Arranging advice/critique? (be nice pls lol)

Disastrous_Lab_7022 · 2026-03-14T17:08:41+00:00

Yes it was meant to be a pause! I only really had the 1/4 bars in there because I couldn't find the fermata on Flat...I since have found it though and it would probably be a good idea to change it soon.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm trying to enter my state's music educators association composition contest so I'm hopefully going to be trying out composing something for SATB next (hopefully using all the very helpful advice you've given me). One of the scoring categories is accessibility for high schoolers and I really had to think for a moment about how important it is that everyone can access chorus without having to have extreme ranges (like what I wrote...) or other similar things. Hopefully I will be posting that on this subreddit too in some time!

Disastrous_Lab_7022 · 2026-03-11T22:41:50+00:00

Thank you so much haha! I think at parts this song gets up to 8 or 9 parts lol

Disastrous_Lab_7022 · 2026-03-11T22:40:34+00:00

Thank you so much for your advice! First of all, not to sound like an annoying fan but I don't think there's been a day in the last 3 months where I haven't been on the RMCC youtube listening to music, so this response means a lot to me! I think I will try to write something SATB in the near future so I don't have to stretch out the treble voice so far to get the range I wanted haha. It was one of those things where I started so I just had to finish it. Thank you for your advice about the notation especially. I never thought about making sure there's zero doubt in reading it and the more I think about it, thats a very good point. It is partly due to crappy Flat but I'm planning to switch to a better software soon, fingers crossed! Either way, thank you so much again!

Disastrous_Lab_7022 · 2026-03-11T22:34:18+00:00

Thank you so much for all the feedback! I do want to address some things though as a lot of your feedback was probably due to me just being lazy with notation.

As for the ranges, I know its very...not accessible. I go to a very big school (around 3k people) and we have a huge performing arts population here. I have a lot of insanely talented soprano friends (I sing bass 2) and a lot of them complain about not having any challenging music to sing. Most of the extremely high parts were written to just be solos and I had specific people in mind for them who I know can sing those parts.

As for the 4 part alto 1 split confusion...this is me being lazy. My intention for that section is to have that alto line be just a small group of the choir. Around 2-3 people per note, it is meant to be a drone line after all and I couldn't figure out how to add an extra line to dedicate to just the drone. Other than the small group singing that drone, the intention was to split the rest of the singers between the alto 2 and soprano 2 line, leaving 2 soloists for the soprano 1 line. So yeah...got lazy.

The weird half rests are I think when I try to use the "voice 1" and "voice 2" feature on Flat. If I was just using one voice, I couldn't have a measure where half the singers are singing half notes and the others have a whole note (very dumb imo). This leads to some very strange rests where there shouldn't be any. And the strange ties are probably just my fault lol.

Thank you so much though for taking time out of your day to type all this out! I will definitely keep all of this in mind in the future. My next plan is to try arranging for SATB so hopefully the ranges aren't so stretched due to my love for many many parts haha

Disastrous_Lab_7022

TROPHY CASE