Music Arranging Basics

Have you ever wondered how the full awe-inspiring sound of an orchestra is achieved? Or how a songwriter can take a song they wrote for just a guitar and spread it out to other instruments to get that full-band sound? This process is called arrangement, and it can be a full-time job! There are several core tenets of arrangement that hold true regardless of what genre of music the arranging is for (in fact, the arrangement can even be what defines the genre, rather than the original song itself).

Range of the human ear

The human ear’s range goes from about 20Hz (the lowest notes) to 20,000Hz (the highest notes). The lowest note on a piano is A0, at 27.5Hz, and the highest note is C8, at 4186Hz. As you go to the extremes of what the ear can hear, its ability to discern the differences between pitches worsens – meaning it’s very easy to hear different notes clearly in the middle of the human ear’s range, and quite difficult at its extremes. Try it yourself! If you have access to a piano or keyboard, try playing around on the lowest and highest keys. As you get to the extremes, the identity of the pitches becomes less and less clear, which is why instruments don’t really bother going any higher or lower, as at that point it is more of an effect than a recognizable note.

This is a fundamental quality of the human ear and is essential to understand when arranging. It means that you can write more simultaneous notes close together in the middle of the frequency range (and still be able to identify individual notes), and fewer in the extremes. If you have too many simultaneous pitches in the lower extremes, it just sounds muddy, and overwhelms the other parts of the music. In the higher extremes you can get away with having a lot of different simultaneous notes close together, but it won’t clearly define what harmony you are trying to achieve and is more useful for ornamentations.

Instrument Roles in arranging

It is essential that in effective arranging you clearly define instrument roles, regardless of genre. Imagine a conversation between several people. If two or more people are speaking at the same time, it is impossible to figure out where the train of conversation is going – in fact, it’s less of a conversation and more of just noise. This effect compounds with an increase in the number of instruments, as you can get away with a lot of individuality in small ensembles, but not in a large eighty-piece orchestra.

There are several roles of instruments, and they can overlap a little, but they are, broadly, melody, harmony, rhythm, and bassline.

Melody is the singable line of individual notes that most people remember when they think of a song. In pop music (and many other genres) it is the line that the vocalist is singing.

Harmony is the foundation that the melody sits on that makes the melody sound so good. It is most often made up of one or more instruments playing chords (or each instrument playing the individual notes of chords, becoming a cohesive chord sound).

Rhythm is the beat of the song. It is most closely associated with drums and percussion instruments.

Bassline is the line that the bass instruments are playing below everything else. It is similar to melody in that it is made up of individual notes, but it is much lower and can be played at the same time as melody without getting too much in the way. Sometimes it can be the star of the show, such as in a bass solo section, but it is most often used to accentuate harmony changes or certain parts of the melody.

the roles of instruments in application

Imagine a rock band. It consists of a singer, a bassist, a guitarist, and a drummer. The drummer is playing the role of rhythm. The fundamental pitches of the different drums and cymbals are so low or so high that they don’t interfere with other instruments. The bassist is playing in frequencies so low (usually) that they also don’t interfere with the melody. This leaves the middle and high (but not extremely) frequencies for the singer and the guitarist. When the singer is singing, the guitarist can do harmony (block chords, or rhythmic strums). Maybe during the guitar solo the guitarist can take over the melody role, but if they are both doing melody at the same time, neither melody shines through and it just becomes cacophony.

These tenets hold for a large orchestra as well. If the high strings (violins and violas) are taking over melody, the winds should be doing harmony or rhythm, and if you have more than one instrument playing the melody, they should be doubling (at octaves) or reinforcing (usually at thirds, but can be at fifths). Harmony can be played by many instruments simultaneously as long as the pattern is simple enough. If you have lots of different instruments playing different, disconnected rhythm patterns for the harmony, it also results in cacophony, and the ear is too busy trying to discern the different elements, rather than focusing on the melody, which is what the goal most often should be.

