How to Write Songs with Loops

Video Transcript

"Hi this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about writing exclusively with the loops. Now as a songwriter you're going to use loops from time to time with your digital recording as a way of having simplified things to record on top of. But, one thing that I've found is that if you have all these different ideas of melodies for a song but you have no idea of how you want to place them on top of each other, it's a very good idea to record them each individually as loops. And afterwards you can click and drag them on top of each other in any order that you want. And, you can build your own structure. You can build your own harmonies completely out of the original loops. So I had a song where there are really just a bunch of different loops that I wanted to try and I didn't know how I was going to lay them on top of each other. So, for example, there was a bass line that I had. That I looped so that I could play it over and over again. There was several different guitar parts that I liked. Here is one of them. And then there was this one which is very similar but a slightly different tone. There was and there was some lead guitar parts that I liked. So, we had this one over here. And then this one over here, this lead. So, what I did to record the song was to come up with all those different loops and then I layered them on top of each other in a way that I though helped build the intensity of the song. So I started off with just the bass. Well I start off with some drums actually that I threw in before that and the bass. Then I brought these two guitars in because those two guitars sound similar. And there was a dreamy guitar part that I thought should come on afterwards. Like this. And then after all that I thought ok the last loop that I liked that heavy, that heavier guitar part should come in towards the end because it grabs so much attention that nothing can really come in afterwards. This is going to be, nothing can follow it, so it has to come in at the end. So I placed it at the end. And there you have it. I have taken a whole bunch of loops and thrown them together to make a song. And it's a good approach when you have little parts that you like but you're not really sure how they are going to fit together until you start playing with them."