How to Play Along With Loops: Songwriting

Video Transcript

"Hi this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about playing along with loops to get new ideas for your songs. Now as I write songs I often have a general piece that I want to work with but I don't know what I want to put on top of it. In my method is to make a loop out of the stuff that I have already have and like and then plug in to the computer either with the keyboard or a guitar or a microphone and play along with it. Just come up with ideas that way. So, for example, I have this one piece that I like that we went like this (playing) and I didn't know what I want to put on top of it. So I made a loop of that part and it was just that part and I put it a little bit of drums (playing) so I play that part over and over again, I took out my guitar and I started to play along with it. (playing) That was the part that I settled on so I recorded that part so this purple area right here is where I sat down, I hit record and played that part and recorded. I made a loop about that part so now the sound that I had to work with are those 3 different parts. The original and the drum I looped. Well now that I have that stuff, I'm going to record some more guitar and play along with it. And I liked all those different parts. So what I did next, I looped all of those. Now all I have is all these different parts I played. It was just one set and I looped and I copied them over and over again. So I can play along with them just like if they were just some other music in the background but I'm playing along with. Now as you can see the whole idea of stems from one little idea that I just played over and over again, kept playing on top of and as soon as I came up with a new idea. I combined two ideas into one piece so I can therefore play back again and again. It's really the equivalent of playing something on a tape recorder and play along with it. If I were to record a part on my tape recorder and play back a tape recorder and play along with it with my guitar is the same thing only this is much more sophisticated. You can keep on playing more and more music to play along with. Basically you can create the entire backing band that plays one part over and over again for you so that you can come up with the next idea."