Arranging / Developing

Developing is where more questions need to be answered, more decisions need to be made, more ingenuity discovered. Moving from the beginning to a place where the work begins to take a more defined shape can be scary and nerve-racking. It's no longer a sketch, no longer a series of loops that you're playing around with. It is no longer a story that can go anywhere but is instead taking on more meaning and turning into a semblance of the end result, a hint at the finished object, even if there is still so much space to explore. It is natural to be both excited by, and fearful of, the question, "what happens next?" Should you retain a loop and embellish it? Should you shift gears more definitively? Should you circle back to the beginning, or retain a traditional song structure idea? This can be the moment where the track becomes a real thing, which builds more pressure in to the process, for it can become more difficult to unravel the threads if you go too far down the wrong path.

There are thousands of decisions that go into the process of sound recording, editing, processing, arranging, and there are infinite possibilities within each of those decisions. If you have multiple layers of influences, concepts, awareness, and artistic sensibilities at your disposal, you will be better equipped to make the decisions that bring you closest to your desired goal, and indeed, to recognize what that goal is in the first place.

Perspective

Regardless of style and technique, it is incredibly important to remember the ability to step away from the work in order to move forward. Changing your perspective is necessary for understanding the material differently, for seeing it for what it is, with enough critical distance that you can rewrite mistakes. You need to be able to view your work through the lens of another person (who is viewing it through you) in order to avoid it becoming simply a conversation with yourself. A day or two apart from the material can do wonders, but sometimes just ten minutes in a different mindset is effective.

This critical distance leaves space for more to influence you - more culture, more daily life, more thoughts and experiences. It is all valuable because art is not made in a vacuum. Instincts are important and the immediacy of thought is important. However, even if you somehow managed to complete the bulk of a piece in a short time and felt happy with it, stepping aside for a day and returning to it would allow you to see/hear it differently, because you would then be a different person than you were the day before, and this would likely add more depth to the sound, by sheer nature of this added perspective, regardless of genre, style, or direction.

Assignment:

Please complete another set of loops, ideally variations of what you worked on already - a means of progressing within a piece.

I'm including some details from the last assignment again, since it applies here as well. Have fun with it, experiment a little, navigate some of the possibilities in the relationship of one sound to another. Don't get overly concerned with fitting a genre, but by all means do so if that's the intention.

Make three loops using only the sounds you edited out of your recording.

• loops should be 16 bars long
• BPM is your choice
• you don't have to use all the sounds you edited, but you can only use sounds from that group
• try to do this without processing the sounds too much
• you can make slight variations of each, or do something completely different (perhaps that is obvious but I feel the need to state it explicitly)
• think about why you structured the loop(s) this way, the extent to which the sounds determined what you made or were in service to an idea you had