If you make electronic music, you’ve probably been there: you’ve got a nice little 8-bar loop going, but you’ve had it on repeat for what feels like hours, fruitlessly tweaking with no clue where to go next.
The process of arrangement – structuring your loops, sketches and ideas into fully-fledged tracks – is one of the most difficult stages of finishing a song, and it’s something that even the most talented artists struggle with.
If that sounds familiar, music education company Color With Live has something that might help. Stencils are empty, colour-coded arrangement maps for Ableton Live based on existing tracks that the company describes as “like a colouring book for Ableton”.
Open up a Stencil in Live and you have a proven structure to work with while writing your own track: all you need to do is fill it with your own material, and the arrangement takes care of itself.
Every element of a song’s structure is mapped out in detail, from builds and drops through to fills and breakdowns. You provide the melodies and chords, the sound design and the effects, but the Stencil helps you mould this material into a coherent layout based on a track that you love.
Color With Live is keen to emphasize that a Stencil is not a recreation of a song or a way to copy another artist’s work. The raw materials are stripped out and what’s left is the structure, a template that you can use to create something that’s entirely your own.
Color With Live recently released a free Stencil Pack that features the arrangements behind Flip It by Levity, Fisher’s rework of World Hold On by Bob Sinclair and Dimension’s Once In A Lifetime.
Also on offer are more than 250 paid Stencils based on songs from artists like Four Tet, Fred Again, Calvin Harris, DJ Seinfeld, Metro Boomin, Skrillex and many more. Each Stencil is priced at £8, and there are discounted bundles available if you want to buy more.
The folks over at Color With Live are a generous bunch: they also have a number of free Ableton Racks available on their site, and a free Extension that can be used to save and organize YouTube tutorials in Live.
"We realized one of the biggest pain points in learning production is arrangement. The advice is always to pick apart your reference tracks, but there's nothing visual to check your work," Color With Live’s co-founder Kevin Rea said in a press release.
"Repetition is what makes learning click. Producers download Serum packs to practice sound design and MIDI packs to practice music theory. We were blown away that nothing like that existed for arrangement. Our mission isn’t for our stencil to be a crutch that you rely on for every song, instead something that you can learn from and then apply to future productions.”
Head over to Color With Live’s website to download the free Stencil Pack.
