If you’re stuck for ideas (esp. in the verse), you could always add some sort of lyrical echo.  There are these long pauses between each short phrase the solo has, so I would probably experiment with little counter-melodies repeating the lyrics the soloist just sang. (I would probably wait to use this kind of effect until the 2nd or 3rd verse)

I also second Yuri’s suggestion of singing first.  If you write it first and then try to add vocal syllables, it will tend to sound sort of unnatural — Instead, try to sing something that feels/sounds natural to you, then write it down.

Don’t be afraid to shorten the introduction.

Consider cutting the instrumental interlude(s).  Guitar solos almost always come off as corny, which could ruin the mood of the song.  If you have someone who can do a mellow, authentic scat, that could work well.

Other than that, I’d suggest searching YouTube for any and all versions of the song that could give you ideas.  Live performances, acoustic versions, or a cappella arrangements.

Your first arrangement won't be ambitious as this one.

A reader wrote in requesting some pointers on arranging for his high school a cappella group, and I thought I’d post a few here: advice for writing your FIRST arrangement.  These tips do not necessarily apply to ALL arrangements and are not general rules, but are good ways to make sure nothing goes too haywire from the start.  Enjoy!

• The best advice for somebody who hasn’t tried it before would be 1) to map out the structure of the piece, 2) to figure out the chords and make the arrangement conform, and 3) don’t write women’s parts — even the sopranos — higher than an an A or B.  Things can get very messy very fast.  Exceptions exist, of course.

• Make sure vowels match between parts.  Have at most two different vowels happening at once, but really writing a homophonic texture is good.

• The way I arrange is by singing first.  So, sing along to the original song, improvising a line that you think might belong in the arrangement.  Then, I go back and expand it through harmonization, and/or fill in the chord with other parts.

• More specific to the song you’re working on, try to find a midi of it with a decent piano transcription, or find piano sheet music.  This can help take a LOT of work out of the project.

• Your first arrangement will probably have lots of repeats in it, and that’s okay.  You can repeat a section COMPLETELY and just instruct the choir to sing different vowels, and it’s a good quick way to make the piece sound like it’s growing.  Sustained oos can turn into sustained ohs or ahs.

• The most important part about writing a good arrangement is making it FUN for everybody to sing, since that makes all the difference in how well they do it.  So, make sure you sing every single part of your written arrangement on your own, and see if you enjoy it.  If you don’t, fix it.

Did someone call me?

How do I get started?

Figure out the key, time signature, and how many staves you want. Listen to the general structure of the song so you get a feel for the arc of the entire song, as well as the important themes. Jot that down, be you at a keyboard or holding a pencil.

Ahem. Next?

It’s wise to get in the habit of dictating (writing the musical notation down as you hear) the significant parts first. The Alto 2 line is usually one of the most quickly developed, as it often includes the bass line. Most people find the bass line quite easy to dictate. Chances are, if you’re a woman, you might be attracted to dictating the higher parts first. It’s just the way we hear things, make sense of things, and churn it all out into something we can replicate. Always remember, Alto 2 lines are more flexible than bass lines in that they can move to new inversions and use homophony.

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Here’s why it works so well:

• These guys are fantastic performers, and are so comfortable with what they’re singing that they can rock out.  The arrangement is excellent because it allows the singers to do just that.
• Maybe most importantly: a (somewhat) independent bassline supports a block of uppervoices which is essentially singing in homophony. Putting all the voices together like this makes the backups much more monolithic and less complex, but the strength it brings is undeniable.
• The arrangement is written right into their sweet spots as vocalists. Best yet, it plays directly to their strengths with loud and resonant sustained notes — this is a very vocally conscious arrangement.
• There are many repeats in it, which means it was probably possible to learn the notes quickly, leaving much more time to work on performance aspects.
• The tenors are written  well within the clef; all parts are low and in a comfortable tessitura.
• The words in the background go by fast, and are sung by the entire group at once, which makes them oddly easy to ignore as a churning of the block’s accompaniment.

For another take on this (mine), see this page. I am strongly in favor of elevating the quality of a cappella arranging on college campuses today; these guys are an example of what makes a cappella singing cool.

Smaller Groups.

If history is any indicator, a great many new aspiring arrangers are members of newer groups with fewer members than the large swaggering a cappella groups that resemble a small construction team on a government contract, only slower-moving.  In fact, I would wager there’s a reasonable chance that you personally are a member of one such small group, and are trying to determine exactly what sort of arrangement you should attempt to create.

Following is an introduction to the time-honored tradition of the Four Part Arrangement (A block of SSAA, SATB, or TTBB.  Soloist costs extra).  Types of groups who might want to consider writing heavily in four parts include:

• Small groups with only five to twelve (5-10) singers.
• Larger groups who have a tendency to sing some gigs with only five to twelve people in attendence.
• Women’s groups, who tend to have a more limited range to work with in vertical pitch space.
• Groups which predominantly perform in a live setting, and want to focus their efforts on strengthening their in-person performance’s consistency.

