ARRANGEMENT

Nothing matters more—It’s gotta work on the dance floor.

(Phil Ross, Commercial DJ)

Arrangement is the art of presenting a musical idea. Great songwriters, composers, bands and producers have long understood that you can have a brilliant melody, an amazing set of drums and instruments, and a mind-blowing vocal performance, but if they are not arranged together in a way that makes sense, it doesn’t work. Music, in particular, has to tell a story. It must follow an arc that presents the elements in their best light, and it has to strike a balance between exposing the listener to each idea and keeping things interesting. The same goes for mashups; you can have two or more pieces of music that absolutely belong together, but if you put them together in the wrong order or ruin the best bits of each, you aren’t doing each element any service. Instead, you will be standing behind the DJ booth scratching your head, wondering why the dance floor is deserted.

Thankfully, the songs we use in mashups already contain the instruments, drums and vocals painstakingly planned out and arranged. So long as we try to preserve the way that the songs want to unfurl themselves, they will do the work of guiding the listener for us. All we have to worry about is what order to place our tracks, and when to transition from one to another.

Pick the first project on your mashup to-do list, open up a new Ableton Live session with your mashup template, and import all your elements, following the steps in the chapter on Live Basics.

Once everything is imported and ready to go, listen through each element and decide how you want to approach your arrangement.

Think clearly about this, ask yourself:

■How do I want my mashup to begin?

■How do I want it to end?

■What big moments can I include here, and how do I build up to them?

■How long should the whole piece be?

■How many breakdowns do I want in this mashup?

■How can I prevent the listener from getting bored?

If, while creating your to-do list, you have already come up with some great ideas for how the music should be arranged, then follow your initial inspiration and simply start putting it together. If not, spend a couple of minutes experimenting!

Experimenting is one of the most enjoyable parts of writing mashups. It teaches you a lot about the potential of what they can do. Try dragging your vocal over a section you didn’t expect it to work over. Try using a part of the vocal that doesn’t seem important. Try cutting up and changing the arrangement of the main track so that it doesn’t do what the audience expects. It is important to have a little ‘play’ with your elements before getting to work, to settle in to them. It will help make sure you’ve found the best potential moments you can. Sometimes the most unexpected ideas announce themselves by accident, giving you the opportunity to present something to your crowd in a way they’ve never heard before.

If you are using only partial sections of a song, such as a small section of vocal from an acapella, make sure you pick the best bit. Take the time to listen through your acapella and pick the most appropriate verse or chorus. If you’re using a classic track that contains two breakdowns but you only intend to use one, pick the best one—or pick half of one and half of the other; whatever best serves the needs of the mashup. Keep in mind that when using a verse from a song, the first verse is generally the best one to choose because people associate this with the start of the song, and are likely to know it better than a second or third verse. For many classic acapellas, choruses near the beginning are sung in a solo voice, whilst choruses at the end are performed with layers of background vocals and ad-lib sections. Figure out which sections are most appropriate in the context of your mashup.

For more ideas on arrangement, find some sets from your favourite DJs, particularly ones who bring great mashups into their sets. Listen closely to which moments work the best, why they work, and what was necessary to build up to them. You will start to pick up ideas, such as how long you need to let one element play for before another is introduced, or how DJs have used editing to extend or shorten their breakdowns, depending on what kind of audience they are playing to or what setting the set is performed in. You’ll get a feel for how far the DJ is willing to pitch-bend a particular element, or how much tempo change they feel comfortable with.

The biggest thing is making sure the mashup doesn’t get boring.

(Ivan Gough, DJ/Producer)

LAYING ELEMENTS TOGETHER

To make any pair of elements feel like they belong together, we need to think back to what we learned in the chapter about theory. First, you must decide what tempo and key your mashup is in. As we’ve learned, the main track(s) carries the most weight in these two decisions. Next, if your elements require any tempo or pitch alteration to become compatible, that’s the second step. Then we know everything is key-compatible and that we’re able to see our musical elements in terms of beats, bars and 8-bar sections.

It’s crucial at this point to get to know your elements. Forget about laying them together for a moment and give them their own space on the timeline, or press the solo button on the Audio Track to listen to one without the other. I like to put my main track at the start of the timeline since the mashup will eventually start with that anyway, and place my break element some distance after it (leave them on their individual Audio Tracks though). Now you can listen to each element on its own.

Analyse—what arrangement does each element conform to? With time, you’ll learn to read it just from looking at the waveforms, but it’s good to listen through anyway, as it will spark ideas. Low end frequencies are represented as big movement in the waveform. So, for dance tracks, usually the thickest/darkest sections are the loudest and have drums or bass-line in them, indicating ‘drop sections’. Breakdowns will look like thinner, lower level sections in the middle with less transient bursts, whilst the thinner sections at the beginning and end are drum intros/outros with modest bass presence.

It’s wise to listen through each element and determine for yourself which sections are which. It’s also a great time to perform some splits in the audio to help you see where each section ends. Create an edit in a clip by clicking on the appropriate point of the clip and splicing (CTRL+E Win, CMD+E Mac).

Figure 8.1 shows a main track that has been split into intro, breaks, drops and outro. Notice how it will make it easy to see which sections to mute or move around. Once you have better understanding of the arrangement of each element you will be able to form a plan of attack for the mashup. The break sections from your breakdown element should now be conveniently split at the section points, so you can simply drag them over to line up with the comparative sections in the main track.

FIGURE 8.1
A Main Track Split According to Sections

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

When learning about rhythm, we discovered that it’s incredibly important to preserve the rhythmic patterns within each piece by lining them up to coincide as much as possible, to keep the ‘illusion’ alive. Think of your elements as actually having very few options in which they can successfully be placed. Line up your 8-bar sections as well as you can, particularly during the bigger, dancing sections. Each time a new element comes in, the listener should not discover that crash cymbals, booms or drum-rolls are hitting where they shouldn’t, or that changes in the music are occurring at odd places. You should easily be able to switch from one to the other and be hearing the same beats, bars and bar groupings continue even while the music changes. Keep that illusion alive, baby!

Figure 8.2 shows a fairly simple mashup from the beginning up to the second ‘drop’. Here’s a little insight into how it’s put together. The two songs used are both dance tracks, so even the breakdown element, which is a remix of a commercial song, is also set up like a dance record. In this case, it’s the breakdowns I wanted to use, but the bonus is that it’s already arranged like a dance track, making the alignment much easier.

