Chapter 12: Getting the Arrangement Right

It is really hard for an engineer to do a great mix that has a lot of impact on the listener if the arrangement isn't right. In this chapter, we will discuss what your priorities should be and how to achieve a great arrangement.

We will discuss the following:

• What really matters in your arrangement?
• Creating a Project Alternative for different arrangements with the same project
• Adding, copying, and deleting sections with the help of locators and Skip Cycle

What really matters in your arrangement?

One of the most common issues I see in people's work, especially less experienced music creators, is the creation of just too many parts that they fall in love with.

I love to watch movies with commentary from the director. Sometimes they will show you a deleted scene and say that it was a great scene and that they hated to lose it, but that it hurt the flow of the movie.

The same may be true in your arrangement. You may love that brilliant synth part, but if it draws focus away from a part that matters more, or competes with it, you have to be prepared to be a little ruthless and decide that it has to go.

Know your genre

If you have a song and the most important elements of it are the singer interpreting the lyrics and some lovely piano or acoustic guitar, then you will have one set of criteria. If you are doing an EDM song, your drum machine and synthesizer parts may be the things that your audience will be most interested...

Creating a Project Alternative

Open the Chapter 12 project.

The process is very simple:

1. Navigate to File | Project Alternatives | New Alternative:

   Figure 12.1: Creating a Project Alternative

2. Name the alternative.
3. Here you can see that I have created three Project Alternatives, and the third one is the active one:

Figure 12.2: Three Project Alternatives

To return to an earlier or later version, all I have to do is select it in the Project Alternatives list, and it will return to the state it was in at that point. If I choose Edit Alternatives, I can rename or remove any I choose.

This is a great way to create different arrangements, all within the same project.

NOTE

Personally, I like to name my alternatives by the date and time, so when I return to an earlier or later one, I know when I last worked on it.

Adding a section to your arrangement

Setting Cycle locators to define the bars that we will be working with ensures that we get the results we need for some of the tasks we will now perform.

If you decide that your arrangement needs an additional section to add to its impact, such as an a cappella intro or a guitar solo, or a drum break, it's pretty easy to create it.

Insert Silence at Locators

Let's suppose that somewhere in our project we want to add a four-bar drum break using the first four bars of drums:

1. Create a Cycle for the four bars. The Cycle sets the locators.
2. Navigate to the local Edit menu and choose Edit | Cut/Insert Time | Insert Silence at Locators:

   Figure 12.3: Insert Silence at Locators

3. After this is done, you will see that Logic has created four blank bars at that location:

   Figure 12.4: Four blank bars have been inserted

4. Holding the Command key to switch to the default Marquee Tool, swipe over the drums for the first four bars...

Deleting a section of your arrangement

Maybe your song is a little long for the airplay you hope to get, or a transition from one section to the next is not quite as impactful as it should be. While not all editing in the Tracks area is destructive, it helps to get an idea about what it will sound like without the deleted section.

Cut Section Between Locators

Let's hear what your arrangement would sound like without a section. I am choosing bars 13–21:

1. Create a Cycle for the eight bars to set the locators.
2. Hold down the Ctrl key and the mouse on the cycled area in the Bar Ruler and choose Swap Left and Right Locators. This creates a Skip Cycle.
3. Press play to start playback a few bars before and note that when you reach bar 13 it immediately jumps to bar 21, skipping those eight bars:

   Figure 12.8: A Skip Cycle

   If you are happy with what you hear, you can proceed. You might want to create yet another Project Alternative.

4. Go to Edit | Cut/Insert Time...

Consolidating regions and converting MIDI to audio files

If you are like me, you may only record a small number of audio parts and use a lot of software instruments and plugins. Bouncing is just another term for what other applications refer to as rendering. The process creates new audio files.

Here is why you might want to consider bouncing all the parts to audio files for mixing audio files:

• You are collaborating with another musician or engineer, and they don't own all your third-party software instruments or they are working in another DAW, such as Pro Tools.
• Your computer gets bogged down with CPU demands and RAM usage.
• Many software instruments and plugins do not perform identically every time you play them back.
• When you commit a part to audio, you have fewer things to think about and can concentrate on your mixing.
• Creating a Project Alternative means you can always return to a previous version if you need to.

When time permits, this...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to get our arrangement just the way we want it by adding and deleting sections, consolidating regions and converting MIDI parts to audio files, and employing Freeze tracks while we do so to avoid CPU usage issues.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to organize our project to make mixing easier with folder stacks, multiple Mixer views, markers, screensets, giant displays of bars/beats, and time.