Week 1 – Introduction And Background

Welcome to my Senior Project Blog! My project is about creating music and arranging already well known and popular songs into new and exciting “avant-garde” music. In today’s blog, I will be detailing the various pop songs that I will be arranging in the coming weeks, and the process that we will go through to arrange these pieces.

Closer By Chainsmokers & Halsey:

This song will be extremely exciting to arrange because of its catchy melody and relatively easy chords and progressions throughout the song. This song is also a duet, which will be interesting to arrange by adding some of our own creativity into the mix as we recreate the song. The primary instruments used in this piece would be piano and drums (subject to change), but it will be interesting to see how we incorporate other instruments into it and what we can create form the template of the song that we are given.

Die For You – Remix By The Weeknd & Ariana Grande:

This song is relatively new so it will be cool to remix a remixed version of an already popular song. Other than that, The Weeknd’s style of music is very versatile which has predominantly helped with his rise to fame. Due to this unique composition style alongside his masterful lyricism, this style of music will be extremely interesting to arrange and play. The main instruments for this will be piano and drums (subjected to change).

Lovely By Billie Eilish & Khalid:

This song in particular I think will be extremely interesting to arrange as well. There are a lot of instruments used in this song so I think it will be a fun one to arrange as well. The melody is relatively unique as well and Billie Eilish’s style is going to make this song super interesting to change and create a new song out of. The main instruments that are used in this song are piano, violin, and drums (subject to change). 

These songs together create an interesting repertoire for this project, and I am excited to see where this will go as we continue to arrange these songs. We are going to create music sheets for the songs that we are performing, so that other people can replicate them if they so choose to. We are going to use some annotation software to create these music sheets, and through this blog, we will provide the thought process and snippets of the songs that we are arranging.

How Does One Arrange A Song?

I have been arranging songs for a relatively long time. I mostly play guitar, so its a little bit different from the arranging that we are going to do here. My arrangements are purely instrumental, so all of the melody, bass, and percussion that you hear in a song is replicated onto guitar. However, for this project, since we have so many different instruments (vocals included), I am going to have to take a different approach to arranging. With my previous arrangements, it was significantly easier to be creative as you were just replicating the song in a new way, which was transforming it into just pure instrumentation. However, for this project, with everything combined together, we have to think a little more abstractly and creatively in order to be creative, which will be more fun for us and interesting to see what we can come up with. 

Overall, I am super excited to continue working on this project in the following weeks, learning and improving my arranging skills while collaborating with other people. I hope you stay tuned to the rest of my project and see where my songs and arrangements go! More to come in the following weeks!