FIGURE 8.2
A Simple Mashup Arrangement

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

To show you what I mean, I’ve treated the song as a series of mini-sections, and labelled each with a number. In this example, each one is exactly eight bars long.

1.Section one is simply eight bars of intro of the main track.

2.The breakdown track starts to filter and fade in. I’m using eight bars of its breakdown, so all the rhythm markers align. As the section comes to an end the main track quickly filters out.

3.As I stop playing the main track, the breakdown track has been arranged so that a vocal comes in. It doesn’t seem sudden, because I’ve already been leading up to it in section 2. It feels like a regular breakdown to the audience, who at this point probably have no idea it’s a mashup.

4.I loop a piece of the breakdown so that it sounds like the final note of the melody is being held for another eight bars. Underneath, the build section of the main track comes in, hyping up the audience. At the end of this section, I allow the most final vocal phrase of the chorus to play for one bar.

FIGURE 8.3
A More Complex Arrangement

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

5.I cut out the breakdown track, and the main track (which is kicking in with beats) plays at full volume on its own.

6.The main track follows its natural arrangement and continues for another eight bars. In the last two beats, I drop it out for effect and play a little snippet of the breakdown track vocal, just to remind people of the breakdown, and make it feel more cohesive.

7.Another eight bars of main track, with more frequent snippets of the breakdown over the top to hint to the listener that the break song is coming back in a moment.

8.As promised, we return to the breakdown track. To smooth the sound of the main track stopping, it automates to a big reverb and a delay on the last beat of section 7, so that its sonic flavour echoes into the breakdown, hiding the edit and making it feel like one piece of music. I’ve been hinting toward the vocal so that I can bring it in straight away. Though most of the time it’s better to have a little break from the vocal, the mashup was for quite a commercial club and so I didn’t want to risk going too long without it.

9.The breakdown track actually wants to go into a build section there, but I want my mashup break to go longer, to be different from the first. So I repeat the same eight bars, but on another track I use a duplicate of eight bars of its outro, which is mostly drums, because I need a rhythm pick-up. I use the outro drums from the breakdown track because I know they’ll mix rhythmically and stylistically over the breakdown section. I use a pick-up to prevent the audience from getting bored of the exact 8-bar repeat.

10.I go for the looping vocal idea again, only this time I extend it to be twice as long to create more anticipation before the next drop. Luckily, the producers who put together the main track produced a build that goes for 16 bars as well, so I can just use that rather than having to add elements of my own.

11.The build goes into its second eight. The breakdown track continues looping the vocal but a pitch-bending effect starts creating a rising feeling in the loop so that it doesn’t become boring. At the end, I switch off the pitch bending Device and it is once again allowed to play the most important vocal phrase in full.

12.The anticipation is released as the main track kicks in. Some of the vocal phrase repeats at the end of the eight.

13.Another eight bars of beats. From here it naturally progresses into the main track’s outro.

This may seem complicated when written, but believe it or not, this is quite a simple idea. It pretty much makes use of the arrangement that was already there in the main track, which the producers have put their hard work into making sure progresses properly. The mashup really just replaces its breakdowns with another song, and uses some simple hinting and building techniques to guide the listener through the changes and accept them as one musical piece. It is easy to stay true to the 8-bar sections proposed by each element, because they are both dance tracks. There’s very little risk of the dance floor getting confused because of the even blocks of eight.

As you progress, you’ll discover that there are ways to avoid operating strictly in 8-bar blocks, but it’s something you need to test out carefully with your audiences. The more non-mathematical your mini-sections are, the greater the chance of pushing them away. If you want to sneak in the occasional 4-bar section of instrumental breakdown before the vocal comes in, that has a better chance of working than shortening one of the 8-bar sections of dancing into six bars, for example. Sometimes it can be effective to drop to silence as well, which we’ll cover later in the chapter. A silence between a drop and a break is a good time to cut out bars because the listener’s internal timer is much more inclined to reset without resisting.

Figure 8.3 shows an example of quite a complicated mashup (in terms of rhythm, anyway). Notice that many of the sections are uneven. So much more work had to be done to make things feel right, using techniques described in this chapter. There is a lot more filtering, chopping and help from rhythm loops in this one.

1.  & 2.Both are 8-bar sections of main track intro.

3.The vocal for this commercial track comes in just before the start of an 8-bar section, so if section 4 came directly after section 2, the first few words would be blocked out by the intro, which is loud and busy. So I had to include two bars here to allow the drum to reverb out into the break, and give the audience a little bit of instrumental from the break track.

4.This is where the vocal section technically starts, though a few lyrics have already been sung. The break was very minimalist, creating too much of an energy drop, so I used a little slice of the main track outro to give it a little more drum energy.

5.The vocal continues, but the energy doesn’t increase enough, so I add another loop from the main track, which is from a big loud section, but the bass is filtered out so that it doesn’t kill the ‘breakdown’ feeling.

6.The elements all high-pass filter up a little to create anticipation. After all, the breakdown track wasn’t supposed to feel like a dance track, so it needs a little help. It’s timed out so that the most crucial 8-bar section of vocal plays through here, to give it the best chance of building effectively.

7.Though the mashup could have just kicked into section 8, it really needed the main line of the song dropped in beforehand. It’s so important to the mashup that it surprisingly feels totally fine adding the extra bar. This is one of those times where vocals are so important they can bend the rules a little.

8.–10. Drop section. Off screen, there’s actually lots of little vocal chops adding to the rhythm in 9 and 10.

11.–17.Pretty much a repeat of sections 3–10, only the break is eight bars shorter to keep it exciting, and the second breakdown chorus was exciting enough that it didn’t need that second loop from the main track.

18.& 19.The main track carries on into the outro the way the producer intended.

You can see that when you’re combining a dance element with a non-dance element such as pop or rock, you need to work extra hard because the non-dance track doesn’t automatically follow the same format. You will often have to repeat sections, choose which breaks will actually appear in the mashup or find ways to make the break feel like it’s ‘building up’ to a dance section. You also have to sacrifice big sections of the song to fit it into those small breakdown zones, so you’ll need to make decisions on which sections are most important to the audience.

