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 give you simple ideas for arranging.

Good.

I'm a simple person with simple ideas.

Let's get this going.

That's right.

Now, we're not promising seven today because we're feeling the vibe. Yeah. Does the listeners need a little break from that. So, you know, we just got back from lunch, kind of like, kind of loosey-goosey. We're feeling loosey. So this might be one or it might be seven hundred and 77. I doubt if it's going to be that. So, okay, let's let's just talk about first, define what arranging is. Sure, yeah.

I mean, arranging is taking the given information of the melody and the form.

And, I mean, those are actually the two main elements.

In some cases, the lyrics, if you're working with a vocalist,

taking that information of melody and form and orchestrating

it out to instruments, providing context and color. Those are the two things I think about the most,

is providing a context and a color to that melody and form. And yeah, and then hopefully making

something artful out of that with some surprises. You know, you want to be able to

set things up. You want to tell your story. You can do all that in arrangement. Now, what's

your feeling on, we're going to go straight to the Q&A section on this? Yeah, no, that's good.

What is your feeling in terms of arrangement on how much, how much creativity is the arranger allowed to put into the process of, obviously, you know, music that's already been composed by somebody else.

So it's their creative, original creative output. How much can and should be given by the arranger?

So I think everybody has their own comfort level with this of where they're drawing the line. I draw the line at the melody. I've done, I did one arrangement where I kind of tweet the melody. It was like a, I think it was like a Paul Simon song too. That, that takes a lot of guts. He's got good lawyers. He's got good melodies too, right? And so why would I do that? Yeah. And now I kind of look back on that like a little bit like, I kind of wish I wouldn't had had changed that melody. But I think that's where most people draw the line. I honestly think I know some people might disagree with that, but I with this, but I think that rhythm and core changes, those are all up for grabs for me. Yeah.

Form can be up for grabs for me too.

I'm not of the mindset that you have to follow the exact original form.

In fact, sometimes that can be a very powerful arranging tool to start in an unexpected place.

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