Negative or subtractive sequence arranging.
Posted August 4th, 2008 by Oliver CheslerFiled Under: Ableton Live, song writing
I often say that the arrangement is the most important part of a song. For some people it’s also the most difficult task. Anyone can make an incredible short loop but developing it into a 4-5 minute song takes some practice, thought and planning. A trick my friend Miro Pajic uses which he calls “negative arranging” consists of copying every track’s parts across the entire 4-5 minutes. Next, he goes in and deletes parts instead of starting blank and adding clips/parts as he progresses. I don’t personally work this way but I was surprised to see Miro is not alone.
As I was doing my nightly troll though the Ableton forums I came across a post by uber Live geek Tarekith. He posted a link to his guide to song arranging and it’s definitely worth a read. He also uses the “negative arrangement” style but he calls it, “subtractive sequencing”: click to read
This is a technique I call subtractive sequencing, where we start with all the song elements and remove bits and pieces to form the structure of the song. – tarekith.com
Have you ever tried this technique? Personally I fill up Session view with many tracks, clips and scenes and drag them into a blank Arrangement view.
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Interesting, inasmuch as I wasn’t aware there were other ways to go about it. I guess coming from tape-based production techniques, I’ve just copied over mute-group arranging to the modern age. But how he described it in his article is essentially how I write electronic music and always have.
I’ve always written my tunes in this way…. I guess its because I find I need to know where the peak of the tune will be before I start arranging – it kind of establishes a boundary and keeps me focussed on the original idea. If I don’t have a definite idea of what the meatiest bit of the tune will sound like, I just keep piling on the salami until the bread crumbles….
I’m definitely going to try the subtraction method this week. Imagine if it cut my arranging time down drastically.
Great post, I missed this over at ALDJ, I just shared your blog comment back over with them.
i make tracks basically the same way, get the bones of the track finished (the main loop) and then work backwards from that, removing certain elements as i go until i have a beginning.
Wow. I hope this kills my writers block.
Very interesting post. Arrangement and construction are fascinating IMHO. Definitely an area worthy of more discussion. Kudos on the link!
I use a similar but different method – loading a scene with all clips I would possibly need, and having the track mutes mapped to my midi controller. That way I’m only working with one scene and I can add and subtract parts with easy keypresses.
this is how i do it!