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Straight Advice on Loop-Based Music

For many years now, artists have been creating music using loops - musical phrases that can be repeated or strung together as building blocks of a song. This technique opened music creation to a large number of artists who may not be musicians themselves, but who had strong musical ideas: they could arrange these blocks into new compositions of their own without having to play all the instruments. We’re not talking just hip-hop or dance music, or phrases “sampled” from other songs; this movement is supported by literally hundreds of fully-legal copyright-clean dedicated loop libraries available from musicians and producers in every genre you can imagine.

In the past, most video editors and motion graphic artists were largely unaware of this technique, figuring that if you needed music to go with your visuals, you either had to be a musician, or license music created by someone else. Apple Computer changed that when they started bundling their loop-based music software Soundtrack with every copy of Final Cut Pro. Nowadays, many visual artists have been experimenting with loop-based composition to create scores customized to the length or mood they desire for their projects, using programs such as Apple’s Soundtrack Pro and Garageband on the Mac, Adobe’s Audition or Sony Media’s ACID Pro on Windows, or Ableton’s Live - my personal favorite - on either platform.

However, being handed a tool does not mean you instinctively know how to get the most out of it. Although these programs encourage experimentation - and wonderful, happy accidents regularly happen - a touch of background in music will help you get more out of them so you can create scores that sound “just like real music.” We’ll cover some of those fundamentals here, as well as several of my favorite tricks. We’ll also mention some alternatives to these tools. While the visual examples are primarily from an older version of Soundtrack, you can apply these same techniques to virtually any loop-based tool you choose.

Beat This

As an editor or animator, one of your primary concerns is how events evolve over time. Time is a central element in music as well - but it uses a different language than you may be used to, focused on beats rather than frames.

A beat is a fundamental element of time in music, and is often used to describe its basic pulse. The steady “thump thump thump” in much modern dance music are beats. When you tap your toes or fingers to music, you are often following the beats. The tempo of music is defined by how many beats there are per minute (bpm for short). Beats are often accented in music with a drum hit; this makes them easy to spot in an audio waveform, as the spikes of drum hits often stand out. Note that not every drum hit is a beat, nor will every beat will be accented with a drum hit - but overall, they provide a good clue or starting point.

The next major building block in time is the bar or measure. This is normally the smallest element of time you will be dealing with in loop-based music software. Although it varies by music style, there are usually four beats to a measure. The first beat in a measure is referred to as the downbeat (sometimes called “the one” - as in “...and then the edit lands on the one”). Rather than just tapping your fingers, you can practice “counting music” by repeating “one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four” over and over again in time with whatever music you are listening to. When counting, place an emphasis on the one, as it is often used as an anchor point for edits or keyframes; in general, beats form a nice time grid for editing or keyframing.

Next up the ladder are musical sections, and the phrases that make up the sentence or paragraph of each section. Most phrases are “powers of two” measures long: one measure, two measures, four measures, eight measures, and so on. These phrases help form larger structural elements in songs, such as the intro, verses, choruses, and the end. The figure below shows an example of a short piece of music that has been spotted for its beats and measures, as well as overall structural elements:

Spotting the beats in a piece of music. The strongest spikes in the audio waveform are drum hits, which help us find the beats. Note that not every drum hit is a beat, and not every beat falls on a clear drum hit! However, beats should be evenly spaced in time.

This is where loop-based music software comes in: It allows you to arrange individual loops - which each represent a musical phrase - into musical sections, and eventually into an entire song or score. Loops sometime contain every musical instrument needed to fill out a song, but more often they contain individual instruments such as the drums, the bass, the guitar, the keyboards, and so forth. Therefore, in addition to arranging loops horizontally in time, you also arrange them vertically to create interesting orchestrations as they layer together (see the figure below). Indeed, there are useful analogies between composing music and how you edit a story or create a multilayered opening title out of individual elements or clips; thinking dramatically will help you arrange loops into music.

A score created from loop segments. Note how layers build over time, drop in and out, and switch between variations to build tension and maintain interest. (Click to open a larger version of the figure in order to see more detail.)

next page: The Magic Tempos

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