The Arrangement Decisions I Regret Most

About 25 years ago, I had a Latin pop band. It wasn't a two-guitar band. The rhythm section was Latin percussion, bass, piano, and electric guitar, plus a tenor saxophone supporting the vocals.

The melody of the song we recorded was pretty strong, and since I was the arranger, the first thing I did was try to find a chord progression that sounded unique. I wanted something as unusual as possible.

The piano player, who was quite good, did a good job with the chords I wrote, but I made the guitar part unnecessarily difficult. I never even considered leaving the guitar out during the verses, which would have cleaned up the arrangement considerably. The saxophone part was also fairly busy, filling the spaces between vocal phrases.

Looking back, I could have made an arrangement that simply supported the vocal and the melody, and the song would have worked much better.

The song never made it to the radio or anything like that. We recorded it purely for the love of music.

Then last year, the singer from that band, who is now a film director, used that same recording in his 2025 movie as someone's ringtone.

The song itself is strong. The melody and lyrics are great; I still genuinely love them.

Listening back 25 years later, what I react to is not the composition but the arrangement decisions I made at the time. I can now hear where I overplayed, overcomplicated sections, and filled space that should have been left open.

There is an emotional attachment to the recording because it represents a moment in our lives; however, from an arrangement perspective, I can clearly hear how much more potential the track had if I had made fewer, more intentional choices.

I didn't learn that lesson right away. I learned it years later. When you listen with fresh ears, reality doesn't forgive.

One of the things to remember before recording is that if you're not completely satisfied with a part, you can always remove it. That doesn't necessarily mean deleting it from the song. It might only mean removing it from certain sections.

If you stay flexible, you'll usually make better decisions.

My rule today is simple: if you still like a recording 2, 3, 5, or 10 years later, you probably made good decisions.

In my case, I already disliked parts of that arrangement by the following year, so obviously I didn't.

If you're currently in pre-production, or you've already decided you're going to record a single, EP, or album, this is the best moment to fix these kinds of problems.

Because once a part is recorded, mixed, released, and attached to your song for years, you're going to live with those decisions for a long time. The goal isn't perfection. The goal is to make sure you're making arrangement decisions on purpose, instead of discovering five years later that the song would have worked better if someone had simply played less.