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Filed under: Composing •Market Served •Music Composition •

Straight Advice on Loop-Based Music

A Pick-Me-Up

To make a piece of music interesting, create dynamics and variations. This means don’t play all of the loop components all the time: Build a piece up by starting with one loop, then adding another with a different musical line, and then a third. After things are cooking along, introduce variations by dropping out one or more of the musical loops, or swapping in different loops. Again, this figure you saw earlier gives a simple example of how a piece of music can build over time:

Working this way reveals an inherent flaw in loop-based music composition: by default, nothing exists before or after the loops. In real music, a new instrument or musical line often announces its arrival with a pick-up: a drum roll, guitar strum, or couple of words before the downbeat of its first full measure. Also, stopping a loop that instant before the downbeat of the next measure can be unnatural; there is often at least one more note, drum hit, or sting that starts on the downbeat after the last full measure of a loop or musical phrase is finished, which then rings out and fades away. This is particularly true for the ending of a song.

Pick-ups are usually easy to fake with existing loops. Create an additional copy of the loop, and place it the measure before you intend the loop to start. Then trim or split it to include just the last beat or so before its end (see the figure below). If you have a “snap to grid” feature enabled, you may need to set it to a finer musical increment or turn it off altogether as you experiment with just how much to trim off. If a hard cut isn’t working, use a volume envelope to fade up the pick-up just before the downbeat of the first full loop. How long to fade is a “to taste” choice you have to make in each situation; audition a few different ideas before settling on one.

To introduce a “pick-up” before a loop starts, use an extra copy of the loop, trimmed to include just the last beat or two before the end. Here, we use a volume envelope (in purple) to help fade in the pick-up (in green, just above it).

Endings are trickier. You can sometimes get away with fading down a copy of the loop. I often keep the downbeat at full volume, and then fade down the rest of the segment over the next beat or so. Better is to provide a punctuation of your own, such as a cymbal, a big reverberating drum, or a guitar sting. I also like to use what I call “whoosh-bang” style effects which lead up to a big hit, and then ring out afterwards - like a drum roll into a cymbal crash. In general, whoosh-bang effects are great at hiding edits and transitions when editing music or introducing new elements. These one-shot types of sounds are inherently different than loops; you will need to turn off your loop software’s attempts to conform their timing to your score’s overall tempo, and manually place them in the overall timeline. A few approaches to endings are illustrated in the figure below:

There are several ways to end loops: fade out a copy of them (the top two layers), append a “one-shot” sound such as a cymbal crash to give it a final downbeat (the third layer), or cover the ending with a “whoosh-bang” sound that builds up, hits, and releases for a final sting (the bottom layer).

Some production music libraries offer up a selection of hits and stings, but it may be hard to match them to the mood of your song. A broad sound effects library (I use the Sound Ideas 6000 set) should have a good selection of drum hits; start there. Some web sites also allow you to purchase and download individual sounds - a good staring place is Sound Dogs, which offer both entire libraries and individual sounds for sale. When the situation calls for whoosh-bang effects with a lot of attitude, I like the Noise Generator library.

Construction Kits

Trying to create your own music out of a collection of individual loops can be daunting - and the hundreds or thousands of loops that often ship free with loop-based software can sometimes be more overwhelming than helpful! In this case, what you need are defined sets of loops that have already been created or selected to go together, so all you have to do is arrange and layer them without worrying about “does this go with that?”

Fortunately, such sets exist. They’re called construction kits, and have been created for musicians who quickly need to create pieces of music in particular styles such as hip-hop or cool lounge. One of the best companies in this area is Zero-G). On their home page, choose Construction Kits under the “By Instrument” popup in their CD Locator. I particularly like their “Pure” series, such as Pure Trip-Hop. Other favorites include the Beatnik Modular series, and libraries from e-lab such as Smoker’s Delight and Abstract Hip-Hop (now discontinued?). Loop libraries often come in multiple formats; make sure one of the formats on offer is compatible with the loop software you’re using - .wav is usually a safe bet.

Think buying a pre-packaged construction kit is cheating, and no “real” company would use these? A few years ago, one of the main scores playing over and over again at the Sony booth at NAB was the “9 Millimeter” set from the old “LA Riot 3” library. It’s successors as well as many other libraries are available from online sources such as Big Fish Audio and Sony Creative Software.

Repeat & Fade...

Hopefully this article has given you a few ideas of how to improve the soundtracks you create with loop-based music composition tools. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not creating cool songs and scores right away; after all, music is an entire art form onto itself. But as with any art, practice, experimentation, and applying ideas you’ve learned in other forms - such as editing and animation - will help you go farther.

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