Importantly, when using an acapella, don’t assume the first lyric is sung on the first beat of the bar. Be sure to keep the phrasing consistent with the original version of the music, or people will get confused trying to follow along with it, or even find that the power of the lyrics is lost. Stardust—’Music Sounds Better With You’—is an example where the vocal starts bang on the first beat of the section. But some music, like the example in the previous arrangement, uses a ‘lead-in’ on the vocal, where the first line actually starts just before the beginning of an 8-bar section. For an example of this listen to Rozalla—’Everybody’s Free’—and hear how the main vocal hook places the word ‘everybody’s’ before the start of the section, on beat three. Other songs occasionally begin their vocal slightly after the first beat, such as the opening verse in ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams, where the first lyric appears halfway through the second beat. If you were to import this vocal in with the first word at the start of a section, the phrasing would be completely ruined, with the emphasis on all the wrong syllables.

Position them in the correct place. So many times I hear people start an acapella on the 1.1.1 but should come in on the 1.1.3 or before the bar starts etc.

(Dave Winnel, DJ/Producer)

This is very tricky for DJs who are new to thinking about music on such a granular level. But if you get lost, listen to the original version of the song, and see if you can find the beat as you listen, identifying whether the vocal begins just before or just after the start of an 8-bar section, and where in the bar it goes. If you’re still having trouble figuring it out, import the full original track into your mashup session, line it up so that it follows the 8-bar sections, then bring the acapella up next to it until it’s playing over the top of itself.

BASIC MASHUP ARRANGEMENTS

Now that we have our elements imported it’s time to really think about how the arrangement of our mashup will play out. With this in mind, there are a few typical song arrangements (also called structures) that always feel right on the dance floor. This is not so much a mashup principle as a general dance music principle. To achieve their intended effect, dance tracks need to feel like they are leading somewhere, and producers have learned not to confuse or disappoint their audiences with structures that don’t respect this.

Mashups are supposed to feel like a single piece of music, and lead the listener on a journey, so the same applies. For this reason, the best way for you to start out is by following this arrangement of the main track in your mashup. Remember, whoever produced it has already worked very hard to ensure it works on a dance floor, so there’s no need to change it up too much. The mashups we just discussed had little chance of failing because they simply stayed true to the arrangement of the main tracks they incorporated.

Arrangement takes a while to get used to. Watch your audience when you play your mashup out and see if they lose interest at any point. If they do, note it down. Later, you can go back to the studio and try something different.

The first few times I play [a new edit], I watch the crowd to see if my arrangement is correct. Quite often I’ll do a song and I’ll see there’s a point that doesn’t work—it sounds right in the studio, but not on the dance floor. What might sound fine in the studio might be biting your ear off on the dance floor.

(Phil Ross, DJ)

Given that most club tracks have at least some combination of an intro, breakdowns, beats (or drop) sections and an outro, we can look at some of the more common modern arrangements visually (see Figure 8.4).

FIGURE 8.4
Typical Dance Music Arrangements

The first thing you probably notice is that none of these arrangements finish with a breakdown before going to the outro. To do this would build excitement and momentum in the breakdown, creating an expectation for an exciting section on the dance floor, but then disappoint the audience by abandoning the song instead and moving on to something else.

The exception to this is when a track drops out the beats during its final beats section and uses a very short ‘break’ section (around eight bars maximum) to give you one last hint of the main theme before moving into the outro. Rather than being a full breakdown, this is more of a strip-back ‘sign-off section’. If it was any longer, the audience would feel that another beats section was coming up, and be disappointed. For an example where this is used to great effect, check out Sebastian Ingrosso & Tommy Trash—’Reload’. Notice how it leads you to the outro rather than winding you up for another big section.

Whilst this is a workable idea in fully produced tracks, I don’t advise inserting it at the end of your own mashups because you will end up with three different songs over the space of 8–16 bars, which will work against the smoothness and subtlety that good mashups are about.

After the intro, whether the mashup begins with a breakdown or a drop will depend on two things: how much ‘breakdown audio’ you have available to you, and the intended length of the mashup.

If you plan out a mashup that is structured ‘intro, breakdown, drop, breakdown, drop, outro’, but you only have one single section of breakdown audio to use, things are going to get very boring for the audience, due to the direct repetition. If you want two breakdowns in your mashup and your breakdown track already has two breaks, or it is a song with two separate verse sections with differing lyrics, you’re in luck. This gives the listener a sense of the journey of the original song. What is not as desirable (but still workable) is a chorus or repeated section of vocal over a slightly different bed of music underneath. Many club tracks already use the same 16 bars of vocal a few times during the song, but they are used over instrument sections that are a little different, and so they are still exciting to the listener each time.

In either case, both scenarios allow you to put two breakdowns in your mashup.

When you will run into trouble is where you attempt to use exactly the same piece of audio for both breakdowns in the mashup, because there is only one breakdown in the song you are taking it from. In this case, it is definitely preferable to start your mashup with a drop, and only have a single breakdown in your whole mashup.

The length of your mashup may also be affected by how safe you feel playing the track. An audience may be willing to listen to a monster-size 8-minute mashup of two songs they know all the words to, but a very unfamiliar mashup may need to be under three minutes long! Additionally, if you’re going to make your mashup short, you should definitely go for the arrangement with two drop sections and a single break in between. As mentioned, avoid the opposite, i.e. two breakdowns and one drop section in the middle. Cutting down the dance parts in the mashup, and depriving them of a big section at the end of the journey will result in people feeling disappointed and walking off your dance floor. Another factor is to consider how your other mashups are arranged. If you make a new batch which all begin with a breakdown, the skeleton of every mashup will be the same. Just like regular dance tracks, some start with breakdowns and some start with drops. You should try and keep some variety, giving you more flexible moments and more varied DJ mixes during your set.

If you want to get really crazy, you can use two different main tracks as your two ‘drop’ sections. This has to be done carefully and tastefully, or the mashup will sound like it’s trying to do too much, and start confusing the audience. Keep it tasteful, don’t do it too often, and only do it when you believe it will really serve the audience. The two main tracks should be cleverly picked out, and arranged in an order that builds the energy rather than stepping it down. Above all, the moment of surprise when the music drops differently has to feel good.

WHEN SHOULD I BRING THIS BIT IN?

One of the biggest hurdles you’ll run into when you begin making mashups is being unsure what to do once you have everything sitting in the session. How do you figure out how to make one of the arrangements we just looked at? How do you decide what’s going to work, or when it’s a good time to bring in a vocal? One way to get started is by finding a mashup from a great DJ that uses the same types of elements. Listen through and see if you can figure out the reasons behind their choices—why did they start the acapella when they did? What tricks or techniques did they use to keep the mashup interesting? Did the mashup give you any hints that the music was about to change? Did it fulfil them?

