Loop Based Composition

loop_composingWhen I first encountered the concept of music loops many moons ago when the only real player was ACID I didn’t quite get what to do with them. Sure auditioning them , stringing them together was fun. Jamming to them was somewhat fun but what else? I got the concept of drum files. Those substituted the very expensive drum machines I had collected through my years. Drum loops made sense. Everybody needs a drummer and drum parts let’s face for the most part are the same per genre. However the notion of using other types of loops to create my material just didn’t make sense. I mean no matter if they were royalty free , it still felt like stealing and at the very least terribly un-original. Of course , again I was filtering through my own lenses.

Loops do have a place in music creation e.g. music for commercials i.e otherwise known as jingles, loops for film scoring etc. For original works loops can have a place as well . They can indeed be your muse , that source of inspiration which sparks your next great tune. Sometimes you just need something to rattle your brain. They are particularly helpful if you are trying to force yourself to write in a particular vibe or genre.

Apple’s Logic Pro comes with a ton of loops. Today I decided that I was going to attempt my luck at a laid back bossa feel. I simply took the first of every bossa thing Logic had for me i.e. drums, bass, piano and guitar. All of these loops are in this case midi based and all using the internal Logic instruments.

That results in this:

4 thoughts on “Loop Based Composition

    1. Charles Post author

      I used to have some of his albums. The questions is what do you do with something like this What’s interesting is that Logic has the notion of a chord track which means that you can specify chord voicings in said track which forces the rest of Apple midi and audio loops follow the changes. So point being, loop based composition as a means of creating material is an approach. It reminds me of what I used to do with Band in the Box except that I first setup the changes , chose a style and then generated a midi file to import into my DAW.

      I will explore this further and see if I can be inspired to generate something interesting.

        1. Charles Post author

          the questions is whether that’s enough to inspire me or do I use the global chord track to specify chords which these tracks will accommodate to and then jam or vocalize a melody. An experiment either way.

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