Arrangement — think in 4s and 8s

Almost all chiptune and EDM breathes in 4- and 8-bar phrases. Introduce or remove one element every 4 or 8 bars: drop the bass out, bring the drums in, transpose the whole thing up, add a counter-melody. Repetition is not the enemy — unchanging repetition is (source: s-037-lab).

Cheap but killer moves#

• Copy a whole section up a fifth (+7) or up an octave (+12) for the finale — in sid-wizard this is an orderlist transpose value ($90–$9F up, $80–$8F down) in front of the repeated patterns, no pattern copying needed.
• Strip everything to bass + drums for 4 bars before the big chorus.
• End phrases on a held note while the chords keep moving.
• Give every phrase a single peak (melody-writing); change one thing per repeat.

Transitions and endings (Catspaw, 1996)#

Slowing a section by jumping the speed (A06 → A07) is audible and abrupt; slide the tempo down over the last beats instead and set the new speed with the tempo restored on the next pattern — tempo changes leave frame-based effects (volume slides, retrigs) untouched. And make the song loop cleanly: initialise speed, tempo, pan and global volume with commands in a silent first pattern (song-init-and-looping; source: s-tw058-the-finishing-touches).

Structure and energy (Necros, 1995)#

necros's songwriting column, after Jim Aikin's "Demo Tape Workshop", names the sections by job: Intro alludes to the melody and rises; A (verse) carries the lead; B (chorus) says "Hey! Check this out!"; the Bridge often moves to a different chordal area; the Resolution is a modified B leading to the ending. Radio form is roughly Intro / A / B / A / B / Bridge / A / B / Resolution, and listeners raised on it hear anything without some structure as "incoherent" or "random". Plan the peaks and valleys before the patterns — "A song is not just a collection of melodic riffs, it is an emotional statement": a catchy A, a chorus, a fuller A, a bigger chorus, a "HUGE" bridge, then a quieter A, a more melodic chorus and a slow finale; neither six minutes at 180 BPM nor eighteen minutes of one piano riff works (source: s-tw015-advanced-tracking-tips-ii).

Beginner traps and fixes (Atlantic 1995, Zinc 1997)#

• Don't trackstack — building one channel at a time, two patterns each, is predictable and boring; start "in the midst of the action", write bridges, vary (source: s-tw032-not-so-advanced-tracking-tips).
• Keep a frequency spread: low-end and high-end sounds at the same time give depth; all-bass is noisy, all-treble irritating (same source).
• Keep something new happening, especially in trance and jungle, or cut the section short; drop the kick at unexpected moments (the "lager" break in Born Slippy); no fade-in intros; when 64 rows are too few, use 128 rows at double speed (source: s-tw096-studio-tracking-tips).

Musical forms (Greg Heo, 1996)#

Listeners hear repetition and contrast; both are needed and must balance — "are your tunes one giant loop?" The stock forms, in letters: binary AB; ternary ABA (B contrasts but shares a motif; the return may vary); rondo ABACA(DA); theme and variations (each variation with contrasting volume and tempo, ending in a finale rather than a literal return); verse–chorus (rare in tracked music without lyrics); "straight" ABCDEFG; sonata (exposition, development, recapitulation, coda). An intro, an ending and a bridge are assumed. "Songs with form help the listener to remember the song" (source: s-tw074-intro-to-musical-theory). The Modsquad's chip-specific rule: when you must repeat patterns, repeat them in threes or odd numbers (source: s-tw077-chip-off-the-block).

Plan the whole module (Sir Nick, 1996)#

Trackers edit "in blocks of only few bars", and Sir Nick argued that this shapes the music: the copy-paste arc — intro noise or the bare chords, instruments filling in over the next orders, a few orders of "maximum mayhem", the same pattern without drums, a long snare fill, the original again, "then the same pattern raised by whole step" — is monotonous by construction. His example was an Abduction '96 entry whose beautiful four-bar piano opening was simply repeated for the rest of the song; four more bars of real material would have fixed it. Remedy: "work out a chord diagram or some kind of structure plan before getting on with the actual tracking", and do not let the pattern length decide the phrase length — a progression spanning two patterns is awkward to edit but worth it (source: s-tw072-composing-whole-modules; the orderlist page covers the mechanics).

