What Does an Arranger Actually Do?

Of all the music professionals singers typically come into contact with, the arranger is perhaps the least understood, even though the work of an arranger has a massive impact on the performance.

Music Arrangers: The Hidden Architect to Your Favorite Performances

Music arrangers adapt music (usually written by someone else) to meet the needs of a particular performer or performance situation. Say you wanted to sing a cover of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", but with your salsa band. You could work with an arranger to adapt that preexisting song to meet your specifications. You could decide together what parts of the original song to use, and in what order. You could settle on what groove(s) to use and what tempo(s). The arranger might suggest that you add instrumental sections that don’t exist in the original song to highlight the band and give you some breathing room. They might even rework the melody itself to suit the new context of the song. Do you want a dance break? The arranger can work that into the arrangement. How about a mashup of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”? That’s a challenge for an arranger.

The arranger’s work impacts many other aspects of the eventual performance, so an arranger has to be an excellent collaborator. Your music director, choreographer, and instrumentalists will naturally all have opinions about the material. The arranger sometimes has many points of view to satisfy. Your manager might want the song to be longer or shorter. Your vocal coach might recommend a change of key.

Arranging ≠ Music Directing

Arranging is not the same as music directing, although the same person often performs both tasks. The music director is usually in charge of hiring arrangers and orchestrators, hiring and rehearsing the band, and rehearsing with the soloist. In the case of a small show, it often makes sense financially and logistically for the music director themselves to work very closely with the soloist to create the arrangements for the show and modify the arrangements as they perform and polish the show. Naturally, the larger the performance (more instruments, dancers, backup singers, larger venues), the bigger the arranging jobs become and the more likely the music director is to hire additional arrangers to help.

Arranging ≠ Orchestrating

Arranging is not the same as orchestrating, although both jobs are sometimes done by the same person. The orchestrator decides what music each instrument plays. Usually, there is a lot of information about the orchestration already indicated in the arrangement, but it is the orchestrator’s job to carry out the assignment of parts to the instrumentalists, fill in the blanks left by the arranger, and deliver the individual instrumental parts to the players.

Arranging ≠ Music Production

Finally, arranging is not the same as music producing, although the producer almost always has enormous influence in the arrangement of the song they are producing. The producer used to be the one who ran the recording session and delivered the finished recording. These days, since the producer is usually personally building the track electronically, it’s up to them to either make arrangement decisions themselves or carry out the arrangement as requested by the performers and songwriters on their computer. 

The nature of songwriting and recording has changed so much with the advent of Digital Audio Workstations (like ProTools and Logic), the words “arranger” or “orchestrator” rarely come up these days in Contemporary Commercial Music (pop, R&B, country, etc.). Producers, songwriters, and artists share the workload in their own idiosyncratic way. The time of celebrity arrangers in the popular music sphere seems to be past, but check out these famous arrangers of yesteryear: Nelson Riddle, George Martin, Mary Lou Williams, Quincy Jones, and Henry Mancini.

Arrangers are everywhere!

Musicians with the title “arranger” are still very active in live concerts and musical theatre. Did you ever see a live concert of your favorite artist, but the songs were a little different (or very different) from the album version? There was an arranger at work, there. Check out Postmodern Jukebox, Third Reprise, Voctave, and Pentatonix for some awesome examples of arrangers getting a lot of positive attention for reworking songs we all love in new contexts. And of course, Musical Theatre continues to need the talents of arrangers for the very intricate musical sequences Musical Theatre is famous for. Often doubling as music directors, orchestrators, and conductors, some of the most successful arrangers in musical theatre today are Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Alex Lacamoire, and Michael Kosarin.