Another way to learn is to just place an acapella over a track and see what it makes you feel. Does it build with the track? Does it feel strange when the beats drop out but the vocal keeps going, or does it feel good? Does that instrument coming in halfway through the drop clash with the vocal? Maybe I should just use the vocal in the breakdown. The main track already has some vocal samples in it—should I try and edit them out, edit out the acapella under them, put the acapella in a different section, or just chop out this whole part of the instrumental? Mashups are a bit like a puzzle, there are a variety of ways to put one together, but in order to serve one moment you may have to miss out on another. You have many options available to you, so it’s important to think carefully about what the most important moment of your mashup will be, and arrange around that.

If you’re looking at your mashup to-do list, you’ll be able to see the thoughts you wrote down while you listened to the music. If you wrote a specific idea down, it’s a good bet that it was a winner. Ignoring the rest of the arrangement, see if you can get the pieces to work together to create that specific moment. It might only concern the way that it kicks into the main track after the final breakdown, or the part where the vocal or breakdown track is revealed. Try creating it, and once you’ve nailed it, then have a think about how the mashup needs to be arranged in order to get to that point. In fact, see if syncing up that one moment has already laid your elements out in a workable arrangement. You may find that it’s perfect the way it is!

When dealing with a long acapella that contains verses and a chorus, I find I like to bring in the verse over the beats to keep them interesting, then bring the chorus in at the breakdown, timing it so that the most climactic section of vocal occurs over the most hyped breakdown section. In this case, the big moment of the mashup is usually the transition as it goes from the big chorus into the biggest dancing section. In other mashups with short acapellas, I usually find I can bring it in during the breakdown, and carry it through to the big drop section, perhaps with some looping or chopping to keep it more interesting or to better match the energy of the drop. Experiment and see what you can find.

MAKING SURE YOU HAVE ALL THE AUDIO YOU NEED

Let’s briefly look at an obstacle that may come up as you plan out your arrangement. At some point you will come up with a fantastic idea for a moment that requires a piece of audio you don’t have. Examples:

■You need the most important vocal from the breakdown track to appear on its own, but there’s heavy layers of music underneath and you really need to just cut to the vocal on its own in order for your idea to work.

■You have a pop track that has a nice empty verse section, but every time the chorus comes in a bunch of drums and big instruments fill up all the space … but you do remember you once heard a remix of the same song where the producer placed the chorus in a breakdown instead.

■There’s a great synth or guitar riff used in a classic song, but in the recording, there’s a drum fill or vocal in front of it that you wish you could get rid of.

In the first two examples, try looking for alternate versions. This is particularly useful regarding pop music; the genre that is mostly likely to be a) remixed by dance artists, and b) available as an acapella (either through official release or by extracting from a full version). I have been able to make many of my mashups better in those crucial moments by checking to see whether an acapella was available. Having the solo vocal to play with gives you hundreds more options and gives you the greatest chance of achieving the moment you want. It also means that the vocal can appear all throughout your mashup, and not just in the breakdown sections, which is great because it helps ‘glue’ the whole mashup together into a single piece of music.

You can perform edits that cut straight from a full song to its acapella version, so that from the listener’s point of view the instruments effectively ‘drop out’ while having the vocal continue smoothly. If you do this, pay careful attention to the tonal difference. Usually an acapella will be lower in volume and less ‘enhanced’ sounding compared to how the vocal sounds within the fully mastered song. Use your ears and do any volume, EQ or reverb alterations necessary to make the acapella feel the same as it does within the full song. If the vocals match tonally, you can then perform an edit that cuts from the vocal breakdown straight to the acapella on its own, and to the audience it will sound smooth. This is a good trick when you want to place a lot of focus on the vocal for a couple of beats.

If an acapella wasn’t released for the song you’re working with, you may have a way of getting it anyway, which we’ll get to in just a moment.

Regarding the second example, there have been many times where I couldn’t quite get what I needed from a single version, and had to use multiple mixes of the same track and splice them to bits. I’ve particularly found this useful because a lot of dance remixes place the whole acapella (from verse to chorus) in the breakdown. This means there are no drums and no big bass-lines underneath! As long as the remixer has chosen to follow the same key and chord progressions as the original version, this can work brilliantly.

Be aware that different mixes of the same song often sound different, and that when using more than one, you should compensate with EQ. When remixing, dance music producers often add a lot more top end EQ and reverb to a vocal to make it sound more distant than it does in the original mix, so you may have to compensate by pulling back the top end EQ on the dance mix audio, or adding reverb and top end EQ to the original mix. Use your ears to match them however you can.

Lastly, when using two mixes of a single track within a mashup, be careful about instruments dropping out and being replaced by completely different sounding instruments as you switch over. If the difference is too great, it will sound strange to the audience, and you’d be better off finding an alternative solution by changing your arrangement.

When trying to find a single instrument riff, such a as a famous guitar riff or synth melody, do a web search for the ‘stems’ to the song, which can sometimes be available for really big tracks. (Stems are the individual elements of the track split up into separate wav files, prior to being mixed and mastered into the final track. This means you can find the element you want on its own.) It’s a long shot, but stems (or remix parts) are available for songs that have been opened up for remix competitions, which can occasionally happen on big dance labels.

If you have producing or musical experience, you may also be able to recreate the riff yourself! If you are able to do this convincingly, it is an invaluable tool that will make you incredibly flexible, enabling you to create mashups that could not be made by anyone else.

‘DIY’ ACAPELLAS

As discussed in the previous section, sometimes you need a vocal on its own to create the moments you want. But, so many potentially amazing ideas require tracks that aren’t released with an acapella. Though we try to make the best of it by using the full songs as breakdown tracks, sometimes we just wish we could get our hands on the vocal alone. The good news is that with a little luck and work, sometimes we can create our own acapella.

‘Do-it-yourself acapellas’ are the mashup artist’s saviour.

Sometimes a track gets released with both a vocal version and an instrumental in the package. Generally, what this means is that you will have access to two files; one regular version with every element in the song playing, and one that’s exactly the same only with the vocal muted. This gives us the opportunity to try and create a do-it-yourself or ‘DIY’ acapella.

First, let’s discuss the concept of phase cancellation.