Not only is the role of the instruments important, but the frequency range that they take up. Reminder: The human ear is more able to discern individual notes in the middle of our hearing range than at the extremes. When arranging instruments, it is important to adhere to those principles - in the example above, if you have high strings taking over melody, then using the high winds in the same place would make it difficult for the ear to hear the melody. You should choose other instruments for the main harmony, and just use the high winds for accents and doubling the melody when it repeats to give it a little more oomph.

music Arranging Basics

Most composers begin with a simple melody and harmony on the piano, and then scale up from there. The piano is the composer’s most important tool because the visually simple way the keyboard is laid out, as well as how simple it is to play any note on the keyboard, and many notes at the same time, makes hearing how the larger piece will sound simpler. Most piano players, and everyone who takes lessons at Loudlands Music Lab, will get enough music theory just from learning the piano to be able to apply a lot of these concepts.

adjusting to the size of the ensemble

Depending on the size of the ensemble (number of instruments) you are arranging for, you can have one instrument playing each role or many. If you are making an electronic or hip-hop beat, the same principles apply, the only thing that changes are the instruments.

For smaller ensembles, usually only one instrument will be playing each role, so as long as not too many instruments are in the same range, effective arranging is simpler. In larger ensembles, like orchestras or just having a lot of instruments in an electronic piece, it becomes more complicated.

In larger ensembles, when having multiple instruments playing the melody, you can choose to double the melody at the same note, at the octave (so have one instrument playing a C4 while another plays a C3 or C5), or you can reinforce it by playing a set interval above – a common way is to play a third above.

creating musical harmony

For harmony, an effective tool is to ensure that the instruments are playing in the same rhythm. In order to keep the ear’s attention on the melody, the harmony must not be so busy that it distracts the ear away from the melody. For example, in a rock band, if the guitar is playing some very busy fingerpicking with lots of non-chord tones while the vocalist is singing, the harmony is not doing an effective job – it is trying to do the role of melody, and so it results in cacophony. However, if the guitar is playing a certain strumming pattern, and the bass is playing notes at the same time as the strumming pattern (rather than having a different rhythm), an effective, unified sound is achieved for the harmony part, leaving plenty of attention left for the ear to effectively hear the melody and enjoy it.

percussion & rhythm

Percussion is a slightly different, but not unrelated, beast. In most modern music, from pop, to rock, to electronic, the drums and bass work together to create a strong unified sound - for example, effective rock arranging frequently has the bass drum and bass guitar playing with the same rhythm pattern to combine the sound into a very strong bass sound for the song. Larger orchestral ensembles classically do not have as much of an involved percussion part from their timpanis or other drum instruments, though you can use pizzicato strings and short staccato notes from the winds as an interesting effect.

filling in the melody

Another important use of arranging is to fill in the sound in between the melody. In a large ensemble, if the violins have the melody, by design of having an interesting melody, they are not playing on every beat. There are pauses, rests, and usually the melody will end and then repeat again. All of those pauses and rest are times when other instruments can come in and fill in the sound so the ear always has something to listen to and to follow.

For example, if the violins have the melody for a few measures, and then the melody repeats again but this time, an octave above, in the space between each iteration of the melody you could do a sweep up (where you play a few notes in ascending order) in a different instrument, such as clarinet, or trumpet to fill in the gaps and make it more interesting. This is an essential part of arranging – making use of all your instruments to keep things as interesting and varied as possible. A great example of this strategy is how the guitar in Dire Straits’s Sultans of Swing is used to fill in the gaps after each line of the verse and chorus.

most important things to know about arranging music:

That was quite a bit of information about arranging, and the more you arrange, the better you will get at finding opportunities to improve the song with the instruments at your disposal, but here is a summary of the most important parts of this post:

1.)   There are roles each instrument should play, which are melody, harmony, rhythm, and bassline.

2.)   The nature of the human ear means it can discern more individual simultaneous notes in the middle of its hearing range than at its extremes.

3.)   Harmony is most effective when all the instruments playing that role are playing in related or identical rhythm patterns.

4.)   You should use all the instruments at your disposal to fill in the gaps between when the melody is playing to keep things interesting.

These are not hard and fast rules that you must stick to, but more like guidelines in order to achieve a specific sound. When you improve at arranging by using these guidelines, try to specifically break certain rules (like have many instruments play harmony with distinct disconnected rhythm patterns, or several instruments playing different melodies simultaneously) and see what happens! Maybe you’ll really like the results, and you’ll know exactly which “rules” to break to achieve your unique and beautiful sound.

Of course, you’ll need a strong background in musical theory and instrument playing to affectively arrange music. So, if you’d like to get your music journey underway, we encourage you to schedule piano lessons at our music school near Everett!