Copyright Free Drum Loops

[Maribeth Seagers]

Iwant to avoid any sort of infringement problems if I were to take my home recordings to the next level. I want to be sure that I own and have all the rights to the drum performance created in EZDrummer.

This album does NOT contain beats, loops, sound effects, or other audio that I downloaded from sample libraries or other public sources. This includes sounds that are available for free from GarageBand, Ableton, Logic, Fruity Loops, etc.

You are correct. TuneCore is explicit in stating the same exact thing as Distrokid. No YouTube monetization using songs with EZDrummer2 as the drummer as they are samples. This is disastrous for me. Very expensive to remedy. I simply cannot afford a drummer to go and rerecord the drum parts. I had planned on using YouTube as my primary advertising platform like Mary Spender. This is a kick in the teeth to Toontrack and all of the customers.

However you can clearly use them in your songs or live performances and edit/manipulate them to your liking and not break any copyright laws as long as you are the rightful/lawful owner of the License that granted these loops (in my case my Cubase 7.5 License).

You may encounter copyright issues later when you publish music on streaming services that contain unedited loops, because you are not the only one ... . It's always a good idea to process the loops uniquely.

This sounds great at first, but not needing to worry about royalties is not quite the same thing as not needing to worry about copyright, no? So I'm just wondering whether anyone knows what the situation is if you were to create a piece of music entirely from edited Apple Loops, who would the copyright belong to? Would you be allowed to put it online as your own? On a related note, what would the situation be if everything were written by you except the drums that were taken from Drummer? These are, strictly speaking, Apple Loops too, right?

Where it isn't fine is if you resampled Logic's content and made a commercial sample library from it - you don't *own* the copyright of the recordings in Logic's content, you own a license to use that content in your music.

As long as you are using Logic's content to make your music, there are no problems, and you own the copyright of the recording of the music, even through you don't own the copyright of the individual samples used in the creation of that music (which is no different to using, say Omnisphere in your music - you don't own the samples, but you do own the copyright of the music you made with those patches which used those samples as part of their makeup.)

I've no idea what you are asking for. All Apple Loops are audio loops. Green/ instrument Apple Loops *also* contain MIDI and instrument data, so you can use the MIDI parts as well, but if you drop a MIDI loop on an audio track, you'll just get the audio content.

In light of the many high profile plagiarism cases making headlines in the music business over the last few years (Lana Del Rey, Led Zeppelin, Robin Thicke, Sam Smith, etc.), it felt like the right time to examine the topic of songwriting from where we all sit: the drum throne.

As a starting point: any musical performance that is recorded in any form already has automatic copyright. This happens in the recording of that performance. In other words, nobody could sample or otherwise exploit your recorded performance without your consent.

So the real question we need to ask: are drumbeats considered songwriting? If they are, then they form part of the musical composition and would be protected under the law just like a chord progression, melody or lyric.

So really, the lack of protection affords us all the ability to do more in the studio. We can do this without the fear of being sued. Singers and guitar players, for example, do not have such a luxury.

Do you have any experience with traditional percussion, like traditional West African rhythms for Djembe drums?

There are several people who recorded these rhythms and also sell educational materials teaching them, but I am not sure if they could possibly have rights over the actual rhythms or just the records/educational materials.

What is your input on this?

Kurt, my son is drummer & has just left his band. They have informed him they are about to release a song with his drum recordings from their studio sessions. He is not happy about this so do you know were he stands with regard to credits and copyright. Thanks Mark

Hi There

My Son is recording his own songs using pre-set accompaniments on a Yamaha digital piano. Its a very clever machine which literally gives you an automated backing band so that you can compose your own songs in virtually any style with just a few chords. He is concerned that even though the songs are completely his own, the backing intros and endings etc would be subject to copyright and only usable for personal home use, not suitable for publishing in any public domain. Would appreciate your thoughts.

When he died in 2017, Clyde Stubblefield was considered one of the most influential drummers in music history, but he barely collected any royalties on the tracks that sampled his work. Should he have sought legal counsel and sued?

Hi Kurt. What if you download an mp3 of a pre-recorded drumbeat by a professional drummer (many are available online) and use that actual recording as the drum track in an original song you write, record and release.

I am trying to do some research about the copywrite of drum patterns and beats. I noticed that the most common answer to using drum beats from other songs are not copyright protected, only the sound recording.

This is a little confusing.

Hi,

I am a UK producer and I have sampled an actual 2 bar drum pattern from an artists cd. I have added in some of my own percussive instruments too.

Will this be legal to use? All other instruments used are from my own composition.

Many thanks,

Andy

Noone has asked royalties for apache or amen so far. The author and copyright owner of amen is apparently dead aswell. So I doubt there is much problem with it. They can be considered to be in public domain now anyway.

i saw some law-guy talking about that. its not just the rythm. there is also a lot of work in the setup, expensive studio toneingenieurs , equipment etc to make it sound like that. and thats the main reason we love to use this stuff. and this work is also protected by the copyright.

anyhow i try to stop using loops in general.

sience drums are so essential for my music i started drumming on my own

i use

-a roland drum pad and kick trigger for input

-some midi-ox scripting for round robin like triggering

-shortcircuit 1 for velocity layering and multichannel output

-a recorded multisample drum kit i found somewhere

in renoise of course

Does anyone know what the copyright position is regarding using instrument preset sounds in music you want to sell? I have a Casio WK3000 keyboard, and it has built-in drum presets and accompaniment patterns available. Can you use these rhythm or accompaniment patterns as part of a commercial piece of music? Who holds the copyright - Casio, the producers of the samples, or are they copyright free in the production of your own music? I plan to contact Casio about it, but I wonder if anyone has any ideas. Thanks.

Well, I'm a strong advocate for copyright owners rights, but clearly any synth maker that puts presets into their synths understands that these could be used in commercial recordings, and I'm sure many presets have been used in many records over the years. So I just cannot imagine you have even a slight concern over that.

3. now if you wanted to take the synth sounds, sample them, and then sell the sounds as a sample collection, you might have a legal problem carrying out that idea. I remember situations like this with some homegrown sample collections that were going the rounds some years back, and there were reports of some of the sellers getting shut down or at least scared into desisting.

For synths, sure. But regarding loops and sample libraries (software only), you really need to read the license agreement. Most of the time you'll be fine, but I've seen some that stipulate that you MUST credit them if you use their samples / loops on a CD you're going to offer for sale and other weird conditions placed on use for commercial purposes. And sometimes, you don't get to see the license agreement / terms until after you open the box, at which point, you can't return the product for a refund if you disagree... Fortunately, that has become pretty rare, but my advice is to check out the vendor's website for their license terms, or send them an email inquiring about them before throwing down your money.

By definition an instrument is a TOOL for making music. Any included sounds or loops originally packaged with the TOOL should be OK. They should be considered part of the TOOL. You may get in trouble however with loops that you add yourself from "TOP 40" hits though.

Thanks to everyone for replying. It might just be that I am being a canny Scot and making sure I have every base covered! I presumed that these presets were copyright free, but I have come across the odd article on the net telling you to take it back to the manufacturer if you're really unsure. On the Casio, accompaniment presets include drum, bass, guitar and keyboard elements that can be used to fill out certain chords, and that's one of the areas I was asking about; the other being drum patterns themselves. I appreciate the wisdom of you guys commenting on this; I guess sometimes you get a bit freaked out with these copyright scares. Still, I will contact Casio to see what they say. So far I haven't come across any copyright discussion in the Casio manual.

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