As we talked about in the Ableton Live chapter, at any given time the amplitude of an audio signal (which later translates to the position of the speaker cone) is somewhere between completely positive or completely negative. If there is nothing but silence in the signal, the waveform will rest in the middle, neither positively nor negatively charged (and the speaker cone will sit still in its natural position, directly in the middle).

When looking at audio as a waveform, the louder an audio signal is, the more wildly it swings positively (above the middle line) and negatively (below the middle line). It is this constantly swinging signal that Live displays visually to us as a waveform in the audio clip.

If you play two pieces of identical audio at the same time as one another, the peaks will be in sync. When these two identical positive signals combine together at the master channel, it results in a signal twice as positive, and the same for negative. Because the peaks are matching perfectly, the resulting audio signal as we hear it sounds just like one of the signals played with twice the power (+6dB in your DAW). This makes sense, because adding two identical signals together should be the same as just doubling the power of one of them (Figure 8.5).

But, if we ‘invert’ one of the Audio Tracks, we flip the wave around its zero line, converting all of its positive peaks into negative peaks, and vice versa. When one audio signal is combined with another that has an identical but inverted signal, all of the positive wave peaks of one track will be combining with the exact negative peaks of the other, resulting in a completely phase-cancelled, silent piece of audio.

FIGURE 8.5
Two Identical Waveforms Being Added Together

We can use this to our advantage when we know two audio files to be identical, except for one small difference: one doesn’t have a vocal in it. Using the above theory, if we line up the wave peaks exactly, and invert one of the files, all of the audio information common to both signals will cancel out, leaving only a solo vocal, with almost or absolute silence behind it (Figure 8.6).

FIGURE 8.6
Two Identical Waveforms, One Inverted, Being Added Together

We can create this phenomenon ourselves by creating a new Live session especially for the task. Import the vocal and instrumental versions of one song, placing them on neighbouring Audio Tracks. Don’t perform any Warping on the audio; make sure to turn Warping off on both clips. Concentrate on creating the best isolated acapella you can; worry about how it will fit into your mashup later. First, find out the tempo of the song (you can use the Warping function to help you, but make sure you turn it back off afterwards) and set your session to this tempo to assist you in making edits later, if necessary. Zoom right in and make sure the peaks between the two tracks line up exactly—don’t assume the original and instrumental mixes have the same amount of silence at the start (Figure 8.7). To drag the audio around freely on the grid, go to Options and turn off ‘Snap to Grid’.

FIGURE 8.7
Lining up the Original and Instrumental Versions

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

Use the beginning of the tracks to sync them if you can. However, if the tracks don’t begin with drums, it will be easier to use a later section where there are easily identifiable transients such as kicks and snares. Bring the two Audio Tracks down to –6dB so that the audio won’t clip at the master. Then, to invert the audio signal on one track, place a Utility on the Device Chain for the instrumental version of the track, and enable both ‘Phz-L’ and ‘Phz-R’. Have a listen through. If the versions are truly identical except for the vocal, there should be little or no music or drums behind the vocal. Now that you’re able to hear what the phase cancellation is doing, you can subtly move the instrumental track around and hear where the best spot for cancellation is. Sometimes one element will sound more cancelled at a certain sync point, but another starts to creep through. This is ok, just find the best balance you can. I suggest using headphones for this part, as tiny sounds and high-frequency bleed-through can escape your attention on speakers.

Be aware that even the final master of a song can sometimes drift, and you will need to listen through and make sure the tracks line up all the way. If they don’t, create small splices in one of the tracks where the peaks start to go out of sync and shift it manually back into sync. Try to time your edit points between lyrics, because any sections without vocal can just be muted later. Also bear in mind that instrumental versions are often 8–16 bars shorter than the original song, edited down so as not to get boring (Figure 8.8). If so, you will need to listen through and figure out which sections have been removed from the instrumental so that you can splice and move the clips accordingly, and make sure the right sections sync up. This is a good reason to have your session and grid set to the song’s tempo.

Do the best you can to make sure the instrumental elements phase-cancel as well as possible, but don’t stress out if your DIY acapella is not pretty. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just usable. We’re really at the mercy of what process the producer went through when exporting their song. Anything created via random fluctuations, such as the oscillation of synths, white-noise generator effects or the random scattering of reverbs will differ between versions unless they were rendered at some point during production. Such sounds will not sync up peak-for-peak between versions, and you may hear some drifting noise or effects sounds in the background of your finished DIY acapella. There’s nothing we can do about that. Although quite ugly when heard on their own, these little musical ghosts are usually not a problem in mashups. The producer has timed white noise effects to occur at the same points we want them to anyway, and extra reverb and synth noise will at least be in key with the rest of your mashup. Even a tiny bit of drum information leaking through can be ok, because you’ll be making sure the vocal is in rhythmical sync anyway.

FIGURE 8.8
Instrumental Versions Can Sometimes be Shorter

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

After you have decided your acapella is as isolated as you’re going to get it, get to work on cleaning it up. First, you need to use muting and fading to completely silence the parts of the acapella that aren’t useful to you. I often render what I have at this point so that I can work on a single wav clip, but I suggest you use Track Volume automation on the master channel, in case you find little sync issues you need to go back and change (Figure 8.9). Use the automation to completely silence long sections between vocal sections, and to perform little fades in or out of vocals to help hide those little musical ghosts as lyrics taper off.

Next, use EQ to clean up the vocal and hide anything around it. It is important only to use EQ on the master channel: on the combined signal. If you use EQ on one of your individual tracks, it will actually change the phase relationships and push the peaks around, causing the two tracks to come back out of sync. Select a section of vocal where they are singing at their lowest pitches, usually a verse, and loop it (CTRL+L, CMD+L). Create an EQ plugin on the master channel, setting up a high-pass filter with a subtle roll-off or Q. While playing, start from the lowest frequency and slowly pull it up until you notice the bottom end start to disappear in the vocal. For males, this can occur somewhere between 70 and 100Hz, depending on the range of the vocal. It is usually higher for female vocals. Once you hear the bottom end start to disappear, back it off by about 25 percent; i.e. if you hear the vocal being affected at 100Hz, back your filter off to 75Hz to be safe. This should take care of any thuddy remainder of the kick drum and bass, as well as unnoticeable low-end audio problems as a result of the phase-cancel process. Be conservative, you can always add a more severe filter when you’re working on your mashup.

