Your album (or playlist) is a journey, a story! The format is the main reason why albums are still very important. When curating an album keep in mind to sequence your tracks to release and build tension, doing this will make the songs leave a more impactful listening effect. If you have a couple of songs that soft, pair that with a couple of songs that are livelier after. However, grouping similar tracks work too.From a Wikipedia definition, sequencing is “The restatement of a motif or longer melodic (or harmonic) passage at a higher or lower pitch in the same voice. It is one of the most common and simple methods of elaborating a melody in eighteenth and nineteenth-century classical music”. In plain man words, sequencing is the process of ordering musical notes to create a harmonic flow. For albums, this means curating the order of songs to create a dynamic story through techniques of fade-ins, fade-outs between songs. Think of sequencing as writing a story, it would be odd if in the 1st chapter the characters are introduced, and in the next chapter, they are dead. For your listeners, it would be awkward to hear a soft song that transitions into a heavy fast-paced song. Singles are what attract your listeners, but an album is how you make them into fans. You have worked hard to create and produced every part of your story, so take the time to focus on the sequencing. Listeners will easily skip from one song to the next, you need to give your listeners a reason to stay for the whole story, and not to skip chapters. But how do you make a captivating story? Is the thejadededge.com/album-sequencing-lost-art/ and also blog.discmakers.com/2020/01/how-to-sequence-an-album/ are true about every studio album 💿 being a story like see example Not only do you want variety from song to song, you also want to vary up the way your songs segue into each other. Sometimes you want songs to fade out, followed by a few seconds of silence before the next track starts. This is especially good if the song in question is powerful, so listeners will have a chance to digest it all before the next song begins. Other times, you’ll want one song to flow into the next, or perhaps have a song brashly cut to the next one, startling the listener. Again, the White Album offers up a nice mix of segues. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” cross fades into “Dear Prudence.” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” ends abruptly, cutting straight into “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The variety of songs and segues keep the listener engaged. (By the way, in order to get these segues just right, you’ll want to hire a mastering engineer who will have the tools and experience to handle fades, cross fades, and everything else you need.) Listeners need a break in the action, otherwise they get overwhelmed. Albums used to have two sides, so artists were forced into telling a story in two, roughly 20-minute chapters (or four chapters for double albums). Today you have the ability to break your album into as many chapters as you want, and keeping them to 20 minutes or less is good practice. To create a suite or chapter, simply have the last song in that chapter fade out or include a grand finale of sorts, then include a few extra seconds of silence before beginning the next. Smile, by Brian Wilson, is nice example of an album that is broken up into three chapters. The songs within each chapter flow directly into each other, but then there is a definite sense of closure to each suite.
