When a track starts to get more complex, and enters the realm of arrangement and structure (after the composing is mostly done), I find it hard to proceed most of the time. Maybe I don’t have the right set of mind in my workflow with the tape. Arranging on tape in my case, escalates quickly in multiple lift and drop sessions, spilled bits of loops on the tape here and there… mostly its ending up by moving the project to my daw for that part. I don’t like the work on the daw so much though, cause I quickly get indecisive with too much opportunities, creating to much „versions" of the song etc… opposed to the creative restrictions OP1 offers so nicely.
Am I doing something wrong? I would like to stay in OP1 as long as possible.
my workflow so far goes as:
A: I make some loops that evolve the theme from loop to loop, with variations and progress. At the end of a loop I try to give a small variation of eg. the last bits of the drums, to build a bridge to the next loop, on the beginning of the tape. When I’m done I start arranging them by dropping copy’s to the later part of the tape. Then after a while I want to re-arrange, and that’s where things start getting really complicated for me. (But I have to admid that I’m also a person who likes to try out variants, though). It starts to getting flimsy and mistakes start to grow. Sometimes I thought the problem might be that I just had to commit earlier in the process.
B: I create some loops as described above. I then switch between those 3-4 loops live, muting single tracks, and record that all to album. I like that because it’s a really musical way of creating a track. But somehow my tracks stay kind of „small-ish" or after a minute of running they stay kind of static.
At last I thought also about getting a further small device that’s not a daw, but something that’s great for arranging and structure. But in the end I would love OP1 being that device itself.
but I really don’t know. Now written all thant, I feel a little dumb . Maybe there’s a better way opposed my own attempts, or it’s just the way I look at things in a wrong way…
really exited if you feel of being in a similar boat, or if you found an other interesting approach to perform your tracks.
When I do the arranging on the OP-1 itself, I approach it more or less like a track by track live performance. So when some scattershot ideas start feeling like a song, I copy and paste them into a draft arrangement, crude transitions and placeholder sounds and all. When after that I still feel good about it, I program the ideas into the sequencers, “perform” it onto a new tape one track at a time, and do as little lifting and dropping as possible in the process.
It sure does take a godawful amount of time, but it actually is a lot of fun.
Try to start arranging from the very beginning or very early, and let that drive the composing, rather than doing all the composing and then moving on to arranging.
For example, get some basic drums going, 4 bar, 8 bar. make a few variations. now cut and paste these and paste to fill up the whole tape. from there you will start to see in the drums where some elements need to added etc.
then move on to bass or chords or melody. once again, make some variations and cut and paste with some breaks to fill up the whole tape. you will more easily see where the arrangement needs additions etc. or moved around or a different approach.
another advantage of this approach is that if you screw something in one section or change your mind about something, you have a full tape of other takes/sections to choose from to fix things.
Hey, that’s a quite interesting and neat approach. This way you can stay much more in vibe with the music and playing/composing happens in a natural and organic way, opposed to chopping around and sticking hard to the loop in the first round.
Substraction, if needed, could come later in the process with then already existing material, which can make composing much more easy. I believe, then, it’s good to not be afraid of erasing and overwriting sections, instead of the need to back it all up to be safe for „later"…
Here is how I do it most often. I usually am noodling around on the piano or on the 1Field. Once I have some sort of idea I start layering on the the tape. The goal is creating a toolkit of stems.
Kinda looks like this:
First percussion for like 4-8 bars, split into 4 tracks, with sounds grouped. Think track 1 has the base drum, track 2 snare, track 3 high hats, track 4 blips n bloops n bongo’s or whatever. (note that you don’t have to start with percussion )
Copy that segment, make another 4-16 bar section in which I paste percussion and smush it into one track.
Start layering base like I did in 1. (But from now on only tracks 2,3 and 4 are available for bass. First track is always reserved for the stacked tracks from the previous segments)
Rinse and repeat for leads, pads, plucks, strings, whatever you need.
This includes the chorus and turns and etc… This naturally flows out of following 1-4 and apply the same methodology of making stems.
Now I have a whole toolkit of stems that I can arrange on the tape by copying and pasting onto the tape tracks. Then I start arranging and sometimes it needs a new part or readjusting or resampling or whatever. It’s all in the process. This methodology gives lots of freedom in how you want to mute parts. But feel free doing some live performance for cutting on the vinyl.
For me this stems method works well to make tracks. It’s a bit tedious and more time consuming but has a lot of benefits.
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