By
ONE
Mon Aug 22, 2005 7:04 pm
Nah...I don't have a certain way. It's better not to so you have some variation in your work. Some cats arrange their tracks the same all the time and it gets boring. Just experiment with the song. When it's a just a beat, to me personally, it doesn't matter too much how it's arranged, but I think it's just a good idea that you set up things in your MPC so you are flexible with your tracks when doing vocals and such later on. The arrangement will come from the song and the MC. You will need to do what is best for the overall product.
Unless you want to do some DJ Shadow / RJD2 / Prefuse 73 type of stuff and make your stuff on the instrumental steez then again I wouldn't worry too much about having a specific song structure from track to track...it will get boring.
But a traditional song structure will go like this:
2-4 bar intro sequence.
16 bars for verse. you can break this up into several 2, 4, or 8 bar smaller sequences for variation
then a 2-8 bar hook. 4 bar hook is good.
then verse, hook, verse, hook
then a 2-4 bar outro (MC's like to talk shit at the end of their songs haha)
And that's pretty much it. Just an outline to get you started.