“Less is more.”
— Robert Browning, "Andrea del Sarto"
In music production, when a song feels incomplete, we add another part.
A second pad goes under the chorus, then a shaker, then a riser, then we layer the hook...3 times.
By the end of the night, the session has more tracks than a Tokyo train station, and the chorus is weaker than it was before.
The Starting Point
Every part we add takes space from the other parts in the song.
Two instruments in the same frequency range blur into one smaller sound instead of one bigger one.
The key parts get louder when we remove something else.
Sometimes the part you need is already in the session.
The Invitation
Before we add anything else, do a Save As... "Minimal Mix", and mute every track except the lead vocal and the drums.
Bring each track back one at a time, and ask yourself if the song is better with it or without it.
If we can't hear what a part adds within a few seconds, leave it muted.
Keep the muted tracks in the session instead of deleting them, so nothing is lost if we change our minds.
The Test
Bounce the full version and the stripped-back version.
Match their loudness, then A/B them at a quiet volume.
Listen for the lead vocal and the hook, and notice which version puts them in front.
If the stripped-back chorus sounds empty, bring back the one part that adds the most, and stop there.
The Guidepost
Every track in a session needs a job to do.
A part with no job still costs us headroom, focus and CPU.
A listener can only follow a few things at once, so give them a few things worth following.
The space between the parts is what lets the hook land.
The Change
Change what we reach for when a section feels weak.
Before we open a new instrument, open the mixer and look for a part we can mute.
Try the verse with fewer parts, so the chorus has somewhere to grow.
Pro Tip: In Ableton Live, select a track you're unsure about and press 0 to toggle it Off/On while the section loops.
The Return
The more often we mute before we add, the faster our songs get finished.
The sessions stay lighter, the mixes take less work, and the hook stays in front.
Each part we keep gets the room to be heard.
During your next arrangement session, instead of asking: “What else can we add?”
Ask: “What can we take out?”
Free Ableton Live Course and Music Production Resources
Song of the Week 🎧
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Listen to how little is going on in this one; finger snaps, a deep bass, a hip hop beat and Lorde's voice, and it's enough.
Lorde wrote the lyrics in half an hour at home in July 2012, and during a school break she and producer Joel Little recorded the song at Golden Age Studios in Auckland in one week.
It spent nine weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and at the 56th Grammy Awards it won Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance.
A great song. Every part left in the session has a job, and the space around the vocal is part of the hook.
YouTube Wisdom of the Week 📚
Essentialism (Greg McKeown, Talks at Google)
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Essentialism — Greg McKeown
McKeown's book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less is about doing less, but better, so we can make our highest contribution. In this talk at Google, he asks if we've ever said yes just to please someone and then resented it, and he lays out what he calls the Way of the Essentialist: getting only the right things done, in the right way, at the right time. In a session, that means choosing the few parts that carry the song and letting the rest go.
Plugin of the Week 🔌
Soothe3 is a dynamic resonance suppressor: it finds harsh resonances on the fly and turns down only those frequencies, only when they show up, so we don't have to notch them out by hand. Soft mode handles most problems transparently, hard mode reacts more to dynamics, and a low-latency mode lets us use it while tracking. Put it on a harsh vocal or a cymbal-heavy drum bus, start in soft mode, and use delta to hear only what it's taking away. It runs as VST3, AU and AAX on Mac and VST3 and AAX on Windows, and it comes with a 20-day trial.
*Brace yourself for the price 👀
Free Plugin of the Week 🆓
Kilohearts Essentials (Kilohearts)
A free collection of over thirty effects, including Filter, 3-Band EQ and Comb Filter, that run as regular plugins in our DAW; it's free with a Kilohearts account. Put Filter on a pad or a doubled part we can't decide on, and sweep its low end out; if the song still works, the part didn't need its full range.
Unsolicited life advice for music makers
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