The phrase “music arrangement” can mean slightly different things, depending on what style of music we are talking about. Traditionally music arrangement meant taking a music composition and allocate the notes in a way that different instruments in an orchestra can play a small part. In this sense, the music arranger needed to find which notes will be played by which instrument.

In modern popular genres, the meaning of music arrangement is slightly different. If there is an acoustic band, arranging is mostly about finding a groove for the bass guitar (rhythm and notation), finding a drum beat, finding a rhythm for the guitar, or even arranging backing vocals or a horn section for the recording.

In EDM or EDM based songs, usually, there is a “producer” who creates a “beat” and there is a “top-liner” who writes a melody on that beat. By “beat”, we mean a drumbeat, a bass line, and a chord progression.

A music composition is nothing more than the combination of a melody AND a chord progression. A music composition can be arranged in many different ways. Think about cover songs where someone performs a song in a totally different genre than the original. For example, here is my salsa version of the Police song “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic“.

The role of the music arranger is to create the final form of the music, whether if it’s for live performance or studio recording.

Sometimes the songwriter and the arranger are not the same people. Nowadays many songwriters hire a music producer, who creates the final form of the song.

Assuming you already have a melody and a chord progression for your song, let’s see what steps you need to make to arrange your music.

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When you just start to learn the process of writing a song, and you don’t know how to start writing lyrics, it’s not a wrong idea to look up what are the most commonly used words in lyrics. It’s OK to look at these words as a starting point.

However, keep in mind that it’s not about what is common in those songs, it’s about how your song will be DIFFERENT from other songs. How your song will be unique.

Words used in lyrics is changing all the time. They used different words in the 90s, different words in the 80s, etc. For example, the most common word was “swing” in the lyrics of the 1930s. In the 50s, it was “mambo”. So if you analyze a song, you always need to take into account when it was written.

By the way, this is also true for music, not only for the lyrics. And even if you check one artist, their lyrics are constantly changing. For example, Taylor Swift was writing completely different songs 5 or 6 years ago.

Another important thing to know is that these are only words, and not phrases or sentences. Context is everything. You can use the same word in very different contexts and with very different meanings.

I analyzed the lyrics of thousands of songs to find what are the most common words in songs, so let’s see what are these words, and what is the best way to use them in your songs.

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In a previous post, we talked about diatonic chords in detail. Diatonic chords are the chords that are inside the key. But sometimes it gets boring writing songs with only diatonic chords, and we need something to make our chord progression more colorful and exciting.

This is when we utilize borrowed chords. Borrowed chords are chords that are not inside the key: we borrow them from another key. One of the borrowed chords often used in songs is the flat 6 chord.

Let’s see what is a flat 6 chord, and how we can use it in our songs.

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Many people believe that rock music is dead because the radio and other mass media don’t play many rock songs anymore. But the reality is that there are millions of people who LOVE rock music all around the world.

Rock music is a genre and there are countless different kinds of rock styles, influenced by a lot of different genres, including folk music, jazz, country, blues, and even Latin music! But now we will go through the very basics to see how you can write a rock song.

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We have a previous blog post to explain how you can create a song in the Lydian mode. While it turns out, there is no such thing as “Lydian chord progression“, there are ways to write a song in the Lydian mode.

Now we will take a look at how we can write a song in the Dorian mode.

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I got another question from one of our readers, she asked “what is a conjunct melody”. I would like to answer this question here so everyone can learn from it. So let’s see the answer to the question: what does a conjunct melody mean in music? Continue Reading

I analyzed this song in more detail in the online course and also here in the blog because I really like the chord progression of this song. It’s an r&b song, and the chord progression is very jazzy, and I even made an experiment on how you can reharmonize it with extended chords.

So let’s see the chords of the song “Thank U Next” by Ariana Grande, and what we can learn from it from the perspective of a songwriter. Continue Reading

If you are a beginner songwriter, it’s the absolute best choice to use diatonic chords for writing a new song. This is because it’s easier to understand the relation between diatonic chords and create chord progressions with them. And generally, it’s easier to create a new song using only these chords.

So let’s take a look at what are diatonic chords. Continue Reading

It’s no doubt that the chorus is the most important part of any song. It’s the part of the song which we want the listeners to remember and sing along.

And the chorus becomes stronger with repetition. So it’s very important to ask the question: how many times a chorus should be repeated?

I have to emphasize that there are no rules in songwriting. You can always experiment with different song structures. But it’s always a good idea to check what successful songwriters are doing, and learn from them.

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I write Cuban style Salsa (timba) songs for my band, and I would say I have a competitive advantage over other genres: it’s probably the most danceable style of music. You cannot think about Cuban salsa music without associating to dance.

We had hundreds of concerts for the past few years, and I can tell you that I have never seen a concert where there wasn’t AT LEAST a few people who were dancing to our music. People can’t stand but to move when they hear Salsa music.

But what makes a song danceable?

It’s not just the genre, because we know a lot of pop songs that are danceable and they have nothing to do with Latin music. Think about the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.

So I sat down to figure out the answer to this question, and here is the conclusion.

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