Clearly, there’s something for everybody here, and on top of that, practicing your four-part arranging skills will help you in that Music Theory 101 class that you just enrolled in.  If you still haven’t done that, then get on it!  College is an amazing place, and you can learn all of these theory skills without paying any more in yearly tuition (for most).  And please, tell your professor about SmarterMusic.

Four Part Harmony

Rameau will get you, my pretty!

For many many years, four-part harmony has been more or less standard — if you’d like to learn more about how this tradition came to be, read any number of historical treatises on music theory written around 1700, especially Traité de l’harmonie by Rameau.  Regardless of its origins, though, it has stood the test of time and is able to produce most all of the chords we know and love with good voiceleading.  It’s also happily thin enough that it’s easy to hear each individual voice within it.  This can be a good thing — it makes it difficult to write an arrangement that is too cluttered.  On the other hand, it can also result in exposure of a few parts that you might wish were left slightly less audible.  Such is the gamble!  At least you have a stellar soloist to distract, right?  Right?

Boiling down a song to only four parts can be both a fascinating excercise and a fantastic enterprise; I do hope that everybody out there in interweb world gets a chance to try it at some point!  By working within constraints, a composer/arranger gets the opportunity to be truly creative, since there are real problems to overcome in clever ways.  That is to say, necessity is the mother of invention — and if you impose the necessity, you create the potential for innovation.  Over time, we’ll highlight here some very clever reductions of vast compositions to only a few voices.  We’ll also point out that many apparently vast symphonic compositions are in fact essentially only four-voice compositions.  I’ll do that now, in fact.  Many symphonic compositions are only written in four voices.

Singing four-part harmony won't necessarily make you like these guys, don't worry.

If you commit to only four voices plus soloist, you’ll end up exploring novel pairings of voices, dynamically changing as the song continues.  Also, writing all the percussive consonants into the score itself will help keep your group from needing a dedicated vocal percussionist.  Finally, even after your group expands to larger numbers, you’ll still be able to sing the same arrangements with a big and powerful sound.  This is what Barbershop is all about.

On that note — in First Principles / Setting the Stage we mentioned that it’s a good idea for even large-group arrangers to consider how many people might be available at a given gig.  Each soloist or descant singer will be singularly required to attend the performance in order for the song to fly.  And if a large group is split too many times (ie five, six, or more parts), then there’s a very real possibility that an arrangement will turn out to be completely unperformable in practice.  Don’t let this happen to you!

When Four-Part Isn’t So Smart

Please wear red honking noses to a performance and use them for the encore. I will send you a prize.

Finally, there are some times where a four-part arrangement just isn’t going to cut the mustard.  For example, mixed groups will often find that SATB without splits is very awkward and thin-sounding, especially for smaller groups, because of the difficulty in making cross-gendral couplings sound convincing.  Groups who want to work very hard toward making their recordings sound as polished and produced as possible should probably not try to reduce their arrangement to only four parts — this makes it sound more like a vocal piece and less like the original instrumentation.  Besides, in the studio, you can always try another take (or let Antares AutoTune fix you up) if somebody is a bit out of tune.  Finally, groups who are made up of incredibly talented singers and/or are seldom missing people during gigs will want to seriously consider writing 6-, 7-, 8-, or even 9+-part arrangements to showcase their strengths.

What’s Coming Up

All kinds of examples of four-part arranging, geared toward smaller groups, or those who are interested in writing arrangements that will be performable by the largest number of groups.  We’ll look at all kinds of things in the 4-part world, and also showcase some examples of simplification in arrangement.  Coming right up!

La!

While arranging music for any a cappella group requires  musical sensibility–not necessarily training, but sensibility–arranging music for an all-female group requires particular dexterity. It is a socially challenging activity, especially at an 18% Greek liberal arts school when you’re asking hot, cool girls to sing nonsense syllables. More often than not, collegiate a cappella groups are comprised partly, if not almost entirely, of excellent shower-singing members–not musicians who get excited about chord progressions. Before you arrange your next (or first!) song, read over these ideas to get your mind right.

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Narrow can be quite beautiful, if you know how to manipulate it.

Last time, we talked about specific range limits for women. Once you’ve accepted these constraints, it’s difficult to see the light between this narrow passage and become inspired! You must muse, what are some powerful and/or effective ways to utilize closed chords (i.e. chords built within an octave)? The advantage to this small amount of work space is that your lines will include small intervals, which are easier to sing. You’ll find that arranging music presents different tugs-of-war; the disadvantage to this small space is that it can feel cramped and unexciting due to narrow ranges. So, you might be asking, how do you battle these two forces in the noble pursuit of bomb-ass arrangements? Everyone will develop their own style, per se, of answering this question just due to individual taste. But, here are some tips to create a more full and robust sound, just to get you started.

Range Compensation in Voicings

Part-writing can be tricky. After dictating the obvious background parts (bass-line, miscellaneous riffs, etc.), you’ll be left with a whole bunch of juicy chords that need to be thrown on the page. Bearing in mind that each voice is an individual horizontal melody and not just a part of the resultant vertical chords, here are some ways to steer clear of part-writing snafus.

