Are you a "loops" kinda guy? Why or why not?

[rasputin1963]

So often over the past ten years, I've been telling myself I need to learn how to make music by using repeating loops.

 

I still really don't know how, and am not especially impelled to learn, frankly. The whole idea, in fact, leaves me cold, because it kinda feels like a "retrogression" to me in terms of the way I was taught to make music... But hey, everybody's doin' it, right?

 

SONAR 6 now has many great new tools for creating loop-based songs. maybe I should buckle down and learn.

 

What say you? are you a "loops" kinda guy?

[Raymar]

I've done some looped stuff and I see it as an ancient way of creating music really, very tribal. Its music that's very in the moment and not going anywhere, very meditative. But that can also be achieved without loops in a wandering way by continuous improvising.

 

But I'm also a modern guy and I like euro structure too, being an ambient artist I like combining the two in various degrees.

 

Steve

[UstadKhanAli]

I know a lot of people are really really opposed to loops, but if you use them in an interesting manner, something that's continually evolving and swirling, it can be quite mesmerizing. I'm usually (although not always) bored by someone taking a two-bar drum loop and looping it over and over ad nauseum.

 

I also like looping in the sense that, say, a guitarist uses one of those loop things like JamMan or Boomerang or whatever, but I don't suppose you're talking about that.

 

I'm mentioning this because I think sometimes people have a knee-jerk reaction: loops = bad. And I know that there are people out there making compelling music with loops. You just have to be imaginative. Raymar has a good post about loops above.

[panthalassa]

 

I think sometimes people have a knee-jerk reaction: loops = bad. And I know that there are people out there making compelling music with loops. You just have to be imaginative. Raymar has a good post about loops above.

 

 

Good point! I started getting into loops around the time I got an EMAX sampler, and I always practice guitar and bass with some sort of drum loop. But I know of times when I'm composing when I'm about to go crazy because some loop's repetitive cycle becomes incessant. In this way, strangely, I feel my creativity is boosted as I plot out alternatives. Before I know it, I have a composition.

[alphajerk]

i like loops for the reason raymar stated, meditative... i like improv too. both have their strengths and weaknesses.

 

there really isnt anything to "learn" per se... just do it. lots of things to explore with it.

[UstadKhanAli]

And remember...you can loop anything. It can be as short or as long as you want. Some loops that people did with tape were over a minute. And again, it can be anything. I've looped gamelan orchestras before, cloudy atmospheric things, night crickets, etc., so don't just think drums and bass.

[Anderton]

I use loops and standard parts, and create loops out of standard parts, and get great drum sounds by using the Discrete Drums loop libraries, and get great sounds by not using loops at all. Just sometimes they work really well, and sometimes...they don't.

 

Of course, EVERYONE should buy all the loop libraries I've done

[monstermaker]

I've been using EZ Drummer and Groove Monkee for drums in Sonar. I don't know if these qualify as loops but they've made my life a breeze.

[Lee Knight]

I used loops 10 years ago. I was actually thinking of sneaking some of that in on this new project I'm working on. The interesting thing is you can use the Acid paradigm in very unexpected ways. By superimposing loops created from the song itself as the source material, and using these new "loops" in out of context ways, you end in a place you never would have...

 

For instance...

 

There is a guitar theme in the intro to the song. A melody that is identifiable as the intro to this song. By taking that guitar melody, time compressing it in half, running it though a filter, distortion and timed delays, them mixing that as a repetitive loop behind the bridge, which may have different chords but the same key... like I said, you end up somewhere completely different but somehow sounding right.

[Lee Knight]

Here's another thing to consider.

 

What usually happens is a song gets put together, created actually from loops. But what if you turn the process around on itself. In Acid, record you playing a song that works of yours, by playing guitar ans sing along with a guide loop that works feel wise. Now take the guide loop away. Now start looking for elements to support that acoustic guitar and voice. Stay away from idiomatic techno loops. Look for junkyard rhythms maybe... a cello loop. Whatever, but find things that support your song.

 

Don't use loops in a turn it on and leave it fashion either. Create a longer form. From a cello loop, break up the phrase into smaller phrases and reconstruct back into entirely new phrases using a macro view to think in terms of "long form". Etc. blah, blah.

[Magpel]

I'm a "human feel" junkie, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing the value in loops and from being awed by their artful manipulation.

 

And then when you listen to all of time-corrected modern rock bands with their snap-to-grid drummers, you say, might as well use loops!

[Rabid]

They can be a great starting point, enabling you to get an idea down before it fades from memory. It is also nice to pretend your computer is a group of musicians, and the loops can be ideas they are suggesting while you are creating a song. If the melody is mine I don't really care who plays the filler, as long as it is good.

 

Robert

[Alndln2]

 

SONAR 6 now has many great new tools for creating loop-based songs.

