Arranging Tips: Beyond the Basics
We already know that mediocre arrangements will lead to mediocre music, and no amount of Autotune and Octaver can fix that.
We also know that we can’t employ the tricks used in studio recordings for live performances, and therefore arrangements for live performances must be more carefully crafted.
(For simplicity, from here onwards I’ll assume you’re arranging for a live performance).
Hence, good acapella music is built on the strengths of the human voice, while working around its limitations.
We’ll discuss some of these strengths and limitations are in this article 🙂
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The human voice is a very special musical instrument. It’s a wind powered string instrument that plays words, with a side of percussion (beatboxing). This has multiple, rather important implications.
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Wind Powered
The human voice needs to pause and breathe (I heard it’s good for health), and there’s a good a chance it’ll become an awkward silence if managed poorly.
Notice the amount of awkward silences due to the background singers breathing. It’s especially prominent with the lead up to the chorus/during the chorus.
It doesn’t feel as empty, because the orchestra (the backing track) fills in the spaces when the singer breathes.
There’s a few workarounds for this.
First, ensuring that your singers are breathing at different times. This way, the audience’s attention jumps between singers and perceives it as the sound never stopping. This is a staple of PTX arrangements and is what sets them apart from many other acapella groups.
Bass and beats fill up the space when the others are doing lyrics in unison/close harmony.
The breathing points of all 5 members rarely coincide. That’s the secret.
The beatboxer is another key secret. Beatboxers inhale when they do certain sounds (like the K snare) so they can reliably keep making sound forever.
Therefore, it helps to use the beatboxer to fill in the awkward gaps.
Notice how the beatboxer carries the song when everyone else is breathing.
Notice how the PTX members are intentionally breathing at different points? (I like to call it Staggered Breathing)
It’s a neat hack, but it also means the arrangement didn’t keep their health in mind.
And you don’t hear this is the other video because it’s Studio Magic (TM).
The last option is to just utilise the silence as part of the music.
Another key feature of being wind powered is that singers tend to sing louder at higher pitches, and softer at lower pitches. It’s therefore usually better to arrange things within comfortable vocal range; when the jumps are too extreme, it can feel a little disjointed/like the energy of the song disappears too easily.
1) At 0:54 – 0:59 Scott sings a higher pitch to cover up the loss of energy from Mitch and Kirstie dropping to a lower pitch
2) 1:07 – 1:11 they cover it up again by having Mitch shout SING
3) It becomes really obvious at 1:44 – 1:49 and again at 2:20-2:25
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String Instrument
The voice is a string instrument, just like a violin or cello. It excels at long sustained notes which have phrasing (soft => loud => soft). This can be used to excellent effect in slower paced songs like Run To You (PTX).
However, being a string instrument also has its limitations.
In most instruments, pressing specific button combinations makes you immediately in tune. The voice however, can easily go out of tune, just like how a violinist can play out of tune by pressing the wrong part of the string. This gets worse with 1) faster and more varied pitch changes, 2) if the singers can’t hear themselves, or 3) the singers aren’t well.
Keep in mind the idea of limited vocal range. Not every guy/girl can scream high like Bruno Mars / Mariah Carey, and not every girl can sing phenomenally low like Sharon Carpenter, and Avi Kapalans who eat bass guitars for breakfast are even rarer.
Point being that your singers vocal ranges are limited by their vocal cords and surrounding muscles.
Hence, your musical ideas as an arranger must be designed to fit the voices of your singers, not the other way around. It’s also why I find performing PTX songs so hard; most singers don’t have their level of vocal range and agility.
Finally a personal peeve: you only have 1 set of vocal cords. Hence, (in most cases) the voice can only play 1 pitch at a time, and it has no sustain pedal. This comment is specifically directed at acapella arrangers who play the piano a lot; you CAN’T always rely on arpeggios in the bass line to sustain the chord you want for the bar.
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DIGRESSING A BIT haha there’s a few ways I know of how to sing multiple pitches at once…
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Words
Singing words is your biggest advantage, because it adds an entire layer of meaning and relatability for the audience.
See? No instrument can match the power of words 🙂
That being said, words can also become a tremendous distraction.
The human ear is excellent at distinguishing voices from any other background sound, but can easily get confused when there’s multiple competing voices.
This becomes a problem when background singers imitate guitars / pianos / bells; no matter how hard they try, they’ll still sound like they’re singing words, and it diverts attention away from the lead singer.
The electric guitar sound really distracts from the lyrics because it’s still a person singing words.
And it gets even worse when the background chorus sings totally different words from the melody.
It’s especially problematic because the melody is a low pitch, while the harmonies are of higher pitches (which the human ear locks onto much more easily).
That being said, if carefully thought out, there are solutions around this. Layering is a very common and effective arranging technique to add words while preventing audience confusion.
Adding one layer of words at a time helps the audience focus on the new ideas without getting distracted by the old ones.
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A side of Percussion
Beatboxing adds a layer of energy and rhythm to the music. We’ll discuss this further in the beatboxing section of the blog, but suffice to say that beatboxing is quite irreplaceable for most acapella music.
As an arranger, it’s also a huge advantage to know how to beatbox, so that you can structure your score around it. That’s one of the biggest secrets of PTX’s songs too!
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In Conclusion
This has been a really long blog post, so thanks for bearing with it! Here’s a quick tldr;
- The voice is a wind powered string instrument that plays words, with a side of percussion
- Wind powered:
- Breathing is unavoidable and must be well managed
- Singing high = singing loud, and vice versa
- String instrument
- Excels in slow songs with phrasing
- Easy to go out of tune
- Limited vocal range
- 1 pitch at a time
- Words
- Vastly more meaningful and relatable
- Potentially distracting
- Percussion
- A tool to be mastered and used well
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It’s easier said than done, but these are all the key factors that a good acapella arranger has to keep in mind 🙂
~ Andrew
Approach To Acapella 