Our tasks for the last few lessons was to compose our own songs and create arrangements for them, applying what we've learned.
During the lessons we'd listen to student demos and Harry would make comments.
If you have read my previous blogs, you'd probably have guessed we spent a lot of classroom time on getting the chords right.
In my opinion, arranging on the wrong chords is like building on the wrong foundation. In the long run, your time invested in harmony study will pay dividends.
Students have the opportunity to rewrite other's chord assignments, and I must say each person differed in skills, tastes and preferences. In the end some interesting alternative ideas came up, and the harmonic structure of our works were twisted beyond recognition.
Besides harmony, it turned out the students were not equally proficient in musical notation. Most of us can read music but have difficulty in writing. Harry pointed out that notation is one of the essential skills in arrangement. In pop music work, numbered musical notation has many advantages over traditional staff notation.
Before approaching an arrangement, it's best to have decided on the tempo and key signature of the song. The gender of the vocalist chosen also have a big impact on the key and instrumentation.
If you've paid attention in class and deligent with homework, you should be rewarded with the ability to create full-featured arrangements by now :) Some of us has gone beyond the basic instrumentations (piano, guitar, strings, drums & bass) and experimented with ethnic instruments, percussions, loops...
When listening to the demos, some software tools have stood out:
Apple Logic Pro 8 (as an arrangement platform, and bundled instruments)
Propellerhead Reason 4 (as a sound source through ReWire)
Spectrasonics Atmosphere (for my string sounds)
Spectrasonics Stylus RMX (for percussion loops)
Class was too short for Harry to cover topics such as emotional contour and layering in detail.
After our homework is done, we had one last relaxing session on swing arrangement.
Final class photo with producer Harry Ng.
Haha, one of the students has already got published works performed by Elanne 江若琳 and Kary 吳雨霏, do you know who she is?
This concludes my arrangement class! It's been a small but important step (I hope) in in my musical journey.
Arrangement is a huge subject, what's been taught has barely scratched the surface!
邀玥 2009-09-30 21:41
Baron School of Music in Mcdonald Road ?
I have been there to listen 講座
Jeduthun 2009-02-16 22:16
睇完之後...有好多話想話，又覺得講左好似好無謂！
惟有講：「好羨慕！」
流水 2009-01-26 20:11