It’s extremely hard to maintain a sense of build-up throughout a whole song’s timeline, so most commercial arrangers do the next best thing, which is creating a series of ‘waves’ of rising performance/arrangement intensity. The crest of each of these waves is typically followed by a sudden arrangement breakdown of some sort, designed to swiftly recalibrate the listener to a lower energy level, thereby creating the arrangement ‘headroom’ required to start another gradual build-up to the next wave’s crest – and, of course, preferably a crest that’s a little more impactful than the previous one!

You can see this kind of arrangement model in action here, with the first wave building towards the breakdown at 1:01; the second wave building towards the breakdown at 2:11; and the third wave building towards the song’s a capella outro at 3:43. Now, in theory, the more you strip back your arrangement for each breakdown in this kind of situation, the more scope you leave yourself for making the subsequent build-up more dramatic. You can, however, go too far in this direction, making the breakdown so sparse that it loses momentum entirely, such that your breakdown begins to sound awfully like an outro instead! Indeed, I’ve heard quite a lot of project-studio productions that fall foul of this, and one of the most common reasons for their malaise is that the breakdown costs the production too much rhythmic impetus.

And here’s where ‘The Subway’ provides quite a neat case-study, because even though the arrangement becomes extremely sparse during the first two breakdowns, the rhythmic pulse is nevertheless maintained by the hint of muffled-sounding rhythm machine in the background. This is such a powerful idea, and I’ve used some variation on it for many different Mix Rescue-style transformations through the years. In this case the rhythm element is percussion, and other common candidates in this role might be a soft kick drum or a background shaker. But you might just as well use a pulsating synth line, or an understated piano riff, or an abstract rhythmic SFX loop. The point is that you just need to find some element that can serves to remind the listener that the production’s rhythmic ’engine’ is still purring along, even if almost nothing else is happening in the arrangement at that specific moment in the breakdown. And, of course, if you do want to signal that a breakdown really is the end of the song, then it makes sense to avoid elements with rhythmic impetus instead – as in this specific case, where Roan’s rhythm machine is absent for the final breakdown at 3:43.

One final little technical observation: if you ever hear a programmed snare drum in your production unexpectedly sounding like the one in the fill at 2:32, then you’re probably inadvertently double-triggering it. What I mean by this is that your drum instrument is likely being triggered from two sets of almost identical MIDI data, causing its internal drum samples to sound so close together in time that they end up partially phase-cancelling each other, resulting in that kind of hollow, comb-filtered tone quality. Now, I don’t know whether double-triggering is actually the reason for the sound of this specific drum fill, but it’s nonetheless a very characteristic tone quality that’s well worth learning to recognise for troubleshooting purposes if you run your own studio setup.