The Track Mute Arrangement Technique

Anyone else do this?

I usually have a single 8 or 16 bar sequence with anywhere from 6-16 tracks. To arrange, I simply record from the stereo-outs into a computer (or another sampler or whatever) while I build the song by muting/unmuting the different tracks, on-the-fly.

It's important to arrange the tracks on the track-mute grid in a meaningful way, and labeling everything helps me too.

I find this technique gives me the best results since I'm basically arranging the song based on intuition/feeling. I don't over-think it, which tends to happen if I track everything out and use a DAW. Another cool byproduct is the accidental combination of certain tracks that weren't necessarily meant to play together.

There are a few downsides:
1. You don't have much flexibility in terms of mixing/effects on each individual track. This hasnt bothered me much until recently. Now I'm experimenting building the initial version of a song using this track mute technique, and then tracking everything out and rebuilding it in a DAW.

2. Sometimes 16 tracks isn't enough for what I want to do. When this is the case I will just make another sequence, carry over only the tracks that I still need for the "B-section" and then add whatever in the new free space.

I do this a lot. You can even have a differnt song available on other banks, and build transitions by muting bits of the outgoing song and unmuting bits of the incoming one.

A similar trick is to have a shorter loop length, like 1 or 2 bars, and implement variations of your track, for example, the hihat pattern for the bar, and a hihat pattern with opening hats or some fill/variation to play at the end of a section. Then allow the first track to loop as long as you want (15 bars?) and then mute it and unmute the variation track for one bar. So your sequence and loops are all 1 bar, but you just made a 16 bar phrase with it on the fly.. For extra bonus points, your variation track can have track mute events at the end which mute the variation and go back to the loopy track. This lets you throw in variations where you want, without being locked to the sequence length.

These kinds of arrangement tricks are very common for LivePA work (playing full live sets, especially with hardware).

that's basically how i roll all the time.

wtf is song mode?

the suggestion about shorter length fills (looping as much as possible) is a good one.

you end up basically with phrases assigned to pads you can then use to recreate an infinite number of new phrases by combining bits from the others.