A form analysis: Purple Motion's Inside Out (1997)#

One Modsquad member's exercise after starting theory lessons, and a useful template: a descending three-note riff over a noise track → a quiet hihat foreshadowing the beat → chords with a few syncopated kicks → drums in, an austere verse melody echoing the riff, repeated → crescendo, drums stop, two low bass notes → chorus: the mostly minor chords go major under a catchy chip-sample melody, twice → a verse-like placeholder → chorus again, then again "in a higher key" → a repetitive chordal bridge with a second, different melody → loop to the start (source: s-tw087-music-theory-a-modern-approach — a satirical series; this section is its sincere part).

Register and space as mixing (Defense Mechanism, 2020)#

On the game-boy's four channels — "when you only have four bits of dynamic range, every little bit counts" — defense-mechanism treats arrangement as the mixer: before turning anything up, move a lead an octave, because two instruments in the same octave "battle it out" like two hands playing the same range of a piano, and an octave transpose also freshens a lead that has gone stale; alternate pan positions on pulse notes or noise hi-hats to create space (stereo-panning); give a snare a transient instead of a higher level (instrument-design) (source: s-intense-tech-15-lets-mix-it-up-and-down).

Odd meters and live arrangement#

In lsdj a phrase is 16 steps, but H00 on step C of every phrase makes 3/4 time; hops back within a phrase (H1x) repeat sections without copying. Live mode queues chain starts and stops per channel so an arrangement can be performed rather than sequenced (source: s-lsdj-manual). Since 9.2 LEFT+START during playback queues a song row in SONG mode without switching to live mode; the same version cut the song length from FF to BF rows to free memory (source: s-intense-tech-21-whats-new-in-lsdj-92).

The song screen as the arrangement (LSDj)#

Two habits turn the order list itself into the map of the piece, and they cost nothing.

• Empty rows between sections. They air the screen out so intro, break, riser and drop are visible as blocks — and in live mode they do a second job: the sequencer stops rewinding when it hits an empty step, so each block becomes an island that loops back on itself. "You can be assured that a bassline will only cycle through the parts you want it to, rather than continuing on and advancing through the rest of the song. Until you TELL it to", and while a block repeats "I have time to decide" what to trigger next instead of jumping something unsynced (sources: s-chipmusic-lsdj-live-performance, s-painperdu-05-shortcuts-and-workflow; live-tracking).
• Marks. Pressing B three times in the song screen marks a block for navigation — "it's in the manual but not a lot of people know about it" — so sections are reachable at a glance mid-performance. The number of marks is limited, so spend them on the structural joints (source: s-painperdu-05-shortcuts-and-workflow).

What live mode adds to that is per-channel queueing: "in live mode you can queue up, in each individual channel and independently of the others, a chain anywhere before or after the one currently playing … So PU1 can be playing the chain at position 01 while PU2 plays the chain at position 2F", where in song mode every channel advances in step. Everything else people associate with live mode — soloing, muting, panning, editing while it runs — already works in song mode: "the only thing that makes live mode unique is the ability to start and stop channels live" (source: s-chipmusic-lsdj-live-performance).

One more arrangement-scale trick from the same workflow: the clipboard survives loading another song, but it carries values, not what they point at — chain 1B pasted into a second song refers to that song's 1B. Work from a shared template save and whole sections can be moved between songs intact, which is the cheap way to build a remix or a live set out of existing material (source: s-painperdu-05-shortcuts-and-workflow).

Two intensities of the same part#

The most portable section-writing device in the wiki is not a new part but a second patch for the same part. pain-perdu builds a verse kick killed at 4 and a chorus kick that is "longer, kill at six, and a slower pitch down", with more low end and a stronger transient, and makes the bass's rise after the chorus kick more gradual so the bigger drum has room: "This could be a verse and this a chorus." The pattern data need not change at all (instrument-design).

