Maybe they should call them Songwriter keyboards?

Among their many other attributes, arranger keyboards are self-contained music production tools. By separating this technology from a computer — the common alternative way to produce demos — you don’t have to worry about audio interface problems, software incompatibilities, corrupt drivers, permissions confusion, ill-timed instant messages, fan noise, or a host of other issues that come with computer-based music production. And because the ambitions of these machines are relatively focused, it is a simpler process, ergonomically, to produce recordings with them.

Here’s how it works. You specify a chord progression and match it to an accompaniment style. The keyboard then generates an accompaniment part in that style. It’s what’s happened to the “Fox Trot” button on home organs of the 1960s, a few decades and technological revolutions later. These days, the sounds are great. There can be hundreds of accompaniment styles to choose from, with pre-programmed intros, endings, fills, and groove variations.

For many purposes, most audiences would neither notice nor care that music created by an arranger keyboard wasn’t created by a live band. In fact, music-industry guru George Howard says, “For songwriting demos, this quality level is fine — good enough to submit to a professional publishing house or performing artist, if you’re a writer or lyricist.”

Let’s focus now on the most critical function for producing demos: Creating an accompaniment part for your songs. I’ll save explanations of how to tweak your band and your sound for another article. Learn to create basic recordings first, and then finesse them later.

Using Arranger Keyboards

For this article, I was fortunate to be provided with three instruments to explore, with songwriting in mind. They are, in order of arrival on my doorstep, the Korg Pa-50, the Yamaha PSR3000, and the Casio WK-3300. You can read about these instruments and many more in great detail on page 20.

As a songwriter, your first step is to get to know what this back-up band sounds like. Begin by listening to each of its styles. There can be a lot to get through. For example, the Korg Pa50 has 256 styles — each with four variations. Seek out the small subset of styles you’re likely to work with most often. It’s helpful to assign these favorite styles (and also individual instrument sounds) to “Registration Memory” or “User” buttons. This lets you recall your favorite styles easily and avoid clicking through countless screens.

Dedicate some time to this process when you don’t have songwriting on the agenda. Basically, you’re auditioning your own personal studio bands, to be on call, waiting for the next gig you throw their way. Then, when you’re actually creating a demo, fishing for that elusive surf rock band isn’t a necessary hurdle to jump over. This is particularly important once you start customizing your own personal bands, rather than using just the factory presets.

By setting this up in advance, you’ll make your songwriting process easier, with fewer barriers between your ideas and your recording.

Recording the Demo

When you’re ready to program your song, first set the style and tempo. On just about any keyboard you can find, there are buttons that provide easy control of these. Performing an accompaniment groove in real time is also relatively straightforward on all arranger keyboards. Press the button that tells the keyboard to generate an accompaniment part, then play a chord. Instant Viennese wedding band or hip-hop crew!

Once you’ve got your groove, set its tempo. The Yamaha PSR3000’s Tap Tempo button is convenient for this. Tap four times, and it sets the groove to your tempo. Adjust it by tapping again or by using the + and – buttons. With a song hot on your fingertips, this is an intuitive way to set the groove’s tempo.

With the groove and tempo set, you’re ready to specify chords. There are two general approaches to doing this: realtime recording and step recording.

Easiest to explain is realtime recording. Press a Record button, and play. It’s like a tape recorder. This works best if you are a decent pianist. It has the advantage of being easy to figure out. If you are a performer, it is an intuitive way to render your music.

When you play a chord in the bottom register, the keyboard creates a groove based on that chord, either for as long as you hold down the keys or until you play a new chord. The most obvious way is to specify the chord by playing three notes that define it. Some keyboards have shortcuts, such as giving you a major chord when you play just a root. The Casio WK-3300 lets you define chords by playing a root with one hand along with an additional key to indicate the chord quality, such as minor, dominant seventh, or minor seventh. I prefer playing the full chord, but it’s nice to know that there are options. Some rainy day, maybe I’ll see whether mastering a shortcut method significantly speeds things up.

