How To Turn Your Loop Into A Song – Production and Arrangement

Today I show how you can take a simple idea with some potential into a bigger concept and eventually a song by trying a few simple production techniques, arrangement ideas and creativity hacks. This video is aimed at beginners who are not familiar with arrangement and song structure. I start with a simple chord loop and try to arrange it into a structure and add some variety to the song. The video covers 3 topics: 1) Finding a theme for your song 2) Filling out the song with rhythm and tone 3) How to arrange your music into a structure that makes sense Time Stamps – 0:30 – The original loop 1:00 – Improvising to form new ideas 3:30 – New chord ideas and humanizing the loop 4:00 – Song structure 4:50 – Adding rhythm and tone 6:30 – Adding a synth to keep the tempo 8:00 – Adding a bass to match the song 9:10 – Drums 10:00 – More synths! 11:00 – Strings 12:45 – re arranging the song (using multiple playlists) 14:30 – Transitions 16:00 – Recording some guitar You can see from the video that I am not getting into the mixing and mastering as I create a song. This is after a few years of taking the mixing far too seriously in the early stages. Some prefer to mix everything as they go but I have found that it kills the creative energy for me! I try to match sounds well so that I don’t need huge amounts of EQ and Compression right away. There are no rights and wrongs when making music. Common Structures for a song include: Intro (4 Bars) Verse (8 -16 Bars) + Prechorus (Optional) Chorus(8 – 16 Bars) 2nd Verse (8 – 16 Bars) + Prechorus (Optional) Chorus (8-16 Bars) Sometime pre choruses are used depending on the genre, in my case I don’t really have a pre chorus but in many genres it’s essential to create build up and energy for the Chorus/Drop. Hopefully it helps you out. Should I make more advanced videos about arrangement and structure? Let me know in the comments below :)