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For someone who has never worked with loops before, the concept and workflow may seem a little foreign. What tips and advice would you give to a beginner about loops?
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By Adrian Try
Adrian is writer and editor for Audiotuts+ and Envato Notes. He has been playing keys and acoustic guitar for three decades, and has six kids. Follow him on Twitter at @envatoaudio.
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loops? no. be original make your own music.
OK Yes, you can use loops, it’s allways better to make your own music, but sometimes you might need some ispiration, so a drum loop or a piano loop can get you long way.
There is couple of thing you should watch out for:
1. Make sure that the loops have High Quality, 24bit should do it. If your mixing session is 24bit, if it is 16bit than your loops should be 16bit also.
2. Allways watch out for used loops, you don’t wanna put something in your song that lil wayne or some other rapper od rocker or whatever, used it beffore you.
3. Use loops as your starting point. Use them as your sorce of inspiration. Don’t build your song round loops, listen to them, just to get some idea.
4. AND REMEMBER IT’S ALL ABOUT HAVEING FUN.
Using loops can be a fantastic source of inspiration for many aspects of music creation – they can be used as the basis of a beat or song, inspire you to create something in a similar style, or add extra spice and interest to something that is already very much fleshed-out. There are a number of things you can do to ensure that you get the most out of using loops in your music creation processes.
1. Organisation
If you plan to be a big user of loops in your music, it is important to keep your collection well-organised. This may mean sorting the loops into folders by musical style, key, tempo or BPM, or even where the loop originated from. There is specific software that can make this easier (example: http://www.icedaudio.com/), but depending on the file format of the loops, you may even be able to use standard music player software and tags to categorise them for easy access.
2. Variation
Some loop formats have markers within them which tell your DAW program or music software where the beats lie within the loop. These slices become very useful when working in a different tempo than that which the loop was originally recorded in, and many DAWs automatically stretch and resize imported loops to match the project’s tempo. REX loops and “Acidized” WAV loops contain these slices or markers, and can be imported by most major DAWs.
Some audio production programs can even extract specific grooves from loops, and apply these to other elements used in your project. This is known by various names depending on the DAW software – including Groove Quantize, Extract Groove, Beat Detective, etc. This and features like it can help you get more out of a single loop, and can let you use a loop in a completely contrasting musical style.
3. Originality
When using loops, particularly those with melodic or harmonic content, it can be very easy to rely on this too much. There are several techniques you can use to alter the sound of these kind of loops:
▪ Equalisation, compression, reverb, glitching or other effects can vastly alter the sound of a loop, and often in very interesting ways. By scooping out a large range of frequencies or applying a large amount of compression to a loop (or both, and more!), it can take on a life of its own and be much more original than it otherwise might have been.
▪ Re-harmonisation. A drum loop with an electric piano melody can be made to sound completely different by the application of a little music theory – playing different chords and bass notes beneath a melody can impart a very different tonality and sound by changing the tonal centre of the music as a whole. For instance, a short, 2-bar melody in the key of A Major might be made to sound very different by playing the chords G#dim, C#7 and F#min beneath it (a simple ii-V-i progression in the key of F# Minor, the relative minor of A Major).
▪ Transposition and pitch shifting can change a loop into something new and original. Even by transposing a loop up or down by a certain amount can impart some originality, particularly on drum or percussion loops (by transposing recorded drums, they take on a very different sound and tone). In melodic or chordal loops, pitch-shifting only parts of the loop by varying degrees can create entirely new chord progressions from existing loops, and fit loops to your own existing chord progressions.
Some loops are so widely used that they become synonymous with the musical styles they are used in. A drumbeat from the song ‘Amen Brother’ by The Winstons has been used in countless hip-hop, drum and bass and jungle tracks, and is well-associated with the cultures surrounding these styles (more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break).
4. Re-recording
In many situations, the songwriting process is helped greatly by having other musicians to play with. This is not always the case, of course, and loops can be used to help in these situations.
By recording parts over a particular drum groove, the process can in many cases be streamlined, often with better results than would otherwise have been achieved. Using loops for song demos like this, too, can help you communicate to another musician what you’re after. For instance, showing a drummer your drum loop can more easily communicate what you want than trying to describe it.
Whether you love them or hate them, loops can serve a wide range of purposes in the music creation process. Loops can serve as inspiration, temporary tracks or a final groove beneath a song, but knowing how to best use them and how to get the most out of them is an important thing for artists, composers and producers of many different styles of music.
Use loops only as scaffolding.
Loops should be used as a draft for a song you’d like to create, but not necessarily in the final piece. A song is like building a house, you might have an idea, but you sketch it up on paper first. When actually building the house and putting your idea into practice, you’re bound to find things aren’t going to go exactly with your original idea. So rather than erecting a house that leans at a 45-degree angle on one side because you don’t want to dig any deeper for the foundation, you adapt. Whether the loop ends up in its original form, altered a bit or something completely new is created – in the end it needs to fit.
I never found myself using loops when I started, because I felt it was unoriginal and tacky. If those are your thoughts, then by all means don’t use loops. I myself find there’s no shame if you can build something that in the end sounds great, yet original. There’s much to be said as well about a balance when using loops. Without that balance you could end up with something completely generic, or something that lacks a good sound.
Ditto Jake on point 4. about rerecording loops. It gives your tracks their own flavour and you can mess around with the phrasing and timing a little too for that extra piece of “original”.
Also when cutting up a loop try shifting the cuts onto different beats of the bar or even onto note subdivisions. This can really create some unique phrasings and can inspire other cool ideas from a fairly stock standard loop.
With drum loops try replacing drum sounds or layering sounds over the top of the loop. This can also be a great way to get something that is a little more your own.
Loops:
1. Chop Them! Don’t just use them as whole cloth. If you separate the loop using a Dr. Rex, or a Kong in Reason, or whatever DAW you use, most have some sort of way to separate the loop into its component parts. Use it! That way, it’s much easier to come up with something that doesn’t sound like every music bed of every local commercial on your TV.
2. Process them! Totally whack it out with reverb, delay the beejeezus out of it, compress it like a trash compactor. Remember, your trying to come up with a sound that is yours. Don’t settle for something you’ve heard before.
3. Don’t get caught up! These things are put out for your use. Don’t let anyone tell you not to use them, or let anyone convince you to use them. It’s your music! Do what YOU want!
Needing loops depends on the style of music. If you are in a five-man-band making conventional rock music there’s no need in using pre-defined loops.
As a producer of dance-music there’s nothing bad to use loops. In the end counts the final result. If the song is good, then it doesn’t matter if it consists of loops from a sample-library or if it’s all self-constructed.
It’s the same as sampling. How many chart hits have been made using samples from other artists?
People want to dance. They don’t care about whether the synth part is a loop, made with a preset from your soft-synth, self-constructed from the scratch or from a hardware-synthesizer worth of 3000 dollars.
You can buy a freezed pizza and add your own ingredients. That’s okay if the pizza tastes good at the end. The same principle applies to loops… :-)
I think it depends on the music you’re making. I make dubstep, electro and drum and bass and I use drum loops quite a lot but I’ll high pass them, sidechain them to the kick and maybe add some reverb. Sometimes I’ll change the pitch or bitcrush them. If it fits with your track and you like the sound of it then go ahead and use them. Don’t let anyone tell you not to use them.
I don´t recomend you to use loops. It´s a technique really overused. Write your own music and have fun.
It’s actually possible to write your OWN music using foreign loops. But you can even write your own loops, if you own no other loops… But if you feel good only without owning loops, go for it. Don’t let your creativity ending up in an infinite loop… :-)