The other approach is step-recording — creating the progression by programming in what chords play when. In this case, you’re inputting a series of directions, rather than performing in real time. You may find this process is more difficult to puzzle out, but it is the most critical task of using arranger keyboards in songwriting, particularly because you will likely want to edit your realtime performances. It can also be faster to input than realtime recording because the data entry doesn’t have to be in tempo.

In step recording, you’re essentially filling in a list. Once you set the style, tempo, and other overall parameters, you can enter chords, measure by measure and beat by beat, into a song. Like a MIDI event list, these songs are organized into lines identified by Bar/Beat/Tick. You define what chord begins at any point.

For example, to have chords change on every half-note, your list might look something like this:

There are many shortcuts for entering chords. For example, the Yamaha PSR3000 lets you specify the duration of each chord’s harmonic rhythm. Then, when you play a chord on the keyboard, it enters it for that specified duration. This interface makes the chord entry go quickly.

Though different keyboards may display this information in their own unique ways, you’re essentially building a MIDI file, which can be transferred to other MIDI devices or computer software for fine-tuning. But don’t be seduced by such possibilities! First, master the essential task of step-recording chords.

The arranger keyboard interprets this event list as direction to arrange an accompaniment. It takes the style, tempo, and other information you defined at the beginning of this list (by default, how the keyboard was set when you created this song). Instantly, it produces a recording.

Devote some time to learning the technology, and practice the core functions until you can perform them easily, without consulting the manual. As an exercise, program a few different four-bar simple chord progressions as if they were little songs, just to master the whole process end to end. This way, when the time comes to create some real music, you won’t have to hunt for buttons you’ve never pressed before.

The Songwriting Process

While working on this article, I was also taking an online class called Commercial Songwriting Techniques, with Andrea Stolpe (at Berkleemusic.com). Each week, my classmates and I wrote a song or a song section and uploaded it to an online discussion forum, where we’d share and discuss our work. This was actually an ideal use for arranger keyboards, giving me a quick way to wrap up each week’s assignments and post them online. In fact, it was so convenient that when critiquing my classmate’s songs, I’d sometimes record my own version, to better explain what I meant, such as if I’d suggest a different chord.

I found that arranger keyboards had three helpful benefits to the songwriting process, beyond just having great sounds and the capability to produce the final demo. First, listening to a groove can jump-start my imagination. It helps keep my song ideas real — grounded to the groove and not overly cerebral. Second, the automatic groove generation helped me practice and fine-tune lyrics without having the distraction of having to perform them myself. Third, I could easily whip up a demo of a song section or two, in multiple versions, so that I could listen back to them and concentrate on issues such as overall balance and large-scale narrative development.

But in the songwriting process, my very first step is to turn the keyboard off. Here’s why.

Years ago, I brought a composition to my mentor, Arthur Berger. I had written it on manuscript paper that came pre-printed with a grand staff and four barlines per system. Arthur advised me not to use it. He pointed out that it would subliminally suggest four-bar phrases of a certain rhythmic density based on the printed measure width. The tool would dictate the music. I found that to be a very liberating insight.

Similarly, using pre-packaged grooves and patterns also defines creative parameters for your song. It’s the price you have to pay for popping out a demo in ten minutes, as opposed to customizing your own arrangement in a few hours. But if a factory groove has a background lick on beat 4, you will be less likely to write a lyric on beat 4, if you listen to the groove too much before you actually start writing. That’s the tool talking, not your spirit. So, start with paper and pencil. Take a long walk, and plumb the depths of your soul for a song-worthy concept and a catchy title. Use the keyboard to play single-instrument sounds, without using auto-accompaniment yet.

Songwriters debate whether to begin with lyrics, melody, chords, forms, or other aspects of the song. My suggestion is to start with whatever you know about it — whatever ideas come first. See where that leads your pen.

For example, in my songwriting class, we were writing pop tunes, so before I began, I knew that the ultimate length should be about three minutes long. That works out to two or three verses in which to tell my song story. Each would likely be 25 to 45 seconds long. That is a lot to know about a song already.

Each week, I would write out a lead sheet indicating chords, melody, and lyrics. Whether you write out a lead sheet, chord chart, or other form of notation, you’ll find it helpful to create a complete hard-copy document of your song. Measure numbers will help you to keep track of where you are when you’re step recording, matching the event list’s series of arcane numbers with real life music.

