Introduction
The human voice is the most special musical instrument that anyone can ever play. It’s literally a wind-powered string instrument that can play words, imitate other instruments, or just make… weird noises.
Farting sounds aside, there’s something just… magical about being able to create music using absolutely nothing but the voice. And there’s this special feeling of unity and closeness when you and your friends sing together, isn’t there? That’s the beauty of acapella music 🙂
Wouldn’t it be lovely to know how to create such music from scratch?
To be frank, there are plenty of other websites and resources that discuss acapella arranging. However, I personally find that many of these tend to focus on:
- High level music stuff (like jazz chording)
- Hypothetical ideas to improve creativity
- Showing off their multi-tracking skills
But these are rather complicated possibilities. As a beginner, wouldn’t you much rather learn how to start your first acapella arrangement in a step by step way?
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I remember I was first inspired to arrange during my secondary school choir days. There was a particularly touching Disney song that I really liked, so I attempted to write down an acapella arrangement for it.
It took me about a year to finish my first draft, and then I asked a senior (who was going to study music in some prestigious university) for some constructive feedback.
To be fair the senior was really very nice and encouraging. But it turned out that I had gotten loads of rhythms and chords wrong, written un-singable parts, and just basically did terribly overall.
That day, I kinda just gave up hope of ever arranging acapella music.
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Fast forward a couple of years. While I was busy serving in army, my girlfriend got roped into a fledgling university acapella group, and she asked me to help her create acapella arrangements for them.
Couldn’t say no, right?
The first few arrangements took ages, and they weren’t very good at all either, but out of necessity I ended up arranging quite a few more songs for them. It was a really hard process, and honestly I felt quite bad for the singers who had to put up with my subpar standards for such a long time.
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Looking back, I really wished that there had been someone to teach me how to arrange, in a simple, structured manner.
That’s what this part of the blog is for 🙂 we wanna help you skip over the tedious trial and error of trying to write tolerable/passable music, so that you can go straight into figuring out how to write music that you really enjoy.
I really hope that the tips that we share will help kickstart and ease your first attempts at putting the music in your head into writing 🙂
~ Andrew
Approach To Acapella 