Force Prep

Arranging Tips: The Basics (Part 1)

Before you get all excited and open up Musescore (or whatever arranging software), it’s important to do a little homework first.

You have to know what the chords and lyrics of the song are, and I strongly recommend making a little reference document for that.

Let’s say you’re asked to arrange a cover of a certain song. For the purposes of teaching, let’s take this song: Feel It Still.

This song will be our case study for arranging basics 🙂

The first thing you have to do is figure out what the chords are.

Usually, you can just google and look for “[song name] chords”. Websites like Ultimate Guitar are quite useful.

Figure 1: The chords as shown in Ultimate Guitar

But what if you find contradicting versions of the chords?

Figure 2: The chords in another version shown on Ultimate Guitar.

Don’t forget that that sort of website is designed for guitarists, so you may need to account for the capo and which fret it’s placed on.

“?!? capo ?!? fret ?!?”

A non-guitarist

Chillax. Let’s take a short detour while I explain some basic guitar stuff.

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The capo is a device for guitars that allows players to transpose upwards.

Image result for playing guitar with and without a capo
Figure 3: See that black twirly thing next to the guitarist’s left hand? That’s the capo.

The capo is placed onto the frets and pins down the strings. The length of the string that can move becomes shorter, and hence the pitch goes higher.

Let’s say we put the capo on the first fret.

Image result for guitar fret
Figure 4: Yes, the terms are a bit interchangeable.
I’m referring to the “first fret” bit. That’s where the capo goes.

This makes the pitch go up by one semitone. It would go up by two semitones if placed on the second fret, and so on. Makes sense?

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Figure 2: For reference once more

Going back to figure 2, we see that the top left says “Capo 4th”. That means the capo is placed on the 4th fret, meaning the chords should be transposed up by four semitones.

  • Am => A#m => Bm => Cm => C#m
  • C => C# => D => D# => E
  • And so on…
Figure 5: The same chords, transposed 4 semitones up.
Does it look familiar? 🙂

Oh look, no more contradiction yay 🙂

And when you compare this to the original song, you’ll hear that these chords fit. So you know that you can trust these chords when you’re arranging!

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Here’s a slightly more advanced way to derive your chords: use solfege.

Here it is again

Listen to the bass note. The solfege of it is 6, 1, 2, 6, which loops every 4 bars. So therefore the chords should also have 6, 1, 2, 6 as the respective root notes.

What key is the song in?

Listening to the first line, we can hear that the solfege is as such

  • Lyrics: Can’t keep my hands to myself
  • Solfege: 6 6 6 1 2 1 3

Once we compare the Do (1) with some tuner app or a piano maybe, we realise that 1 is E.

Figure 6: For Reference

So the chords would be as such:

  • 6 chord = C# is the root
  • 6 is always a minor chord
  • etc

Hence, the 6, 1, 2, 6 chord pattern would therefore be C#m, E, F#m, C#m in the key of E major.

If you want, you can write it in the proper music notation format (roman numerals!), either capitalised for major chords, or uncapitalised for minor chords.

So the chord progression is therefore (vi I ii vi) in the key of E major.

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The last thing to do to make things simpler is to see how the chord pattern repeats throughout the song. It helps to analyse in 4 or 8 bar chunks, and in terms of segments of the song (verse, chorus, bridge etc).

In the case of Feel It Still, with a little bit of thinking I can summarise the song like this:

Figure 7: Concise.

All the chords I need to know are crammed into the two bolded lines, and the rest of the document is purely for lyrics and the link to the original song.

And that’s that for homework. With experience, you’ll be able to do this in like 5 minutes for songs you’re familiar with (not even kidding).

When you’re ready, head over to part 2. That’s where the real work begins 🙂

~ Andrew