I'm Adam Manus, and I'm Peter Martin, and you're listening to the You'll Hear at Podcast.

Today we're going to talk about five tips to becoming a better arranger.

Now, what are we arranging?

Music, flowers, weddings.

What are we talking about here? You're definitely arranging music because I've tried to arrange flowers once and my wife said you're not

allowed to ever touch the flowers ever again. That's good. What about like arranging something else that the mafia might arrange? Can we even talk about that? Arranging a hit? No dude, that's totally confidential. I can't believe you even brought that up. Let's edit that out. Okay, edit that out. Thanks. Okay, so five tips to becoming a better ranger. Why don't you kick it off with number one, Adam?

So the first thing that we want to Let's edit that out. Okay, edit that out. Thanks. Okay, so five tips to becoming a better arranger. Why don't you kick it off with number one, Adam?

So the first things that we want to talk about are three things. Voicings and voicings and voicings.

So this must be important. You've said it three times. Yeah, that's right. So, I mean, really, one of the most important things you can do to help your arranging is to study voicing, to understand how to voice harmony under melody. This is like the baby steps of arranging, right? I mean, pianists are naturally kind of inclined towards arranging because we do this on our instrument every day. I mean, it's part of being a pianist. And I think that's why you see so many pianists go into arranging.

And that said, if you don't play piano and you want to get into arranging, take a little piano because it definitely helps with that.

But what you want to know about is how to voice chords, you know, whether that's open voicing, closed voicing, how to balance a chord

amongst multiple instruments. You know, sometimes if you only have three notes in a chord,

if you're playing a triad, but you have six voices, what do you put on what? You know, there are

things to know. So what you really want to study is voicings and how to orchestrate that

harmony underneath a melody. Right. And if you're not a pianist, don't think that you have to

become an accomplished, you know, technically astute pianists in order to be able to benefit from playing

and understanding voicing for arranging. You can get a very rudimentary

view of the instrument and handle on the instrument to be able to play these

voicing and most importantly be able to move them voice leading start to

understand and start to hear how that works by just sitting at the piano and

that's so important for the arrangement process. That's so true.

Right.

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