Here we’ll look at building a basic 4/4 dance track (the theory still holds for any genre though) using some audio samples and MIDI files from dancemidisamples.com.

Your starting point should of course be a blank song in your sequencer, and from here we’ll start to layer up our basic percussion sounds in an 8 bar loop.

One top tip while we’re getting started: listen to the style of music that you’re aiming to create exhaustively and try to get a feel for the types of sounds your favourite producers use, and then compare your own choices. Getting the right sounds can make the difference between your track smacking through speaker cones across the country’s dance floors or the CD becoming a coaster on an A&R man’s desk, regardless of how good the musical content is.

Once we’re happy with our percussion sounds it’s time for Bass. At this stage choose your favourite plugin synth and have a flick through some bass patches. Once we’ve found our basic sound it’s time to jam! For simplicities sake we’ve dragged-and-dropped a bass line MIDI file from a DMS pack into our arrangement. Once you’ve decided on your pattern it’s time to tweak that sound to your preference, try altering filter settings or adding distortion effects to liven up your bass sound.

It’s too easy to jump the gun at this early stage and start to arrange our sounds as they would be in a finished track, but resist this temptation! We don’t want to end up with five minutes of beautifully arranged percussion and nothing else.

With this in mind continue to build up your track until you’ve got a complete section, say an introduction part to the track. Next it’s time to start a new loop, this will be the lead part to our track. Again we’ve added a lead synthesiser MIDI file on top of our percussion and bass line.

Repeat this process until you’ve got loops of the main parts of your track. This loop based approach saves time, and will allow you to gather some idea of how the different parts of your track will interact once you arrange them. Conversely this technique will also help you create contrasting sections that stand out from the rest of the track (if that’s your aim!).

Now we’ve got these basic building blocks it’s time to lay out our track to our personal preference, again at this stage it’s a good idea to refer back to our target style. Have a listen to your favourite tracks again and work out what you like about how they’re arranged. Ask yourself some questions about them; How does the track build up? Why does that bass line rock so hard when it drops into the track? The answers to questions like these will help you get your own ideas together about how you’ll arrange your track. It’s always a good idea to make a very basic arrangement first, and then refine your elements. By this point you’ll probably have worked out if there are any other elements, such as special effects that you could fit into your track and now’s the time to add them in.

When you’re happy with the arrangement of your track it’s time to get that ruthless streak out. Have a critical listen through from start to finish. This is best done with a clear head so take a break first! One trick the pro’s use here is to turn your computer screen off, remember we’re using our ears here not our eyes! Again ask yourself some questions; Is that section needed there? Did the build-up do the track justice? This technique is the best way to weed out faults in your arrangement and mix. Saving multiple copies of your song file at this point can help you safe guard the basic arrangement of your track from your edits.

DMS