How to write and arrange faster

I have to be honest about something. What I am sharing today is not that difficult but nevertheless took me a long time to learn. It is a tip for learning to write more efficiently.

In the six CDs I have previously recorded, I have written or arranged all the music. My process has always been the same and has sort of been based on the survival of the fittest concept.

Basically, this is how it worked. I would sit down at the piano every day and tried to come up with ideas. Some would be good and some would be bad. The next day, I would start again, rejecting the bad ideas of the previous day but trying to build on the better ideas. Sometimes I could remember the good ideas and more often I couldn’t. There is no telling how many good ideas never made it to the next day because I just forgot them.

Eventually, enough ideas would stick until an arrangement was done. From a certain perspective, you could argue that the writing from that process would tend to be good because it is full of ideas that have been strong enough to survive the process. That is where survival of the fittest comes in.

But on the other hand, when using that process, it was no wonder that I would often spend six months working on ten songs for a CD.

I am in the middle of a new CD which will be released in April. My strategy for this one was very different. I committed to write ten arrangements over ten weekends, really focusing on just one song every weekend. As I work it out, I write everything out in Finale. On average, I am spending about five hours on a song on one day, but when I am done with it, it is pretty close to being ready to record. I still tweak things going forward but the major writing is finished.

I can’t believe how efficient this process has been compared to my old one. A side benefit is that the sheet music for this CD will be ready to publish along with the CD. And I do consider this new CD to be the best writing that I have done. It is a children’s CD but the music is not dumbed down at all. I have two original songs on there with eight traditional children’s tunes.

My simple tip for writing and arranging is this: document your ideas as you go. I use Finale. You might have another way to do it such as recording yourself on your phone. That works too. But don’t depend on your mind to remember good ideas.

Some of you might be intimidated by the idea of learning Finale well enough to get a song entered quickly. I certainly understand that but Finale is just software like any other software. It has a learning curve but once you get good at it, you can work in it as easily as you work in Microsoft Word. I would not consider myself an expert but I can input music quickly.

My songs are usually about 4 minutes long which translates to 80-100 bars of music and if I know the song well, it takes about 2 hours of work to get it into Finale. I usually don’t work that way though. I work on sections of 8-16 bars at a time, working out what I want to do and getting it into Finale. For those that know the software and are interested, I use Speedy Entry.

If you don’t want to pay for Finale (yes it is expensive), there are now great free alternatives on the market such as MuseScore and NoteFlight.

If music notation software is just too big of a hurdle for you right now, the hand held recorder is just fine or even just jotting down notes on paper. The main thing is that you don’t want to be starting over every day because your mind fails you.