We have been singing since the beginning of time. However, the production of a song and the professionalization of the know-how that gives birth to it and live through the media are a relatively recent phenomenon.
The craft has gradually been organized since the beginning of the twentieth century and was then matured by multinational record companies. Indeed, the song needs broadcast media to exist and make itself known. It therefore requires, to please the greatest number, a good dose of reflection and work.
What are its ingredients? Few things in fact: lyrics (a story put in verse), a melody (well conformed to the text and easily memorized) and finally a good arrangement (the arranger is the master of all the musical production).
Thus, the techniques that we are going to develop are aimed as much at the arranger anxious to better dress the music, as at the singer-songwriter (ACI), who will combine in the most intimate possible the text and the melody.
We will learn through this book to write lyrics and an effective arrangement for the service of varieties, French songs and pop music. In this we will be helped by numerous examples of texts taken from ACI's tubes and by analyzes of arrangements made on songs which seemed to us to best serve our purpose.
We will also learn the techniques of the harmonization of a typical melody and we will apply to it ten variants of harmonic progressions and qualities of chords. Finally, if we began our study with the art of lyricist and its processes, we will close the treatise with a dive into the reality of the profession of song arranger. Indeed, thanks to selected pieces of Quincy Jones, one of the biggest producers of tubes of the musical world, we will penetrate decisively in the mastery of the techniques of the arranger.
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