Arranging efficiently

According to one of my online critics, I am not an arranger; I am apparently a deranger. I have been around the absurdities of the bickering that goes on in church music for a long time and thought I had heard it all but I have to say I have never heard that one. It made me laugh for a long time so props to him and I wanted to pass it on to you to brighten your day as well.

Now I want to talk about arranging.

With all due respect to my friends that write arrangements professionally, I have not performed anyone else’s arrangements in maybe fifteen years. It is not that mine are better. Many times, I don’t think they are better at all. It is a matter of efficiency mostly. It is just a lot easier to arrange/derange my own stuff than learn published arrangements. When you arrange your own music, you naturally use the skills that you have mastered. On the other hand, when you learn someone else’s arrangements, you often find yourself having to do things that don’t feel very natural.

That be said, some of you are still scratching your head and wondering why I would say arranging my own stuff is more efficient. After all, the arranging process is an additional step in the process. Some see it as a very big and complicated step. It doesn’t have to be though; you might be surprised if you knew how little time I spend on arranging typical songs. For that matter, you would be surprised how little time often goes into the arranging of a ton of professionally recorded music. And those arrangement books you buy? My guess is the average arranging time behind those arrangements is just a few hours per song. I have a friend who has written something like forty published books and she only spends a week on a book and that is not full time.

That brings me to my topic of this post: how you can arrange that efficiently too. Let’s keep things simple. Here are the three basic things you need to arrange a song.

* A shape (the big picture of what you want to do in terms of development)
* A style (a consistent flavor/sound you are going for)
* An idea/hook (a specific technical element that supports the style; could be harmonic, rhythmic, melodic or something else)

That is it. If you focus only on those three things you can quickly come up arrangements that sound arranged. They won’t win awards or intimidate Beethoven but they will work. If you arrange to your strengths, you will naturally play them well and that makes all the difference. Who would not rather listen to a less polished arrangement played very well than an ultra-polished arrangement played in a mediocre fashion?

Let me tell you the big, inefficient pothole to avoid if you want to be efficient: the diversity pothole. You are probably going to overvalue diversity. We are taught that our music needs to be diverse. Your arrangement books will always have diversity in styles between songs and even diversity within the arrangements themselves.

When you start arranging, forget about diversity. Just because an arrangement book may contain eight different styles ranging from classical to reggae does not mean you have to master all those styles. Attempting to do that will suck up enormous amounts of time and still will rarely end well.

Folks, think about the various biggest musicians in the world and consider how diverse they are. How many styles did Frank Sinatra embrace for example? How about Andrea Bocelli?

If the top musicians don’t feel the need to be diverse, why should you? Arrange music to your strength and don’t worry too much if your music all sounds similar. That is not necessarily a bad thing; it is just part of developing a style.

Don’t let the pseudo goal of diversity make you inefficient. Just figure out some things you are good at and let them define your style. Then start writing arrangements within the parameters of that style. Be diverse only within the parameters of your style.

And of course, the most important thing I can tell you is this: start arranging. Arrange and arrange and arrange some more. The first arrangements will take you a lot of time but eventually, you will get faster and better. At some point, you can even get comfortable with improvising arrangements on the spot.

Yes, it is absolutely feasible to get to the point where you can much more easily arrange your own songs than learn published arrangements, and in my opinion, that is a worthwhile goal for most church musicians.