FIGURE 8.9
Using Volume Automation on the Master Track to Clean Up

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

If there is a little bit of high-hat noise spilling through, you can try the same thing using a low-pass filter up the top. Bring it down from the highest frequencies to see whether you can eliminate some of the hats. But be very careful, it’s much more important to keep the sibilance intact for lyrical clarity than it is to silence drum spill. Acapellas are useless if you can’t actually hear the lyrics. If in doubt, don’t alter the top-end at all. If you think any additional EQ band changes around the middle can help clean up the vocal, go for it. There may be a snare or high-hat poking through that you can use a very surgical notch EQ to pull out. Just be sparing with them, because they’re likely to negatively affect the vocal.

Lastly, add an additional Device or plug-in that has mid-side functionality. Waves ‘Center’ is a good one, but many EQs will also provide this control. EQ Eight does, so feel free to use that. In this instance of the Device, we’ll switch the Mode from stereo to M/S (mid-side). When set to the default stereo mode, any EQ change applies an identical change to both the left and right channels of audio. Setting it to L/R mode allows you to make independent changes between the left and right channel, for instance pulling out a frequency on the left side, but leaving the right as is. Similarly, mid-side mode allows you to independently control two channels of audio—everything that is common to the centre of the stereo field, and then everything that sits at the sides of the stereo field (audio not common to both sides). The plugin performs a conversion to work on the audio in this way, and re-converts it to stereo at the end, so that the signal sounds normal to us. The reason we want to process the audio in this way is that the vocal almost always sits directly in the centre of a stereo mix. Remember those elements we always have problems with during phase-cancellation? White noise, reverbs and synths—they are almost always spread out across the stereo field. Using mid-side processing, we can make changes to (and hopefully eliminate) these elements while leaving the vocal relatively untouched.

First, pull out absolutely everything on the side to see whether this improves the clarity on the vocal. If, like EQ Eight, your EQ doesn’t have a volume control for each channel, do this by selecting ‘S’ or selecting ‘side’ mode, then setting up a high-pass filter and literally setting the frequency to the highest setting (Figure 8.10). If you play your audio, you should feel all the stereo information get sucked out of the music, leaving you with audio that sounds like its coming from directly in front of you.

This may be all you need to produce a noticeable change in the acapella, dropping out a lot of the extraneous musical ghosts. If you find that the vocal itself suffers a lot, it may be because the vocal is double-tracked (recorded twice, each version panned slightly to the side). If this is the case, you will have to settle for pulling out perhaps 50 percent of the side signal. If your EQ doesn’t have a volume controller, change your high-pass to the low-shelf setting and, starting at 0 gain, pull it down until you find a good balance between the instruments disappearing and the vocal starting to lose its integrity (Figure 8.11).

FIGURE 8.10
Using EQ Eight to Eliminate ‘Side’ Information

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

FIGURE 8.11
Using EQ Eight to Partially Attenuate the Sides

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

Listen through the whole acapella at this stage to see whether any sections have slipped through the net. Switch between using headphones and speakers, to make sure you hear detail in the headphones and low-frequency problems on the speakers. In the Device Chain, make sure there is a limiter at the end. Just use the same limiter and settings you would use for your mashup template. Make up the 6dB loss we began with, either with a utility plugin before a Limiter Device, or within the limiter Device itself.

To finish up, go to options and re-enable ‘Snap to Grid’. Create a selection on the timeline (on any track) to define the area you want to export, and render your new DIY acapella to a wav file of its own, where it can be used in mashup sessions later on (see the section on exporting at the end of Chapter 9). Ensure that you begin on a bar that makes sense, to make things easier for yourself when you import it later. If there is a lead-in to the first lyric, you can even provide a whole eight bars of silence beforehand, just to be safe. When you export it, make sure you specify in the file name that it’s a DIY, to warn yourself to listen out for those effects, floaty background noise or the subtle remains of drum loops. You should know the tempo of the vocal now, so include this in the file name too, to save you having to figure it out every time you use the acapella from here on.

This method can get you the acapellas for some seriously good songs, and really open up your options for creating great mashups. It’s unfortunate, but less and less music is released with acapellas and even instrumentals these days. It used to be standard for dance tracks to be released as an Extended Mix, Original (or radio-style) Mix, and an Instrumental Mix. With this in mind it becomes more and more necessary to try and create acapellas without the aid of an instrumental.

Though they won’t usually sound very good on their own, some DJs make very usable DIY acapellas even when there is no instrumental track to phase-cancel with.

There are two ways to go about this, and both use the techniques explained above.

First, if you are trying to grab an acapella from an electronic-based track with plenty of repetition, you may be able to use the above method exactly. Instead of placing an instrumental version on the phase-flipped Audio Track, you simply place a section of the original that has no vocal over it. You use the same syncing method to line it up with a section of the music that does have vocal in it, and see what cancels. If the two sections are instrumentally similar enough, you might be able to get a passable cancellation. At the very least, the drums will usually cancel nicely, perhaps leaving a layer of high-hat, ride cymbal or a small layering synth, which is not a big deal. You’ll have to do a lot of chopping and changing to find out which parts phase-cancel the best, which is why it’s important to have the grid correct in relation to the song.

Sadly, this technique requires the music underneath to be very simplistic, repetitive and to contain lots of instrumental section. Many tracks simply aren’t set up that way anymore; instead they using short, ever-changing sections to keep audiences interested. The biggest obstacles are changes in the musical elements as the song progresses, such as fluctuating chord movements and constantly varying melody lines. These will not cancel when sampled from different sections, instead summing to create multiple musical lines smashed together and becoming twice as noticeable as they were before. But it’s worth a try, if the acapella is seriously desirable. It’s a little more likely to work in either older tracks or drawn-out styles such as house music, which will often only use a short 8-bar phrase of vocal. The changes in this style of music are also so patiently spread out across the track that the addition of a vocal is likely to be the only change in that particular 8-bar phrase. This means it will cancel beautifully!

The second, absolute last-resort method is to literally apply processing to the track without using any phase-cancellation. This pretty much never gives you an acapella of the quality needed to do remixing with, but if it’s used in the right context, it can just barely scrape across the line in terms of mashup usability.

