Music Arranging - A small introduction : ''The Importance of a Melody''

Hello Steemit!

I've been wanting to talk about music arrangement for a while but I didn't know how to start , the common ''blank page'' situation in where you don't know what to put first!

First of all I'm no real arranger , I haven't studied this subject formally. Even though I've now been taking private lessons for about a year now with an amazing teacher called Daniel Camelo I'm just starting to hone on this skill little by little . Still , If a had to write for a 20-piece orchestra or a Jazz Big Band , I'd just run away crying for my mother! hahaha

Actually , I just consider myself an investigator , I have little formal education on most of the things I do ... I did study music though but more of a ''music performance degree'' and I have never made any use of it ! Don't get me wrong though , what I learned over my ''school years'' was very important to me! Some of that knowledge I still use. I just keep putting together skills that I think are useful for a musician nowadays ( recording , producing , arranging , etc. ).

This was the first time I got called in to a studio to arrange a song...had to take the picture!

So , today I won't be tackling specific music theory , but just an overview of things you might want to be aware when ''arranging'' a song. First of all:

What is musical arrangement?

Well , this is more of my personal concept of what I consider an arrangement , but to me it is the art of putting the musical elements together in order to enhance an already established music composition. It's the way you present the music , that's why you can have a Pop , Salsa and Heavy Metal version of Billie Jean and still identify it as the same song, the arranger writes parts according to how he wants to present the composition .

Whether you like the salsa version is up to you , but this proves my point that the ''presentation'' of the song is completely different! But it is more than obvious that we are listening to Billie Jean. Why is that?

Melody is the most important element of a song!

This is what determines a song , what gives it it's name and why it is identifiable ! Of course there are types of music where a main melody may be absent and maybe rely more on grooves and such , but that is why I'm talking about a ''song'' , where most of the time there is a main melody and everything else revolves around it . So , before writing anything around it ... Be aware of the melody! Try to respect it as much as possible and don't sacrifice it for the sake of a ''cool'' arrangement . In my opinion , a good arrangement is a ''melody enhancer!''

Melody is so important that it actually defines who owns a song! You can register a melody to your name , but you can't register an harmonic progression , imagine if we couldn't use a 1-4-5 progression without paying for rights.. that'd be too crazy. You can get into legal trouble if you use someone's else's melody, put it in your song and claim it as your own! On the other side , there are several songs that use the same harmonic progression , here is a very clever and fun video demonstrating that:

You can clearly see that what separates each on of those songs is the melody, everything else is practically the same thing in this video!

Ok , so now that I talked about how a song is mostly determined by a melody , I want to show you a little example of a song that I pretty much changed completely because I thought in the original ''arrangement'' the melody was not well presented. I kept the melody but changed almost everything else , and did some editing , tuning , etc... let's see what happened:

First , here is the demo of an artist I co-produced and arranged, Raul Rueda, bassist and composer. I first asked him for permission to show some of the unreleased demos as this is his material. Later on I will do some breakdowns on actual finished songs that made it to an EP we worked on , this song is called ''El adicto'' ( The addict) and this is what I received , just a live take done to capture the idea:

Don't mind the performance , it was just a take for reference ... So ... what I noticed in this original demo was, ''good and bad'' as at some point of all this becomes a little subjective :

• The groove is nice , the bass has some interesting lines to it but I'd certainly want it to be heavier sounding , not as in distortion , but a little more dense in its groove.

• I Didn't like the fact that it was Major... the lyrics had nothing to do with the actual music , it pretty much as the name implies it about an addict who tries to fit into society ( at least that's what i got , I might be wrong! haha)

• It doesn't have an intro ''hook'' , it takes to long for the melody to drag you in.

• There is a bit of a funk and Jazz nod to it , but it is quite lost because of the arrangement.

So , after trying out ideas the song came to this , it's just a live take with some overdubs as this track didn't make it to the EP , so it's quite raw :

Ok , first major changes were:

• I took it to the relative minor ... and it jus worked better , Raul even adjusted some lyrics because of the mood change.

• The tempo was made slower so the song would groove better.

• I added a guitar intro hook , kind of inspired by ''Vultures'' by John Mayer in the general idea , it's very different though.

• I added lots of little motifs and ambients with the guitars , kind of how Andy Summers approaches guitar layers , I'm a huge fan of his work , I always say that his guitar playing is what held together Stewart Copeland's drumming with Sting's bass playing , Summer's guitar work was the ''glue'' in The Police for me. So, Huge inspiration in a lot of what I do!

• Finally , some vocal layering , to add emphasis to certain words.

See how it still feels like the same song even though almost everything changed? That's because I kept the melody untouched , so the song's ''core'' was never lost!

Here is a song from Raul that actually made it to the EP , so you get what we were looking for in his sound, hope you like it!

Well , This wraps it up for now ! I hope you can get some ideas from this post and actually be aware of when working on music. Have you had any experience with arranging a song for someone else? How about your own music? Let me know what you think of this!

Thanks for reading and listening!
Signing off

Pechiche Mena