Find a track you like that's within the genre you're aiming for and break things down as I have.

This will help you quickly get super familiar with how a track breathes and evolves taking the listener on a journey.

This exercise should take no more than 1 hour, feel free to work in blocks of 25 minutes, then a 5 minute break.

You should be fine to do this on your own but it's totally OK if you want to watch me go through the process.

In the next video I'll make an Ableton file so you can see how the parts fit into this song. Prowler is more banging techno with fairly consistent energy levels.

So basically if I'm doing a track with similar energy I can take my idea and fit it into the Prowler Template.

By using these templates you don't have to think about or figure out where your break downs will be, how long, or where to place them in the tune. Same for the intro, outro, and other parts.

After this you'll watch me take an 8 bar idea and fully arrange it using the methods you're learning here. This method saves you from trial and error!

These videos where you watch me are here more for beginners and or those who want the extra detail.

A Few Things to Keep In Mind About This Process

This is how you quickly get 80% of an arrangement done. So you don't have to think about the length and placement of breaks, drops, intros, and outtros.

This process will very much help you with the overall structure of your track. It's not magic and a little effort will be required as it's very likely that your track won't be a 100% match to the one you're modeling. For example, if I use C. SMith's Explanation, his tune doesn't have any low toms or percussive elements and my track does, I'll have to figure out where to place the toms in my track that are not in his.

But because we've studied his track, and know where energy increases, and decreases, we can use that as our guide. Remember less is more. So if I have those toms, I'm not going have them play throughout my entire song, that would be too frequent, too much, too repetitive. In stead I'll look to place them in parts where I want to build energy, and not use them when I'm looking to subtract excitement from the track.

Here's track I'm starting with. You can hear the individual tracks and some processing used like tape saturation. I'm a fan of the UAD Studer for that. UAD is $$$ you may want to consider Slate Digital's Subscription Model as you can get 1 year of everything Slate for far less than UAD.

***The worst thing you can do right now is get distracted playing with all sorts of plugins***

Resist the urge to be a gear slut! Linking to Slate because their stuff is well reviewed and the subscription model is a good move on their part. I use UAD, because I have a 2011 iMac. I chose to invest in UAD because their cards run the plugins, not my aging iMac.

Keep in mind stock plugins should be fine for now IF you're working with good source material. Remember this is not the mixing phase, we're just using sounds that are mixed/recording "Good Enough For Now."

So if you have some side chain compression or any other subtle processing on your bass so that it works well with your kick, export your tracks with the little bit of processing. When you arrange you don't want to be fussing w/ EQ, or levels or anything to do with mixing.

In my example, I have some guitar licks that have some delay and reverb, I'm bouncing those files with the effects because those are part of how it should sound. I also hi passed the tom samples a lot as to not muddy the low end. I'm committing that file as it is with the hi pass filtering.

Any bit of processing I've done to achieve a decent mix will stay - later you'll see me make more enhancements.