For this method, you just import your song and begin by using the EQ and mid-side processes you learned just now. You’ll depend very heavily on your mid-side processing for this. Many DIY acapella creators also use volume automation, or even complex plug-ins for automatically muting audio below a certain volume (called noise gates) to pull the volume down in the small gaps between vocals. This is a tricky one though. I believe that it often is more trouble than it’s worth, as the listener will hear strange foreign instruments launch into awareness every time the vocalist sings something, before disappearing just as suddenly. This draws even more attention and causes even more distraction! In cases such as this, it’s usually best to leave the extraneous instruments running at a constant level, and to only use the acapella in mashups with tracks that can effectively obscure those instruments. One example that comes to mind is the acapella for ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’ by The Chemical Brothers. There was a DIY acapella floating around online that I was always tempted to use, but the filtering and gating that had been necessary to hide the drum loop and instruments was so devastating to the vocal that it sounded like someone murmuring through a telephone line, as well as lurching the backing track in and out each time the vocal played. Instead, it was better to wait for a mashup idea where the instrument and drum loop would match the vibe in the mashup, so that I could use a less demolished version and allow the audience to hear the lyrics in perfect clarity. If in doubt, resist the urge to filter or mute too harshly at this stage, because you can always do more of it later, on a mashup-by-mashup basis.

Regardless of which method was required to produce your acapella, after you have exported it, you can still try one more technique to get those last remaining ghosts out of the audio. You must always make this the last thing you do though, otherwise it can prevent the other techniques from working. For many years now, the more specialist DAWs and audio manipulation programs have provided noise reduction processors in order to reduce hiss on old recordings. On forensic-investigation-themed television shows, this is how they remove the sound of passing cars from CCTV recordings to hear the murder victim’s final words! They work by feeding the noise-reduction processor a sample of the noise on its own, so that it can build a profile of the frequencies that make it up. It then reduces those frequencies across the whole recording in an attempt to remove the noise.

For a free plugin that does the job, look no further than the Cockos plugin, ReaFir. Designed for their DAW ‘Reaper’, it is available free from www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/ and works as a noise-reduction processor when set to ‘subtract’ mode. For paid options, ‘denoise’ in iZotope’s ‘RX’ or ‘noise reduction’ in Adobe’s Audition are great options. Select the largest section of the music that you can find that has no vocals, but all of the left-over noise and ghosts that you don’t want. Then open up the noise-reduction process and tell it to ‘learn’ the noise profile you have selected.

Then select a short section where the vocal plays and experiment with the settings, previewing each time. Too much noise reduction will reduce the frequencies it interprets as ‘noise’ so much that it will affect your vocal, usually resulting in dulling and a strange morphing feeling in the vocal. Back it off to an acceptable level. Also, play around with frequency settings, if there are any. Reducing the noise reduction in frequency sections where the process is doing too much damage, such as the top end, can rescue the lyrics. As you’ll hear, the processor faces a pretty tough job trying to reduce the noise without killing the vocal, because the human voice covers so much of the frequency spectrum. But a little bit of it can help. You’ll generally get much better results if you were able to phase-cancel away much of the instrumental first. Once you’ve found your desired balance, extend your selection to the whole file and process it. Listen through closely, and if you’re happy—export it.

Lastly, I want to stress that you shouldn’t feel disheartened about the lack of acapellas available today. Though they have been a great mashup tool in the past, you can still take advantage of a great vocal simply by using the song as a breakdown track, and by utilising smart arrangement to put the vocal in the places you want.

GENERAL TIPS ON ARRANGEMENT

Before we go into specific techniques, here are some general tips for the arrangement of your mashups. These kinds of ideas will eventually come automatically to you, so don’t stress about memorising each one!

■Remember to use space and avoid two new elements coming in at once. Let the audience get used to one before you bring in another. For example, if you’ve just transitioned to a breakdown, try to let it play for 4–8 bars before bringing in a vocal. If you’ve just transitioned into a drop, let the audience get used to it before you bring in a vocal or something else.

■Related to the above idea, try specifically not to bring in a vocal right at the beginning of a break or drop. A vocal is usually an important element and requires the audience’s full attention. So again, they need time to feel the new breakdown or kick-in before they’re ready to focus their ears on lyrics.

■More often than not, you need to use a reverse reverb to bring in a vocal, to help the ear compensate for the fact that the vocal does not naturally occur over the song beneath it. More on this technique later.

■If you decide to have two breakdowns in your mashup that both use the same ‘break track’, make the second break interesting, don’t just repeat the first. If the two breaks are too similar, do something special in the second break, like introducing a vocal towards the end, or including a drum loop over the break. You can make it eight bars longer, or eight bars shorter. Play with the expectations of the audience. Try to have it transition back to the main track in a slightly different way. Better yet, if you’re using an acapella, avoid using it over the first breakdown’s build-up, holding it off until the second break’s build to really bring it home.

■For mashups that use a vocal, try and use the most catchy or well-known hook just before the main track kicks back in. Even if this means dropping out some or all of the elements behind it to bring focus to it.

■You may choose not to use some sections of a vocal, either to fit it in to a short section or prevent the mashup from becoming boring. If you do this, be careful to listen to the lyrics and make sure they still make sense. It’s easy to get caught up in how your mashup is working and forget about the story behind the vocal. In some songs, the chorus is the most important or well-known section. In others, it’s the opening verse.

■Always be careful how much you crowd into a mashup at once. If you try to play multiple elements together that are too full, you can create trouble. Try to avoid it sounding messy, or the audience will get confused about what to listen to. If in doubt, less is more.

■If you want to put a lot of focus on a short section of vocal (from one beat up to one bar long) try muting or high-pass filtering away the main track underneath it momentarily. This works well when using a short vocal hook during a main-track section, and you want to draw attention to the vocal without the beats and bass-line trampling all over it.

■If you find you need more energy in the final section of your mashup, gradually pull the master volume down around 1dB during the build-up, then slam it back up to full—right when the main track comes back in. It is only a subtle change when listening in your studio but it makes a difference when heard live.

■Listen to the mashups in sets from your favourite DJs. Write down everything that happens as it plays through your speakers. This will teach you so much about good mashup arrangement.

■Lastly, experiment!

EDITING INTROS

Mashups and re-edits help to keep interest in a culture that is growing more and more used to a quick turnover of music.

(Phil Ross, Commercial DJ)

Once you feel you have come up with the best arrangement plan for your mashup, start putting everything in place.

