Pros and Cons of Using Loops

[Bertha Russell]

If you don't know what loops are, they are audio samples. Sounds, drum
beats, bass lines, etc. Piece of sound, that can either be played, or
'looped' through a song. Its the old practice of sampling from albums,
taken to another level.
There are loop libraries made by some very famous musicians, and a
whole horde of producers.
Ok now you know what they are, you are asking what are they for.
Well...you can use them to make your own songs, with nothing but
loops. You can also use them to add touches to songs you have
recorded. Since using them to add "color" to songs is common in music
production, I'm not going to focus on that. I'm going to talk about
producing loop based songs.
The pro's of making music based on loops:
First is that you don't need to learn all the instruments or hire
people to record with. You do need to learn how to make them into
something people will listen to, in essence the computer and your
software becomes your instrument.
Second is comparative cost. You can buy loop collections for as little
as 10 dollars, all the way up to a couple hundred for the superior
quality collections. That may seem expensive; especially since there
is a tendency to collect loops, but compared to the cost of hiring
musicians, its far cheaper.
Third is that it gives you a whole world of sounds, styles and effects
to work with, right on your computer.
Now the con's
Mainly the problem with loops is they are repetitive. All the tricks
in the world wont make up for the fact, that you cant really improve
with loops the way a real musician can. With a little learning, and
some tricks you can fake it pretty well, but it still removes the
wonderful human element, and the chance for happy accidents during jam
sessions.
It can also become difficult; even impossible, to get the sound you
want. You might have an amazing drum track lined up, you found a bass
loop that is killer, you even found an awesome rhythm guitar loop that
works. You spent hours cutting, pasting and tweaking it to get a
realistic rock sound, and arrangement. Only one things missing, and
its the one thing loops cant do. Give you lead guitar that matches
everything else perfectly.
The same can be said of any genre of music.
So making songs with just loops is fun, its cheaper, it makes a great
hobby and its got a pretty smooth learning curve, but not having any
skill with an instrument, or musicians to work with limits what you
can do.
I still would recommend using loops as a way to learn music
production. Then you can increase the scope of your knowledge over
time to include instruments, recording other people, and all the other
fun stuff producers do.

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