The same walkthrough gives a reason to keep the ducking running on channels the kick never touches: the pulse channel gets an envelope "that starts from zero and rises at the speed of A" once per beat, so "even if you have no kick playing you still have the feel of the song … you can really clearly hear when the kick is going to hit". A breakdown that keeps its ducking keeps its pulse (source: s-painperdu-04-sidechaining).

And a last pass worth naming: echo as a filling operation. "Echoes can help fill an arrangement out and give it a greater sense of depth and, if you want, space. In the final stages of working on a track, I often look for every bit of free space in the patterns and see if I can add an echo here and there" — the arrangement equivalent of the C64 rule that the lead channel is also the fill channel (source: s-lsdj-and-you-echo-chamber; the techniques are on fake-echo).

From the interviews (1995–98)#

• Borrow an ensemble ending: blackwolf's "Last of the Omnipotent" closes with a drum-and-bugle-corps coda lifted from his marching band's Spanish show, "cut in half and changed keys" (source: s-tw040-interview-blackwolf).
• khyron (1997): techno depends "more on the arrangement side … slowly lead up a big crescendo into a big booming break with a kicking 909 kick … arrangement and production more than anything else", while trance needs only "very basic" chord theory (source: s-tw111-interview-khyron).
• mental-floss (1998): techno is "more monophonic than a lot of 'real world music'" — "Thinking monophonically is a bit of a mental change" — and layered writing needs theory to stay on top of "stuff happening on different levels" (source: s-tw119-interview-mental-floss).

Length and long-form on the C64 (Galway, 1986–2001)#

• martin-galway's long pieces — Parallax at about 11 minutes (the intro is two-thirds of it) and Times of Lore, 11 minutes with a random solo generator — are the period's extreme of arrangement at length; asked what he would improve, Galway named "the biggest trait of all my tunes that I'd like to improve – their length" (sources: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews, s-remix64-galway-interview). The composer he was competing with reads the same trait as the achievement: jeroen-tel calls Galway "the guy who really used the Commodore 64 SID chip as a synthesizer" and singles out his ability to stretch "a single music theme over so many minutes of time without it getting boring" — where rob-hubbard was "extremely catchy and very 'to the point'", Galway was "more biased around atmosphere and sound" (source: s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel).

Arrangement as subroutines (the 1986–88 game drivers)#

Galway's and Ocean's players have no patterns: a phrase is a subroutine and harmony is a transposed call — PLAYT G4,p2c9d / PLAYT Fx4,p2cb4 (Rambo), sub07: JSRT $1f sub06 / JSRT $1d sub06 / JSRT $1b sub06 / JSRT $1a sub06 (Arkanoid), CALL MEL1 / CT,-5 MEL1 / CT,-12 MEL1 / CT,-17 MEL1 (Daley Thompson '88). Loops nest (REPEAT 4 / REPEAT 3 / PLAYT F3,p2cb1 / NEXT / PLAYT E3,p2cb1 / NEXT), voices can jump into each other's streams for a delayed echo, and Dunn's comments read like a lead sheet: "PLAY VERSE+CHORUS TWICE", "MIDDLE 8", "LET BASS + BACK TAKE OVER", "REPEAT TO FADE". Within a 5.5 KB budget this is why the music sounds like variations on short cells (sources: s-realdmx-galway-rambo-player, s-realdmx-galway-arkanoid-player, s-realdmx-ocean-dunn-hughes-driver). Fred Gray's Mutants is the extreme: the song is 26 routines, each a section (source: s-realdmx-fredgray-kimmel-whittaker).

The composers said it too (1987–88)#

chris-huelsbeck's advice to magazine readers states the subroutine idea directly: "Man kann Gruppen von Tönen zusammenfassen, das nennt man einen Takt. Diesen kann man beliebig oft wiederholen lassen. Man spart so Speicherplatz"; the bars go "in einem extra Speicher" and are replayed "in beliebiger Reihenfolge und beliebig oft" — store each bar once, sequence it freely (orderlist) (sources: s-64er-rainbow-arts-feature, s-happy-computer-soundprofessor).