 

You don't neccessarily have to use them for complete songs. For instance, I'm mostly linear based, but through overdubs and almost never use pre recorded audio loops, but I do use the groove clip feature in Sonar for midi. If I play a keyboard line or bass line or anything else in midi that needs to be repeated for a few bars I just groove clip it(acidize of sorts)and pull it out as long as I need it, and if the whole section repeats the same way Sonar lets you pull all of them the same way simultaneously. I'll also fly in a pre recorded loop for a part or whatever in a rare instance, or even use a whole drum track that way and embellish it with real playing. So no, I never rely on loops for complete songs, just when it fits or is needed and mainly as a convenience for looping/stretching my own midi parts.

[tradivoro1]

Although I rarely use loops, I've used accompaniment loops, where I create one midi part that's going to modulate at different points, loop the one accompaniment figure, and then modulate the loop at the different points where there's a harmonic change... I think maybe once I used a drum loop... I can see the value of this for certain types of music, most of the music i do has a lot of changes, so I don't really use them...

[tucktronix]

I'm not a real big fan of loops, will use them every once in a while to add a little motion to a track(under a sequenced drum track), or a synth pad. I've only used them in a pair of my tracks thus far. Like the earlier poster(tradivoro1), my material has a lot of changes, and I would prefer more realistic fills done my liking.

[blue2blue]

For much of the nineties I had a live-loop act (using at first a simple digital delay with a 7.6 second loop and, later, a pair of the original JamMans) and played solo (and in collaboration with others) in coffee houses and clubs. (It was called Frippenstein, after Bob Fripp's Frippertronics rig.) I mostly used keyboards but often threw in guitars. One of my frequent collaborators, Michael Rothmeyer is a guitarist who also has used loops prominently in his music.)

 

Building your own loops a pass at a time is challenging -- a lot like working without a net -- and can be pretty fun and pretty scary, too, when there are a whole bunch of people waiting to see what the hell you're going to do next -- and you're wondering, too...

 

Anyhow... with the short delay times on those old delays I got powerful sick of things going around and around -- even when I had two JamMans and could switch back and forth, do some layering, etc, and run a drum machine with an uneven beat match against the loop -- meaning a little more variety as I looped, say, three bars but the drum machine was set up in blocks of four and could be triggered for fills... it was, in fact, the drum machine that kind of started wrecking things, somehow... my ethereal music started sounding a lot more like everybody else's beat-driven electronica.

 

 

 

And that brings us around to using conventional, pre-recorded loops.

 

The first band I was in that used loops was back in '83-'84, using samples and some very simple loops from an Emulator 1. We never made it out of my little living room four track studio, but we came up with some interesting music. (Most of it was more sample oriented than loop oriented; the Emulator just didn't have much memory.)

 

 

Later (overlapping my Frippenstein phase to some extent) I'd play with more advanced samplers, creating my own loops from recorded music (which never saw the wild) and finally buying a (wildly inexpensive German) loop library when I finally broke down and bought ACID 2, after resisting it ("too easy") for a long time.

 

And I have to tell you... it was, indeed, too easy... I guess I just need more backpressure from my tools... I did a few things -- and one or two of them definitely amused me (here's one that I can still listen) but, ultimately, I found it kind of uninvolving for me.

 

That said, I've frequently in the past chopped up and recombined percussion loops and dropped them in to mixes to taste... but because of the way I worked, the "loops" were rarely reptitive in the normal loop sense (though I would often drop a repeated section into a chorus or refrain to tie things together.)

[alfonso]

Somehow I am, although (sorry Craig...) I never used commercial loops in my life...I modify and treat them so much that a freeware library I collected during years from magazines is more than enough together with hundreds I made on my own. But.....

 

it's very difficult you could recognize any one of them, I use them in a Scope modular patch, usually, changed in speed, granulized, filtered, chopped and all this processing has different cycles over time, so it's never the same...It has happened in few cases that i used something constant along the track, but it never sounded as the source.

 

I generally use audio snippets as a sort of long waveforms to shape.

 

They are not many though, I prefer to synthesize directly, I like to build percussion with waveforms, shapers and filters and some processing like frequency (not pitch) shifting delays.

 

[brewgoodbeer]

I think loops have their place. No music should be stagnent. I think too many people let their music get this way and they just happened to use loops. Loops can be effective tools as many have mentioned above. When done poorly, they can really stink.

 

When you think about loops remember that they started out as not being recorded at all. Legit composers have been writing repeating parts for years. Think about a fugue. While there are some differences in key and counterpart, they essentially are loops. In the comtemporary period composers wrote twelve tone pieces that had tone loops that used all twelve chromatic tones, not necessarily in the same octave, and then repeated the tones over again. Thus the name tone loop. Some of them were crap, and some were interesting. Music should never be boring. I have not mastered keeping loops full of life and I am inclined not to use too many of them. I do however use them to create drum parts, and bass lines.

[Hard Truth]

When I wasn't working with a drummer I found loops very useful for creating tracks and i had much more success with Acid loops than with a drum machine. Now that I have a band with drummer and bassist I don't use the loops so much but many of our songs were originally composed with loops. Not surprsingly, the live rhythm section took the rhythms to new and interesting places. But the loops were a good way to let the rhythm section know the type of feel I was looking for.

