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Filed under: Audio •

Straight Advice on Loop-Based Music

Simpler Alternatives

Loop-based music composition tools have made creating music easier, but they still require you to have a sense of music and how to construct a song. Without this, it’s easy to create a cacophony without a clear start or end.

If you’re not quite ready to make the leap to composing or arranging your own music, but still want more flexibility than a standard stock music library provides, check out SmartSound’s SonicFire Pro. SmartSound offers a large number of license-free music libraries where each song has already been edited into the measures, phrases and sections that make it up, and then includes encoded clues as to which sections go together and which ones don’t. Their software provides an interface to these libraries where you can search for music based on styles and moods, select from a few variations provided for each song, and define the running time you need. SonicFire will then rearrange the song’s building blocks to create a customized piece of music for you, without the need to arrange the sections yourself (although it also has an editor where you can dive in this deep if you so desire). Click here to view a video I created at SmartSound’s request on how to use SonicFire Pro in conjunction with After Effects to create a score for a PSA commercial.

SonicFire Pro’s Maestro makes it easy to select a piece of music from a large library, and to enter the duration needed.

There are other intelligent assisted-composition programs available. One is Abaltat’s Muse, which has been reviewed here on PVC by Steve Hullfish last year, as well as by Mark Spencer in the first PVC Pipeline | Post newsletter (to not miss future articles, subscribe here).

A Deeper Alternative

If you like creating your own music using a loop-based tool such as Soundtrack, and want to go farther, check out Ableton’s Live. This program gives you two ways to compose music out of loops: either arranging them with the typical grid layout of other programs, or an interactive realtime interface where you can turn individual loops on and off on the fly, allowing you to instantly hear whether or not a particular combination or progression is going to work. It can also record your realtime improvisations and present you with a grid layout of what you did (so you don’t miss that sudden, lucky thunderbolt of inspiration), and then edit it further. Live also provides a wide set of enhancements over typical loop-based programs, including integrating its loop editing utility within the arrangement program, as well as a providing a number of parameters to precisely edit how a loop is warped to fit your chosen tempo or musical key. Live is the tool I use for my own compositional efforts.

In addition to a normal linear view of your composition, Ableton’s Live allows you to interactively create music by turning individual loops off and on in real time, including the ability to edit your loops in the same application while the piece is playing.

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