You can either start from the most important moment of your mashup, or you can start from the beginning of the first element. If you’re working on the first section of your mashup, it will generally be your main track intro, unless you’re starting with something unusual such as a set intro or something you don’t need to mix into. While you have the audio in front of you, this is a great opportunity to edit your intro to a more desirable length. Your reason for doing this is that songs from different styles and eras conform to different standards. For instance, more underground styles such as tech house or extended mixes from the 90s are more likely to utilise an intro of 32 bars or more, equating to over a minute of music. On the other hand, more commercial and fast-paced styles such as subgenres of electro can use intros as short as 8 or 16 bars, particularly styles where the producer anticipates that the DJ will employ a fast turnover of music. As dance music audiences get more used to fast paced sets, DJs find they have to mix between songs quickly, so intros are getting shorter all the time.

Given that sets are more rapid than ever before, many DJs like to be able to pick and mix a track very quickly during a set, and shorten the intros on all their music to 16 bars (around 30 seconds at 128 BPM). Other DJs like to extend theirs out to 60 seconds or more so that they can do more creative mixing and let the audience enjoy the transition. As long as you keep your intro length to a multiple of eight bars to make sure you can still bring it in at the right moment, you can shorten or extend it to however long you like, depending on your style as a DJ. If you need to extend it out, try and time your ‘pickup’ moments to points that make sense. For instance, if you are extending a 16-bar intro to be a 32-bar intro, don’t give the audience eight bars of low energy, followed by 24 bars of higher energy; give them 16 bars of each. Listen closely to the elements within the production. If the track uses building effects such as snare rolls and white noise risers to build to the end of their intro, it is going to sound strange when you repeat that 8-bar section. The audience willfeel like the track is about to drop in, then suddenly go back to a smaller energy and build up all over again. In a case like this, it actually is better to repeat the first eight bars three times, and only then allow the intro to continue to the building section, while using your own build effects and elements to try and aid the build through the first 24 bars. You’re going to have to use your ears constantly to make sure you don’t create any jarring surprises for the audience.

On the other hand, if you are shortening a 32-bar intro to be 16 bars, you need to be careful which 8-bar sections you choose to remove. If you pick the wrong one, you’ll end up with massive jumps in energy, which will sound disjointed and confusing to an audience. Sometimes, the rise in intro energy is so constant and gradual that there is no 8-bar section you can remove without causing problems. In this case you can either remove your 8-bar sections from the very start of the track, leaving the later section intact, or you can perform a fade.

Using a fade to smoothly skip an 8 or 16 bar section can be very useful, but you have to make sure you get it right. First, you must only perform it on audio that is not Warped. You do it by selecting 16 bars of audio, splitting it into two clips, and performing a gradual fade so that over the course of eight bars, the audio fades from the first clip to the second, effectively covering 16 bars of the track’s original energy build, but having it occur in the space of eight bars. You’ll need to splice your intro in the middle of the 16 bars, and move one of the clips to a second Audio Track. Shift your clips so that the sections that must overlap are doing so. See Figure 8.12.

FIGURE 8.12
Overlapping 8-Bar Sections to Shorten an Intro

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

Zoom right in to make sure all of your beats match up exactly. This is hugely important, because if they don’t match up sample for sample, the result will be a washy, flanging effect as the two almost identical pieces of audio play ever so slightly out of sync (Figure 8.13). This is why you cannot use Warped audio, or the peaks will drift around and you will hear flanging and flamming. Hold Alt (Win), CMD (Mac) to bypass Snapping to Grid, allowing you to freely drag the clip on the arrangement page.

Activate the Mixer > Track Volume automation lanes on both tracks. During this intro section, if only one clip is playing at a time, you want it to play at 100 percent of its natural volume, which is 0.00dB on the volume fader/automation point. When there are two clips of the same song playing at once, you need to bring one or both of them down in volume, otherwise the elements common to both clips (usually your drums) will playback twice as loud, or +6dB compared to one playing by itself. The limiter will not like this, and while trying to squash this excessive audio down to an acceptable level, the music will crack up and sound bad.

Try to have one of the Audio Tracks playing at –3dB automated level, or settle for a compromise and have both Audio Tracks playing at around -2dB. If one of the clips is a section that doesn’t have as many drums in it (usually the very end of the intro) you can allow more of it in. As always, use your ears. You want to listen for a good balance between the two audio streams, but also listen for any uncomfortable drops in volume. The aim is to be so smooth with your fade that the audience doesn’t know eight bars have been bypassed. If you hear any squashing and distortion, alter your automation to make it comfortable. Figure 8.14 shows an example where an intro of four 8-bar sections is reduced down to two 8-bar sections by fading from the second 8 to the fourth 8, and completely skipping the third 8.

FIGURE 8.13
Lining Up the Peaks

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

Have a close look at Figure 8.14. The final bar of the second 8 is also completely muted to make sure there’s no drums left underneath the vocal that appears in the last bar of the intro. When editing an intro like this, be aware of any special moments in the intro of the song you’re using. If you’re performing a fade between two clips, but one of them intentionally drops out all the drums and effects one bar before the kick-in, you don’t want any lingering audio coming from the other clip, so splice it at the same time the other clip drops its drums, and delete/mute it. If the producer has intentionally dropped out the drums before everything kicks in, you don’t want to destroy the effect.

FIGURE 8.14
4-Bar Sections Being Shortened to 2 with Splicing and Crossfading

Screenshot Appears Courtesy of Ableton

Sometimes you will need to silence a clip in this way just for the space of one single beat. Big room tracks often place a giant snare sample on the last beat before a kick-in, and cut out everything behind it. House tracks often provide a half-bar or full-bar of drum-fill with nothing behind it. Similar to the previous example, you need to preserve that effect and make sure there’s no smaller drums or residual effects hanging around in the background coming from a second fading clip.

If you wish, you can use all of the above techniques for editing and altering the length of outros as well. If you need to extend a track with a very short outro (eight bars) it is often quite difficult. Sometimes, you can just repeat a single bar rather than a whole 8-bar section, and duplicate it out to create your own 8-bar section. Usually this works best if there are no effects sounds in the outro, but just simple drums. Finally, if you need to extend an incredibly short outro, see if there’s eight bars or a single 1-bar loop in the intro which you can copy to the end. As long as it goes smoothly from one to the other, it’s fine. Much of the time, the intro and outro of a song are made up of almost the same simplified elements. Just use your ears and make sure it doesn’t sound like anything new is coming in during your borrowed section, or this will confuse you and the audience when you’re mixing from this track into another during your set.