[Hard Truth]

Loops make for easy rhythms for dancing, and they can create a hypnotic effect. The hypnotic effect is why several genres using repetitive loops are favored by recreational drug users.

 

Almost always when i hear someone complaining that a song is too repetitive due to the use of loops, the complaint comes from a musician. Most listeners don't notice or care, at least consciously. I've noticed that musicians not accustomed to electronic and/or dance music tend to focus, and complain about, the repetitve loops, and not hear the subtle shifting of timbres or counter rhythms that is also going on during a song. In other words, they are not seeing the forest because of the trees.

[brewgoodbeer]

I think loops have their place. No music should be stagnent. I think too many people let their music get this way and they just happened to use loops. Loops can be effective tools as many have mentioned above. When done poorly, they can really stink.

 

When you think about loops remember that they started out as not being recorded at all. Legit composers have been writing repeating parts for years. Think about a fugue. While there are some differences in key and counterpart, they essentially are loops. In the comtemporary period composers wrote twelve tone pieces that had tone loops that used all twelve chromatic tones, not necessarily in the same octave, and then repeated the tones over again. Thus the name tone loop. Some of them were crap, and some were interesting. Music should never be boring. I have not mastered keeping loops full of life and I am inclined not to use too many of them. I do however use them to create drum parts, and bass lines.

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

Jeff Mills is a producer who made at least one album where every tune is a very short loop.

 

The album I brought after I heard the music in a club is titled;

JEFF MILLS

"PURPOSE MAKER"

Warner Music Switzerland

 

I personally think Jeff is the genius in this underground sector, of course you can not listen to this music more the twice, but that's already a lot cosidering the stiritual quality of todays pop music.

 

.

[nat whilk II]

There's a particular art to making an excellent rythmic loop. First it's gotta have an immediate appeal on its own, plus, and second, this is the hard part, it has to hold up under repetition, even get more interesting.

 

Some rhythm loops sound great for a couple of rounds, but after 8 bars or so they get annoying and idiotic sounding.

 

My first reaction to loops was definitely old-school - really negative, like most old-school guys first reaction. I bought stuff that I read rave reviews of that was from the early 90s looped music and tried to get my brain around it. Couldn't make the stretch for a few years...

 

Then almost all of a sudden I got it, and yes, it was that hypnotic thing about good loops that opened me up. In some difficult to describe subtle way, I had to shift from hearing the music as a storyline to hearing it more like a mantra.

 

In the mode of storyline listening, looped music seems to go nowhere, do nothing, and it gets irritating real fast because of frustrated expectations.

 

In the mode of "mantric" listening, looped music has a centering effect from which all this energy just seems to be generating. It's both more machinelike and more physical than storyline mode.

 

I didn't predefine any of this, I just kept listening and trying stuff out and bingo, one day I dug it. Only later did I try to define the shift to myself.

 

Some days I want the humane depth and intelligence of the storyline. Some days I just want to get lost in the trance. no pun intended.

 

Because of the strength of these two poles, storyline and mantra, most music seems to center around one or the other. Not many artists can pull off both at once. Some of Underworld's stuff seems to dip into both modes, but even then its kinda of a "verse-chorus" thing where the "verse" has spoken word and then the "chorus" ramps up the focus on the loops.

 

nat whilk ii

[rasputin1963]

 

Loops make for easy rhythms for dancing, and they can create a hypnotic effect. The hypnotic effect is why several genres using repetitive loops are favored by recreational drug users. Almost always when i hear someone complaining that a song is too repetitive due to the use of loops, the complaint comes from a musician. Most listeners don't notice or care, at least consciously. I've noticed that musicians not accustomed to electronic and/or dance music tend to focus, and complain about, the repetitve loops, and not hear the subtle shifting of timbres or counter rhythms that is also going on during a song. In other words, they are not seeing the forest because of the trees.

 

 

This is exactly so... My prejudice, perhaps is that I always considered rhythmic, pitch and arranger's to be "the thing" in music... and its as though the modern breed of dance composers have "musicalized" things-- as you say, counter rhythms and timbres-- which I didn't necessarily consider "fair game" for composition... or at least not my first choice for musical change...

 

I suppose I can "bend" my composer's ideas, though.

[Consul]

Toto's "Africa" is played on a drum loop bedrock: http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_totos_africa/

 

The first couple iterations of the Doctor Who theme was all based on a couple of short tape loops.

 

Alan Parsons himself stated that "Mammagamma" from Eye In the Sky was mostly loop-based (other than some guitar work and drum fills), done with a Fairlight Series III if I recall correctly. In fact, listening to most of the songs on Vulture Culture and Ammonia Avenue is enough to tell me that they stuck with that style of song construction in the studio. "Separate Lives" is almost certainly loop-based.

 

Loops can be done well, or they can be done poorly, is what I guess I'm saying here.