It's been a long time since I started getting requests to make a video about Arrangements. This topic is really complicated, as it depends on what kind of music, or what kind of arrangement you want to do in your music. This will be the first blog/video on this topic, where I will explain to you how do I see this topic.
In order that I can show you in DAW how to make any arrangements, first of all, I will need to go through some types of arrangements, so that you have a better picture when I make other videos on this topic.
As I see it, there are 2 main different types of arrangements in Psy-Trance music. Those two types of arrangements can be called also different approaches to music.
The most popular and the most successful type is the Uplifting type of arrangement
This type is the one that Vini Vici use in their music, where you have a long intro, long breaks, and many changes in the groove. This way, the contrast is made by long intros, long breaks and parts where kick and bass are running. The main thing about this arrangement is to create this contrast, and that's why people start jumping and screaming when the kick and bass hit after those long breaks. In order to create this huge moment, we need to take the energy of a track down in order to bring it up. The whole philosophy about this kind of arrangements is that wave we create with energy up and down, followed by huge and loud risers, uplifters and snare rolls. It is really common that we make a lot of changes in this kind of arrangements, triplets, offbeats, or we have several layers of the basslines. As we are not running our kick and bass too long, and therefore we can push all elements highest as possible, as they won't run for too long, and they will be followed by huge breaks and intros, as well as a lot of broken grooves (bass will stop after every 3/4, or there will be some change in the groove.
The second type of arrangement is Progressive! I do not call it progressive because it describes the genre, I call it that way as the progress of the track is slower and the whole attention is on this progress, and I believe that any Uplifting music should not be called progressive, even if many people call Vini Vici progressive. If we take any other genre besides Psy-Trance, you will hear that all of the other music genres, that have a prefix of progressive, have this thing in common. Progressive House is also slowly developing trough a time, there are no many of the huge changes and big uplifters ( bellow you will read about the Fusion between those two types, so a lot of artists are making this new style that I call fission between progressive and uplifting)
Progressive as I see it, it needs much more time to develop, and by listening to the progressive, you should not expect the big moments in tracks, the progressive you should listen through the longer amount of time, through the sets of 2hrs or longer, and only then you can feel the true power of the progressive music.
Now, the third and today most heard kind of arrangement is a mix of those two above, and I call it Fusion of Uplifting and Progressive. As with Vini Vici coming to the prog scene and their huge success, they had a huge impact on the scene, and a lot of artists have started to make this kind of arrangements, and it was like that for some amount of time, while native progressive almost totally disappeared. In the last two years, we can hear a bit of progressive come back, as we all realised that we are slowly getting away from what we wanted to create. This new kind of fusion is based on the native progressive arrangements, followed by an uplifting part in the middle of a track. This way allows producers and DJs to play the same tracks differently, and adapt their sets to the crowd in the county they play. We all know that European and Brazilian scenes are totally different and that the Brazilian market is huge with parties and a lot of people, and this scene just loves Uplifting arrangements. While Europe is more about the progressive arrangements where there is continuous mid-level energy followed by much fewer changes. So by applying this fusion in your tracks, you can make edits depending on where you gonna play, and by having the progressive with uplifting elements in each track, you would be able to play the same tracks anywhere you go!
Video will be available 25th April at 20:00 CET
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