hi charley
What is a song? Are there any real rules? How much music theory is involved, if any? I ask because lately every song I hear I analyze it in my mind as to its structure. Could that song be done well on an arranger? And.....could I do it?
I think certain things in music are difficult to explain because it has to do with human perception, mood, cultural environment, how much
sense for music someone has, our age, etc. -and that is what defines the rules.
Similar as you, when I hear some song/music that I like (that catch my interest, so to speak), I start to
analyze it in my head and try to find out how to transfer it into arranger.
Can I do it? If I really like the song, then I usually can ...or I will
learn how to do it during creation. But as I found out, that's not the right question.. right question is: will I be able to play that song?
The thing is, we only have two hands and many times that's not enough to
imitate several musicians: playing on splitted keybed, changing chords, changing voices, executing pads at the right time, ...not to mention, that we can't afford mistakes if variations consists of several bars.
I also realized that not every song is suited for playing on arranger. Many songs are great mainly because of singers voice and the way how (s)he sing it. And no matter how perfect style we make, we will not able to present that with arranger. I've created quite a few such styles and in the middle of the process I realized that it will sound... boring -and I deleted it.
The variations start out with minimal accompaniment and progress adding more accompaniment and perhaps volumes as the song plays. When did we start using this type of template for song creation and why?
It's because preset styles are made that way. They serve for demonstration only -they're not song specific. Not everyone is able or interested to make custom styles and so they just use what's there -it becomes kinda boring over the time, though.
...When 4 variations came into play it made things sound much more realistic, but only to a point.
Here comes my wish that I expressed a while ago: we need more than only four variations! -your conclusion confirm that my wish has it's place.
...What do you do to keep from sounding repetitive?
Well, I don't play gigs for audience (except few youtube videos) and so I can only share my thoughts on how to avoid repetitions:
Each song must have distinctly different rhythm pattern in style. That doesn't necessary mean that every style must be totally different in it's core. Many times it's enough if we only change bass and/or padding pattern, to make song sounding quite differently. What I'm saying is, a style must sound interesting enough if we use three (max four) channels only. For example, drums, bass and (guitar, piano, etc.) padding.
Most songs can be performed with a style that has only length of one bar in all variations... which sounds very boring if we use such styles for all our songs.
Just sharing my thoughts,
Bogdan