How To Structure An Electronic Song

Before working on this project I had no idea how to structure an electronic track. My first electronic track was simply a progressive layering of sounds that eventually faded out. Clearly I needed some kind of foundation to build up a real track or I would simply be stumbling around blindly.

Thankfully, I discovered a very instructive video from SeamlessR on YouTube

A quick summary of what SeamlessR suggests is the following:

• Intro: 16 bars
• Break: 8 bars
• Rise: 8 bars
• Drop 1.A (heavy bass): 16 bars
• Drop 1.B (everything): 16 bars
• Bridge: 16 bars
• Break: 8 bars
• Rise: 8 bars
• Drop 2.A (heavy bass): 16 bars
• Drop 2.B (everything): 16 bars
• Outro: 16 bars

For those like me that really need the basics explained, the term “bar” represents a unit of time in music. A bar contains some number of beats. In the common case a bar contains 4 beats. So how long is a beat? It depends on the “beats per minute” or BPM of your track. A common BPM for a track is 120, which means each beat takes 1/2 of a second (60 seconds / 120 beats per minute). Therefore, a bar in that case is 2 (0.5 * 4) seconds long.

So if you want an idea of how long a given section in the above structure lasts, multiply by the number of bars by 2 and that is the length of that section in seconds. For example, 16 bars would last 32 seconds. If I did the math correctly, the total suggested song length above is a little less than 5 minutes long.

Now its time to put this structure to use in my first trance track.

Is that right?

For those of you with actual music background, feel free to correct my description of song structure. If you have any tips or advice, please let me know in the comments.