You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Simple Ideas For Arranging - #116

Episode Date: May 25, 2018

Today, Adam and Peter talk about some simple ideas you can incorporate to make your arrangements really pop. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin and you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Today we're going to give you simple ideas for arranging. Good, I'm a simple person with simple ideas. Let's get this going. That's right. Now, we're not promising seven today because we're feeling the vibe. The listeners need a little break from that. You know, we just got back from lunch, kind of like, kind of loosey-goosey. We're feeling loosey. So this might be one or it might be 77. I doubt if it's going to be that.

So, okay, let's just talk about first to find. what arranging is. Sure, yeah. I mean, arranging is taking the given information of the melody and the form. And, I mean, those are actually the two main elements. In some cases, the lyrics, if you're working with a vocalist, taking that information

of melody and form and orchestrating it out to instruments, providing context and color. Those are the two things I think about the most, is providing a context and a color to that melody and form. And, yeah, and then, hopefully making something artful out of that with some surprises. You know, you want to be able to set things up.

You want to tell your story. You can do all that in arrangement. Now, what's your feeling on, we're going to go straight to the Q&A section on this? Yeah, no, that's good. What is your feeling in terms of arrangement on how much creativity is the arranger allowed to put into the process of, obviously, you know, music that's already been composed by somebody else? So it's their original creative output. How much can and should be given by the arranger? So I think everybody has their own comfort level with this of where they're drawing the line.

I draw the line at the melody. I did one arrangement where I kind of tweet the melody. I think it was like a Paul Simon song too. That takes a lot of guts. He's got good lawyers. He's got good melodies too, right? And so why would I do that? Yeah.

And now I kind of look back on that like a little bit like, I kind of wish I wouldn't have had changed that melody, but I think that's where most people draw the line. I honestly think, I know some people might disagree with that, but I think that rhythm and core changes, those are all up for grabs for me. Form can be up for grabs for me too. I'm not of the mindset that you have to follow the exact original form.

In fact, sometimes that can be a very powerful arranging tool to start in an unexpected place. Yes. For me, it's keeping the melody as close to the original as possible. What about tempo and feel? I think that's all up for grabs. I mean, and again, people might have, some people think of an arrangement as just someone's version of the song. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Exactly done how they'd done it originally. But for me, tempo, feel, chord changes, form, time signature, key, those are all of Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I think that if you're coming from the spirit of placing this particular composition in an appropriate surrounding for a particular performance or recording or a particular artist in particular, that's a lot of particular. I'm a particular guy. I'm getting very specific. I'm very particular. it. But I think that, yeah, the setting for that, you know, we decide how much we want to change all that as arrangers based upon what's going to sound best for that song, for that situation.

And I think as long as you're doing it for those reasons, now if you're just sort of changing everything but the melody because you can and just to be, you know, crafty, that's not going to necessarily work. But if you're thinking about, you know, the particular instrumentation, the sort of vibe that it needs to have, and then your life. all that up for the arrangement. I think it's a great thing and can honor the song and kind of give it more width and breadth to what that song is. I mean, however the original composer composed it is their vision. But if it's a great song or a great composition, it can lend itself to a number of different situations that the original composer might not have thought of, and that's okay. That's true. A great song

is very malleable and should be looked at as a piece of clay to work with. And you know, what's funny about arranging. I love arranging so much. It's one of my favorite parts of music, but I think arranging is one of these things where this line of what's acceptable has shifted and will continue to shift back and forth. Like I remember when I was first starting arranging 10 years ago, like there was definitely, I feel like in the zeitgeist, they're frowning upon doing too much. Yes. You what I mean? But now people like Jacob Collier and the dirty loops and like all these cats who are doing all this like crazy stuff with these pop songs, you know, and like really throwing in a bunch of chord chains. And at first when I heard that, I was like, what are they doing?

Oh, that's crazy. And now I absolutely- George Gershman turning over in his grave. No, but I love it now. I mean, I'm like, you are using exactly the tools that you want. I don't think any of it is superfluous. I think it's, you know, especially for like someone like Jacob Collier, he's doing, if you hear him talk about it, he definitely has a purpose behind everything he's doing. Even if I don't, it's not something I would do. I definitely. definitely respect his intent behind it, for sure. Yeah, and it just works from a performance standpoint. I mean, that's the whole thing.

I mean, if you're going to go and do a bunch of crazy stuff or sort of transform something, the proof is in the performance of it and how it sounds, how it can relate to an audience. And I think it's important to think about, it needs to work for somebody that knows and loves that song or composition, as well as someone that doesn't know it. And, I mean, it seems easier.

And you're just like, well, if they don't know the song, they're not going to be like, oh, you messed up that song. But it's got to work both ways. And I think the great arrangements do. And if you look at, you know, some of the great composers, and I'm just thinking back to like classical composers that arranged, like Brahms, didn't he do a bunch of arrangements of earlier pieces? And, you know, sometimes, you know, arranging, we forget that a lot of times it means replacing or placing music in different instrumentations. That's a big part of arranging. Yeah. Some of the arrangements that I've done that people have been, you know, I've gotten some of the nicest comments are, is when I stripped a bunch of things away and didn't change a bunch of chords, but I made a very specific instrumentation decision based upon the performance of that song. It's all part of the tools.

So here, you know, the name of this is simple, what is it, simple things to simple arranging techniques? What's the name of this episode? I don't know. We're so deep we can't. Simple ideas for arranging. Simple ideas for arranging. So if I were to give my top sort of simple idea for arranging, it is to at first experiment with one of these elements, one single element first. Don't change everything at once.

Try changing the tempo or try changing the chord changes, you know, really changing the color. You can try changing the feel. These, all these things, these color and contextual devices you can use. use, these all help in really sharpening your arranging tools. So restrict yourself, just like we would restrict ourselves in the practice of the piano. See if you can arrange a simple tune, something, a blues or something like that, by using one of these elements, either tempo or chord changes or feel or even form, you know, like experiment with chopping off a bar or extending a section, stuff like that.

All really, really gives you a lot of. options to to help shape an arrangement. Yep, absolutely. If you do that, you will be led to the promised land and you will hear it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hear it.com to get more information, submit a question, or just say hello. You can do that. Absolutely. All right. And if you like what you heard, please leave a review and a rating below. Thanks.