The Drop Chorus



It’s not uncommon to have a double chorus at the end of a typical commercial song’s structure in order to really hammer home the main hooks. This is a sound idea in principle, but it does present one arrangement difficulty: if you give the first of these final choruses a really full arrangement to let everyone know it’s arrived, then it becomes difficult to sustain that excitement through into the second of the final choruses, because there’s no room left in the mix for additional parts.

A lot of productions address this problem by using more impassioned vocal parts and adlibs, but I’ve always felt that there’s only so far you can go with that approach, and that there’s more mileage to be had in using more imaginative arrangement alternatives instead.

One trick that I just can’t resist mentioning is what is often known as a “drop chorus.” You build up
to the first of the final choruses as if it’s going
to be huge, but then wrong-foot the listener by muting loads of the important parts when it does arrive, typically leaving just the lead vocals and some kind of stripped-back rhythm section. If you judge it just right, the listener effectively gets two chorus pay-offs at the end of the song, instead of only one. The first of the final choruses uses the element of surprise to make its impact (as well as focusing attention clearly on the lead vocal, which is rarely a bad thing!), whereas the subsequent chorus delivers that all-guns-blazing fullness that everyone was expecting first time around.

If you’ve not consciously noticed any song using a drop chorus before, I encourage you to keep your ears open for it, because it can be extremely effective— Jordin Sparks’s “Battle field,” Dido’s “Hunter,” and Anastacia’s “I’m Outta Love” are just some of the hit songs that have made dramatic use of the
concept. What’s particularly great about a drop
chorus from a mix engineer’s perspective is that you can often create one entirely at the mixdown stage if you want, without doing any further tracking at all—all you’ll usually need is a bit of muting and rebalancing


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