. Basically, just pay playing a some more sports, more sparse, no electric guitars, no harmony on the vocals. Basically pretty open. I was gonna say I like on the first course, though. How, like I'm always really impressed when one note that carries across different chord sounds like so profound. It's like, Do you sing one note and it, like, affects me. It's like the weirdest thing. Have one repetitive No can do that in the right context, you know, And that's the power of a good melody. Like, uh, you can strip the arrangement down and it still works, and I guess, conversely, shitty melody, the biggest arranging in the world. It's not gonna make a difference, but you can add to the arrangement, and it sounds cool, but I think I think you're right on the first chorus is no uh, no less musical than the 2nd 1 It's just not as big. So we move forward to the 3rd 1 and this is a little bit more subtle, but it's still different. See if you can catch the difference here. That's three. Here's number two. We owe a little play three warm or time. OK, here's number three spotted. It's It's subtle is help. It sounds like something's a little beef here the last time through. I don't know if there's like a synth in there that's a little fatter. Or though, like the base is maybe a little bit more in your face. I'm not. I've listened to this a lot to try to pick it out, and the only thing I noticed is that the vocal harmony is one inversion up like there's a higher voice in there for a second. I thought there was almost like some verb doubt like Rumi gang vocals in there, but I think that was just me being mistaken. I think those air in the second quarter as well, though, yet that actually I thought that at first, too. But then I noticed those air in the second course to that would have been my first thing to think. OK, so they added big harmonies at the end of the song because lots of people do that. But that's not the case that already happened before. It's Ah Onley. Thing I'm hearing is that there's one upper voice in the vocals which just takes it up One little step in intensity. But that's enough. Yeah, you have to make it successful when you hear the last chorus. It's not like Copy Paste or I've already heard this and I am sick of it. Um, so, um, and chord inversions Uh, that's, Ah, something we touched on an easy keys earlier. That's not something that if your guitar player, you're gonna automatically be great at cause they're sometimes pretty hard to play and there's a lot of memorization involved, you know, every single inversion of every court and just be able to call on it and say, I wanna just bump up the last chorus one inversion up of the same progression. It might take a while. I mean, not that long, but, um, if you know what you're doing, but still not as instantaneous is going into something like easy keys and going to the court wheel and just bumping the inversion up one, but is I think it's helpful to be able to hear that. So I still think you should a practice, that stuff on guitar, Um and ah, that is basically what I wanted to cover from the previous section. So I just want to see if there's any questions about song analysis that anybody has. Um, you got anything, Anything, an Internet bill, You know nothing about that. Specifically. I think it's so cool to be able to see, um, how you do that and how you talk about those different parts and just sort of parse that out because it always is a challenge, right when you're listening to something to try to figure out, like, what just made that thicker, And it's it's usually blended so well that it's a challenge. So it takes a discerning here, and that's something you just have to develop. I assume over Well, yeah, when you have Ah, when you have basically bands or artists or composers that are at the very, very top of the world game. Basically, uh, they typically have been working it for very, very long time. And they've mastered the art of developing simple ideas, uh, making variations off of simple ideas. And it's the genius is in how they make, uh, the simplicity powerful in the unit that goes back Teoh, Mozart and Bach. Super simple ideas done great. But the thing about super simple ideas and the development of them is that it's hard to spot subtlety. You have to really listen hard, and once you start to spot that subtlety and you become aware of it, then you can get better at putting it into your own music. And I think that the exercise here that people should do is to make a point of doing this, uh, at least at least once or choice. A week kind of thing like is just as part of their working on music routine. If they haven't already done this should at least do it for a good number of things that they're influenced by. I'm just gonna say, like training your brain or however you just put it that's like, that's exactly what it is. It's like, you know, have a little learning to just hone in on tiny little parts of a mix or a song like an average person will just, you know, gravitate towards the main vocal line. And that's kind of all they remember of a song. Musician types tend to, you know more be like a while, the guitar tones cool or whatever, but then like to really, really get in depth like like producer status type stuff. I mean, you need I need to, like, really see the tiniest little things. And a lot of times, like someone having an emotional reaction to a song like the average person will be put into words like why a song makes him feel a certain way. But sometimes it's just a little subtle thing in the background that they don't even know is there. But it's like stirring up some some emotion inside of them, you know? Well, yeah, people, the audience doesn't usually know why they like it. They just know that they like eggs. And I think a lot of alarm musician types actually get in their own way by, uh, by confusing the two things. But yeah, the one of the big tricks is to not let the audience really get thrown off of the song by changing things up too much, Not not making it feel like it's a different song. It's It's this chorus that's really great happening again, driving at home. It doesn't need to be a reinvention of that will. What does need to be is a development I love adding, like little synth parts where appropriate in different songs and stuff like that, and sometimes could even, like, literally be the same notes that guitars are doing. You know, it's not really even like a unique part, but it's like the kind of thing you hear the chorus like. OK, that sounds great. And then when you mute that one track your like, it's definitely better with it there, you know, it's like there's those tiny little cumulative things will add up to be like, Wow, this is really amazing. And now I want to dissect it. Yeah, however the Like you pointed out earlier, the first course, which is stripped down, was still great. The actual music still needs to be there in in, you know, a simple state. If it's it's a crappy chorus, it's not going to suddenly become good because you added a bunch of instruments to it.