Two later statements of what the arrangement is for. chris-huelsbeck ranks it with the melody and above everything technical — "The basics of a good song remain the same: good melody, accompaniment and a strong and interesting arrangement. All other elements like sounds and recording technique are exchangeable" — and describes where a game score's arrangement comes from: "the concept, artwork and in the best case play the game itself … That gives me ideas about mood, speed and character of the music" (source: s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview). jeroen-tel names his best own track as Supremacy "because of its melodic content and its arrangement", says two years of taking notes on Hubbard's "arrangements, techniques, melodies & sounds" is how he learned (tracking-workflow), and states the chip arranger's one advantage over the studio: he would like to be remembered for "composing extremely complex melodies, arrangements using extreme intervals without having to worry that those can't be played by real live musicians" (source: s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel).

Dice as arranger (BLOCK ACID DUB, 2006), and covering from MIDI#

• Frantic's 256-byte tiny-sid-compo entry has no arrangement in the usual sense: a 32-step grid gives each voice step a duration and a pointer to a group of four possible instruments/notes, and a CIA timer read picks one when the step is reached, with "no change" as one option — so "the tune will appear different each time" while its skeleton stays. His justification, borrowed from a dub producer: "one part of the brain follows what is steady in the music, and another part follows that which is fleeting and passing, and therebetween a tension arises" (source: s-sidin11-tiny-sid-2-part-2).
• Reducing a ten-track MIDI to three SID voices: Tognon muted tracks in the sequencer until drum, bass and melody/lead/chords remained, then kept a bars × voices map with the instrument per cell to see the arrangement at a glance (goattracker) (source: s-sidin10-goattracker-2).

Writing the tempo curve (LSDj)#

A cover arranged for the stage, section by section: T commands walk the tempo from 100 up through 142 to 150, on to 180 and back down to 80, one small change per phrase — "each phrase I'll have a new tempo that goes slightly up very organically … this was really painstaking, [but it] really pays off in the end". T can sit in any one channel and still moves the whole song, so when the first tick of a phrase is taken by a groove command he puts the tempo on the second, while noting the first is the right place. Between sections he leaves an empty phrase that sets up the next groove and "puts everything on hold to keep you waiting for what's going to happen next" (source: s-painperdu-03-isometric-sav-walkthrough; the same empty rows earn their keep live — live-tracking).

Related#

orderlist · chord-progressions · rhythm-and-groove · channel-interleaving · melody-writing · tracking-workflow · live-tracking · fake-echo · sidechain-pump

Sources#

s-037-lab · s-sid-wizard-manual · s-lsdj-manual · s-tw074-intro-to-musical-theory · s-tw077-chip-off-the-block · s-tw058-the-finishing-touches · s-tw072-composing-whole-modules · s-tw087-music-theory-a-modern-approach · s-tw015-advanced-tracking-tips-ii · s-tw032-not-so-advanced-tracking-tips · s-tw096-studio-tracking-tips · s-intense-tech-15-lets-mix-it-up-and-down · s-intense-tech-21-whats-new-in-lsdj-92 · s-tw040-interview-blackwolf · s-tw111-interview-khyron · s-tw119-interview-mental-floss · s-realdmx-galway-rambo-player · s-realdmx-galway-arkanoid-player · s-realdmx-ocean-dunn-hughes-driver · s-realdmx-fredgray-kimmel-whittaker · s-sidin11-tiny-sid-2-part-2 · s-sidin10-goattracker-2 · s-64er-rainbow-arts-feature · s-happy-computer-soundprofessor · s-chipmusic-lsdj-live-performance · s-painperdu-05-shortcuts-and-workflow · s-painperdu-04-sidechaining · s-lsdj-and-you-echo-chamber · s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel · s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview · s-sidmusic-galway-interviews · s-remix64-galway-interview · s-painperdu-03-isometric-sav-walkthrough