Loops & Construction Kits

How many of you guys here use preconstructed loops in your music? I have a bunch of them from various resources, but never understood if people actually used them. Personally - using loops would feel like being 12 years old again, fooling around with Sony Acid “making” music, lol. Or maybe it’s not that uncommon?

i use loops sometimes but when i do i usually mangle them beyond recognition, and i will avoid them being the prominent drum/sound in my track. i like variation. when i use a loop i’ll use the 09xx command on it liberally as well.

That I understand. And I guess using loops to quickly build up a track and discarding them later sounds like a good idea too

i use drum loops as support drums or just plain background noise sometimes (depending on the song), mainly to fill the “gaps”. making your own loops and distorting them afterwards is fun too.

i personally don’t subscribe to the mindset that using loops is like cheating (same with presets) BUT … it’s quite easy to spot a person that uses a known set of loops or presets especially when they are the defaults that came with the DAW. :D

There’s nothing wrong with loops or samples that are preconditioned. I’d consider this an after the fact approach to constructing music with more emphasis in cutting and dsp chain techniques.

Currently I prefer to synthesize or record from scratch. This is still somewhat an after the fact approach, after such and such type of synthesis, hardware, software, etc. Everything gets measured and most of the control is done on the source before the added cutting and dsp chain techniques.

pre-made loops are the TV dinner of music

How can I make breakbeat music without any loops? Drums in drumloops just sound the best, hard to beat that in tracker. Is Amon Tobin 12-year old? I bet he uses some loops.

There are many ways to break a beat, many ways to spread them out, many ways to use a tracker***, many ways to track about. Amon Tobin is more than 12 years old. And loops are the poops about and throughout the world of music, that movie with John Cusack, that song about the Sugar Shack, cheap sampling keyboards from RadioMac, Donald’s Trump Hotel elevator muzak, the President of the United State’s press pack, ageless recordings of, above, below, and also underneath, the abominable Kool Keith, and that fantastic album by Goldie. What was it called?

Stay away from me loopeople!

I use whatever helps me create a song that has an appeal to me. Sometimes I mic the drums in my studio, sometimes I plug in my guitar, sometimes I take out my percussions and record those, sometimes I pick oneshot samples from my library, sometimes I use a loop or a riff from a construction kit. No rules whatsoever. It’s the outcome that matters, no?

I have more admiration towards people who manage to create music that please me than towards people who make everything from scratch and possess some major technical skills. Personal interest.

This.

If you feel a loop will take your song to where you want it to be, use it. You can’t cheat in art.

This debate reminds me a bit of the early days of synthesizers and sequencers - artists using synthesizers where just “pressing a button, not real musicians”.
I guess it’s a post-modern debate with roots from guys like Marcel Duchamps calling it “ready mades” calling a urinal “fountain” when putting it on display,

and conceptual art was born. Must art include handicraft or is it enough to have an idea, presented by combining things made by others?

i think most of the loop haters here (myself included) are referring to commercially produced shit “NOW: That’s what I call loops! vol.1”, though there’s nothing wrong with making your own loops, or (somewhat significantly) modifying these loops until the modification is uniquely your own. most musicians interested in having a unique sound would agree that using commercial loops without modification eliminates an enormous amount of artistic merit.

the very dichotomy depends on the artist’s intentionality, or lack thereof. provided with 10 legos, one could certainly build a decent number of unique creations, however, the agent’s intentionality and creative freedom is proportionally limited by the finite number of possible lego combinations.

Mushen is right, they’re like LEGO

You just have to be creative…


took about three sessions.

I’ve heard few times an argument like “You just can’t get the same feeling and atmosphere without samples and loops”. That just makes me wonder “How the heck was the original made then?”.

I think everyone have seen this, but I think it is still relevant.

Kits are essentially just musical pieces made with the concept that they should be easy to remix, so I don’t think there’s much difference between sampling a rnb song from the 60s and sampling a construction kit from 2009.
But… While I’m all for using any and all tools available I’ve actually never used any loops or even samples that were made for the purpose myself. To me it makes it less fun and it’s sooo simple to make a generic, anonymous sounding amen/dnb/2-step loop in renoise and that’s the best you’ll ever get from a kit unless you want your music to sound like someone else’s, but there’s nothing “better” about doing it yourself.

And for all you pious anti-copypasters consider Gounod’s Ave Maria, one of the most revered musical pieces in the occidental tradition but essentially what Gounod did was take one of Bach’s preludes, take some lyrics from an old catholic prayer book and make up a melody to sing it with that goes along with the prelude.

I think…
Actually I don’t know…
No, I don’t use them.

+1 for making me laugh

I use them all the times. From a variety of sources. I often edit the shit out of them loops or whatever, but not always. Also, I don’t feel any sort of guilt or whatever. Sound is sound. I sample commercial packs, amateur packs, audio CD’s, vinyls, FLAC’s, and shady MP3’s encoded by your little sister in winamp. Lossy, Lossles, don’t give a damn. Sound is sound.

I’ve tried a few times to make tunes based on loops provided in competition sample packs but I always seem to end up binning the result. I’ve got nothing against people using loops but for me it’s just too much fun to sample/record/make my own sounds - it’s just a nice feeling making something from “nothing”. Ripping loops out of old records I can understand, but buying some “Now… Commercial Loops Vol XXI” just seems to be a bit impersonal.