• Use different inversions of chords (i.e. more than just the root note in the lowest voice), paying close attention to voice leading (for example, 7ths and suspensions should resolve down).
• Use parallel octaves and especially fifths more sparingly. They are great for emphasizing a specific melody line (or even a great bass line if you’re feeling saucy), but don’t overuse this tactic or it won’t be aurally exciting. For women, more contrapuntal lines tend to be a more effective use of your pitch-space
• Along with the above, allow overlap of the parts: good melodic lines are likely going to cross in the condensed range.

Range Compensation in Dynamic Textures

Women: have you ever noticed that you have a lot more dynamic control in head voice? Classically, women would only sing in this register, and there’s no question why; it’s a sound that has huge potential for expressivity, flexibility, and lightness. However, in the a cappella world, not using chest voice would be a grave mistake, for it cuts off a whole new world in timbre, volume, and range. Because the altos sing oddly low in their physiological range, they may find difficulty in achieving excellent registration and sound production. Big flashy dynamic contrasts are much more difficult to achieve, since the most limber and comfortable tessitura to sing in is markedly higher than the block should be written. So how to overcome this?

Dynamics waiting to be milked.

The best-case solution to this problem comes in the training, not in the arranging. Train the group to milk their dynamics for all they are worth (and explain why!), even in the less-than-optimal basement register — but always with good and healthy vocal technique! If the arranging takes into account the groups abilities to respond to training, you will have a much easier time at this. A few more things to wrap it up :

• Be particularly careful to avoid lots of repetition, even if it’s only in a few parts. The listener’s brain can and WILL grow weary of this, make no mistake. Instead, how ’bout this: write the arrangement especially around an interesting rhythm or melody! Try harmonizing a great riff in all or almost all the parts at once.

• Get creative: you don’t have to always limit yourself to the explicit harmonies the original song uses. Instead, go for more complex implicit harmonies. You have a choir of voices, use them to the fullest — anything that breaks the chain of brain-dulling stupor-inducing repetitive texture.

There are a lot of rules to follow to be sure, but the main thing to take to heart is: don’t be afraid to divert and do new things once you’ve established a basic idea, whether it be harmonic, rhythmic, or motivic. Now get to it!

GWWWAAAHNRRNUHH!

Men’s choirs and mixed choirs have something of a built-in advantage to women’s singing groups — a group of baritones with swallowed tones and an affinity for Barry White known as “basses.” They happily crank away at low notes down to an A or a G, and then start groaning like wounded wildebeest as they prove their testicular fortitude on an F or an E. Oh yes, their absence in the ranks of all-female a cappella groups is woefully mourned. Indeed, when arranging vocally for a treble choir or for women’s vocal ensembles, there are quite a few things to consider in order to compensate for this lack.

First off, it’s necessary to accept that the range of singing is much smaller with all women than with all men. After you’ve huffed and puffed and started to settle back into this unfortunate reality, you may begin the process of arranging well for women. We’ll assume the SSAA framework, and look at ways in which this is quite a different (less wilde) beast indeed.

Range Limits

Altos

Your Alto IIs will form the core foundation of your voicings, just as the basses would for other ensembles. However, it’s important to be very conscious of their vocal comfort, capabilities, and health. Do remember that all women essentially have the same vocal range, that of a soprano or mezzo-soprano. The contralto is the third voice type, and are rare indeed — although you might be lucky and nab one during auditions, it’s unlikely that the majority of your second altos will in fact be true contraltos. Consequently, write carefully for a group of straining sopranos, and mind their vocal health — as an arranger, it is your responsibility to protect their voices from consistent loud and low singing which will most likely permanently damage their voices.

That is, let the enrichment of the singer’s voice outweigh your need for some resonant low tones while in college; they’ll be wanting to use their voices for the rest of their lives. Besides, when girls try to sing below their healthy range limit, it can and will negatively affect their timbre and intonation, thus bringing down the entire group’s sound.

When you’re starting, try to keep your altos above the f below middle c. This is a rather solid and comfortable lower limit, and tends not to distort the voice too ridiculously; even the rare opratic contralto’s range doesn’t extend but a third below this. Many groups will try to arrange down ridiculously low, to a d, c or even a B — this is very risky, and usually hurts in the end.

Definitely the prima donnas of the a cappella world.

Sopranos

Also quite important — the range for sopranos generally shouldn’t be much higher than that for Tenor Is in male groups! By avoiding the higher range, the sound of your women will be compact and powerful, and much more resonant than you could otherwise imagine. Don’t write a Sop I part that goes higher than F unless the situation is fully appropriate — high parts always come out much louder, partly due to the increase in air support one must use to reach higher notes. The highest part is generally the most exposed and therefore most tricky to tune. And of course, for all types of vocal arranging, it’s best to avoid a large space between the highest part and the one immediately below, or the highest line won’t sound or feel supported.

More posts will soon be on the way to delve a bit more deeply into these topics; stay tuned!