Chapter 7. Getting It All Stacked Up

We're going to be exploring a technique that's really popular in dance music called subtractive arranging. It doesn't quite have the same charm as the techniques with more colorful names like chopped and screwed, or glitch, but it is a main staple of the dance music diet.

Now that we know how to make all of the main ingredients for our electronic music stew, it's time to start putting them all together and building the foundation of our song.

The idea is to create a loop, just like we did before, that has all of our basic ingredients, and then layering more and more parts on top of it, until our loop sounds too busy. When we reach this point, we will simply mute the elements that we just created, and build even more parts on the loop. Once we're done, we are going to have all of the parts that we need for the entire song. Later, in Chapter 8, Spreading Out the Arrangement, we will be discussing how to lay these parts...