You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 5 Tips to Becoming a Better Arranger - #42

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

Peter and Adam give you practical advise for getting your arranging game together. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Manus and I'm Peter Martin and you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Today we're going to talk about five tips to becoming a better arranger. Now what are we arranging music, flowers, weddings, what are we talking about here? You're definitely arranging music because I've tried to arrange flowers once and my wife said you're not allowed to ever touch the flowers ever. That's good. What about like arranging something else that the mafia might arrange? Can we even talk about that? Arranging a hit? No dude. That's totally confidential. I can't we've even brought that up. Let's edit that out. Okay, edit that up, thanks. Okay, so five tips to becoming a better arranger.

Why don't you kick it off with number one, Adam? So the first thing that we want to talk about are three things. Voicings and voicings and voicings. So this must be important. You've said it three times. Yeah, that's right. So, I mean, really one of the most important things you can do to help your arranging is to study voicings, to understand how to voice harmony under melody.

This is like the baby steps of arranging, right? I mean, pianists are naturally kind of inclined towards arranging because we do this on our instrument every day. I mean, it's part of being a pianist. And I think that's why you see so many pianists go into arranging. And that said, if you don't play piano and you want to get into arranging, take a little piano because it definitely helps with that. But what you want to know about is how to voice chords, you know, whether that's open voicing, closed voicing, how to balance a chord amongst multiple instruments. Sometimes if you only have three notes in a chord, if you're playing a triad, but you have six voices, what do you put on what? There are things to know.

So what you really want to study is voicings and how to orchestrate that harmony underneath a melody. Right. And if you're not a pianist, don't think that you have to become an accomplished, you know, technically astute pianists in order to be able to benefit from playing and understanding voicing for arranging. You can get a very rudimentary view of the instrument and handle on the instrument to be able to play these voicing and most importantly be able to move them. Voice leading, start to understand and start to hear how that works by just sitting at the piano. And that's so important for the arrangement process. That's so true. Right.

So the next tip we have is to study a variety of instruments, how they work, how they blend with each other. And so this is sort of the opposite for pianists. You know, we might know the voicings, and we might know what these instruments sound like, but we have to really start to understand how they blend together. We can't just take great voicings at the piano and throw them and explode them at a saxophone section or a woodwind section and expect that to be a good arrangement. We have to really understand, you know, much deeper than just what is the range of each of these instruments, but how are they played, what kind of sound can they produce,

what kind of intervals work for them, what register do they play out of tune in, what leaps just don't quite work, where can they play pianissimo, where can they play forte, and then how do they blend with the other instruments? Because then, if we start to understand that, we can take these voicing that we know at the piano can work and apply them to the correct instrument.

Man, I think this is a very underutilized point in jazz that it's not just about notes on the page, that not every instrument should play everything. I mean, of course, any instrument can play any part of the core or whatever, but knowing where the strengths lie the ranges and that's super important for getting good like powerful sounding arrangements. Right. And if we think about, you know, a lot of times we'll take certain voicing in the kind of middle register of the piano right around middle C, close voice, you know, close in voicing,

closed voicing, five note, four or five note voicings and apply them to a saxophone section. And that can work really well, but you have to understand that the difference between an alto saxophone and a berry saxophone and what the range is with those close voicing, you know, you're going to be at the top of the range of a berry or towards the top of the range of a berry, where you're more towards the bottom range on an alto, so it's a different kind of a sound. It's not just you're throwing notes on a page. Yeah, it's a whole different timbre in those ranges. So that's very important.

So our third thing is to listen to great arrangers. This should be self-evident because, I mean, if you want to be a good player, you listen to good players, right? It's the same thing. So, you know, Duke Ellington is obviously the master that we all have sprung from in this, genre of jazz arranging. But check out Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Nelson Riddle, Thad Jones, Charles Tolliver, Gil Goldstein, Maria Schneider, Terence Blanchard. I mean, there's a long list. We're so lucky in this music that we have all these great improvisers, but we really also have

just an abundance of great composers and arrangers that have worked in jazz. Yeah, and I think that one thing we can think about, too, is as we study these arrangements, looking at the scores, listening to the recordings, is that we're looking for specific techniques they use, you know, not only in how they apply the notes, but how they take other people's music because if they're arranging somebody else's music, you know, they're using certain concepts

on how they're going to apply their techniques to someone else's music. So that can be very instructive to us as arrangers as, you know, like how are we going to, you know, be influenced by these other arrangers, but put our own thing on somebody else's music as well. Totally. So that brings us to tip number four. And I would say, you know, all those great jazz arrangers you just mentioned are wonderful, but we can even go more foundational to work on our arrangement.

And that is to go straight to the source of J.S. Bach. And really study the way that he would arrange out, you know, and we could think about it certainly as instruments. And he was a great arrangement of instruments. But now we're getting back to just like voice leading and arranging certain parts and how things move irregardless of the instrument. because I believe when Bach was composed and correct me if I'm wrong, Sir Adam, but I don't think the saxophone even existed at that time.

I think the man who invented the saxophone was still a twinkle in his father's eyes. That's right, this French father's eyes. But the thing about that is it's not to say that we can't use concepts in voice leading and counterpoint that we learn from Bach and studying his parts and counterpoint and apply them to saxophone sections, even though the instrument didn't exist, because it's the same thing, lyricism and melodic movement, counterpoint, harmony, all those kind of movements work the same on a very foundational level,

and there's no better composer and arranger to go to the Bach to learn those. He is by far the best at that. And, you know, I almost think of counterpoint as like voicing's 2.0, right? This is like next level voicing. So it's like if you're a pianist, you can just kind of plunk your hands down

on voicings that you know or whatever, but it's that next level of, you know, when you go to the next chord, what is the voice leading between those voicings from the previous chord? Yeah. That makes, you know, that separates great pianists from mediocre pianists. It's the same thing with, and it's probably even more important when you're arranging different instruments, of thinking about voices individually when they move from one chord to the next.

You know, and learning about that through Bach, four-part corral writing, I think, is the easiest way to see it. You know, you can kind of see and hear how these voices move. You know, there are all these rules, right, of counterpoint, and you can actually hear them in box writing and you've got the vertical and you've got the horizontal. Exactly. And you can just see it, you can hear it, it's all right there. It makes a lot of sense.

So definitely check that out. All right, our last point for this is five tips to becoming a better arranger. And that is to collect sounds. What I mean by collect sounds? I mean, just kind of like how, if you're a player, you collect licks or voicings or whatever that you like. You know, when I arrange, I have sort of a stable of sounds that I know I can get on the page with, you know, different groups of instruments. And I kind of have them always in my back pocket.

You know, I was just doing this thing this weekend. And I was thinking about, what am I going to do on this last course? I was like, oh, I'm going to do that thing that I've done this time and this time and this time. I know it works really well. I know it like is going to get, you know, the audience exactly where I want them to be. So remember that. if you write something you like, keep it. I mean, you're going to anyway, right?

And the back pocket? Is that where you recommend keeping it always? Well, front pocket if you're traveling throughout Europe on the trains. That's right, right, right. Now, that's a great point because I think these, you know, collecting these sounds, these techniques, these little trademarks of really our personalization that we put on the arrangement because we can't forget that, yeah, we're arranging somebody else's music or a stand. or something that already exists,

but we're putting our little stamp on it and it can be personalized. Yeah. You know, the easiest way to find sounds is to steal other people's sounds first. That's right. To understand why their arrangement sounds like that. Steal that, make it your own.

Classic rearrangement. That's right. Well, you'll hear it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hearit.com to get more information, submit a question, or just say hello.

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