How to Arrange Anything, Step One: Find the Structure

By Anne Sullivan 

Are you ready to try your hand at arranging your favorite song?

Maybe you’ve already tried arranging, and although you’re pleased with the results, you wonder if you could have made your arrangement sound a little more special, more harp-y.

Whether you’ve tried arranging yet or not, this blog post and the next two will cover what you need to do to make your arrangements musical and creative. It’s easier than you might think. Here’s step one: start with the structure.

By the time we hear them, most pieces of music have lots of embellishments, fancy touches that make the music sound interesting. The first task of an arranger is to strip all the extra bits away and find the core structure of the piece. This would mean identifying the melody notes and eliminating all the extras. It also means looking at the basic chords that support the melody. Lastly you will need to look at the form of the piece, how the sections of the piece go together. Look for verses, a chorus or refrain, a bridge, an introduction, a coda. Once you’ve found what is essential to the music, you have a clean slate on which to create your arrangement.

Here’s a pro tip: you can make this process easier by looking for a very easy piano version of the song you want to arrange. These beginner-style arrangements already have much of that work done for you. The arranger has already chosen the melody notes and the basic chords. Of course, you may decide to choose other ones; that’s your privilege as an arranger. Also, the very basic piano version may have left out portions of the song that you want to include, so you may need to add those on your own, or find a slightly more complicated arrangement to guide you. 

Please note that I’m in no way suggesting that you copy anyone else’s arrangement. Looking at other arrangements to use as references is very helpful, though, and it will help you learn to spot the choices other arrangers make, which in turn will help you learn what choices are available to you.