Keep writing until you feel like you have articulated all the pre-existing parameters. Then, your songwriting craft can take over. Your bag of songwriting tricks will continually expand, as you read songwriting books, take courses and workshops, and just listen analytically to music.

If your pen stops, a good general guideline is to explore contrasting ideas with what you’ve currently got. This is one of the over-riding songwriting principles in Berklee’s songwriting curriculum. Contrast is effective at many levels, but particularly, between song sections. Consider changing the melody’s range (tessitura), phrase lengths, and/or texture — particularly if the chord progression remains the same in the chorus and verse.

The more you learn about songwriting, the more insight you will have into what elements can be modified to add contrast. By basing new material in the song on relatively opposite iterations of what’s currently written, you create a duality between song elements that together create an organic object. It’s yin and yang —complements that together form a comprehensible whole.

At some point in this process, it will make sense to you to start working with an accompaniment. Just listening to the groove will give you ideas for melodies and lyrics. You might determine the style and tempo based on the song content, or the band that’s going to play it. Call up one of your “registered” favorite grooves, or if you must, go fishing. Play the chord, then set the tempo. Choose a relatively wordy line from your lyrics, and practice singing it at different tempos. I find a Tap Tempo function to be very helpful here. You may decide to slow down the tempo, or you may decide to simplify the lyric or melody.

Sing all your words and music along with the groove, using the keyboard’s Performance mode to automatically generate the accompaniment. This is the first place where arranger keyboards really aid the songwriting process. Singing lines to accompaniments helps you refine them and shake out overly wordy lyrics or awkward notes. Freedom from having to play a piano or guitar while you sing lets you focus on what you’re writing.

It may be helpful to step-record individual song sections, verse/chorus pairs, or other portions of your song before it’s complete. Set the section, then listen to it and sing along. Refine any awkward corners, and shine up any dull spots. I sometimes record multiple versions of individual sections, trying out different rhyme schemes, numbers of lines, melodic concepts, and so on. Then I listen to the bozo on the recording and try to see which variation was most effective.

Using the keyboard’s Groove Variations is an easy way to add some contrast between song sections, to help define them further. These variations are often subtle, but it’s enough to define the new musical place and function. It’s a common function on all arranger keyboards: Four buttons let you choose the variations, which may be as minimal as a stronger backbeat or as profound as a different time feel.

When your song is becoming mature, step-record a complete arrangement, with an intro and ending, and different groove variations on the different song sections. Listen to it, sing it, and be bold about making revisions.

To add vocals, your keyboard may have the ability to record your voice via a microphone input and then mix your voice with the accompaniment to an internal audio recorder. Or you may need additional technology to combine your accompaniment track with your voice. This could be as simple as a tape recorder that records the keyboard playing back through its internal speakers as you sing, or it could be a computer audio setup, where you run audio cables from the keyboard into an audio interface and then record vocals in a new track. Alternatively, you could save your song as a MIDI file, and perform it using another instrument entirely.

Keep your process simple, so that you can record the song easily. This will make it more likely that you’ll listen to it critically, listening for ways it could be improved, and then making revisions. Perhaps after listening to your verse/chorus pairs over and over, you determine that you need a bridge to shake things up. Or a new chord might occur to you. Listen while you’re not doing anything else, such as singing or playing a guitar.

This is a great strength of these keyboards. It is so easy to make a decent demo recording that you will keep improving your song after it is recorded, because spinning out new demos is so easy that they become a part of the process, rather than the end goal.

Once upon a time, songwriters commonly spent thousands of dollars creating song demos that rivaled commercial recordings in production quality. Today, this is rarely necessary. Arranger keyboards are a recent innovation that yields high-quality, convenient song production capabilities easily and cheaply. Though they offer sophisticated features for customizing recordings — even featuring sound synthesis capabilities — the ability to step-record chords is extremely useful. Master that, and your creative process can be greatly streamlined. You will have more time to write, and all your songs will be recorded, which makes them more likely to be heard.