A tale as old as time. How have others broken out of the loop?
Is it as simple as multitracking out to a daw with overbridge and recording clips? Is there another piece of gear that has helped in arranging?
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Load one of your favorite tracks into Ableton. Mark each section. Listen carefully, study what’s being added, what’s being removed, what changes, what’s being reused, remade or modulated – and take notes.
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Gasp, can’t believe this is as old as it is, but here’s my timeless advice:
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I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I think it depends what your goal really is. If you truly want to do music that is not based on loops then you’ll have to figure out how to genuinely compose longer-form structures, maybe melody or progressions, then write “accompaniment” for them.
One thing that works for me sometimes is to do an entire “loop-based” session of building up different tracks, sound designing them so they fit together, and then just erasing the entire sequence but keeping the sound design and mix. Then re-composing based on that. I find the second pass is usually better than the first.
But also sometimes “breaking out of the loop” can mean just making music that sounds less overtly loopy, more like obscuring the loop. Or, looping but maintaining interest.
I find this is what I actually want. I do like music with inherent repetition or loopiness, the trick is just to make it interesting, not boring, and not grating. Here are some more dirty tricks:
- Bring in two contrasting things at a time, not just one. So if you’ve built a cool, busy 4 bar loop and want to arrange it, start by having drums or whatever, then when it’s time to add something, add the bass AND something up top, like a hi hat. Next time around add some chords AND some congas. Or whatever. It’s surprising how quickly this obscures that you are “just” adding to a loop.
- Make a loop that’s overstuffed and make the variation taking parts away, or recomposing parts. I like the TE EP’s “commit” style workflow for this.
- Compose the parts of your track backwards. So where on the DT you might start with the kick on track 1, start your track with an atmosphere on track 8. I was made aware of this by a RMR video, I think, where he mentions that he never starts with drums. That’s a little too much for me — former drummer — but I try it out when I can. I also like to actually go numerically backwards through the tracks to sort of shock me out of my usual habits.
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Take your loop. Copy it. Mute parts and if it flows delete those parts. Copy main loop again do the same thing on different sounds.
Make another loop with same sounds and no sequences. Make a new sequence with the same sounds. Maybe add another sound or two.
Now you have an intro main A and main B plus a breakdown. You can do all of this in less than 10 minutes. It’s the kenny dope mpc workflow. I have seen him do it all in like 3 minutes.
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Arrangement is something you chiefly do with your brain - the gear is just the means by which you achieve that task.
If I didn’t have a sequencer then writing a piece of music would look pretty much like:
Come up with initial idea
This will have to be something I can actually play (there’s no point me writing a guitar part that Joe Satriani can play because I’m not Joe Satriani).
Fiddle around with idea until I get another idea.
Keep going like that until I’ve got a bunch of ideas.
Start forming that into some kind of structure - either a “stock” structure like “verse/pre-chorus/chorus”, or let the music “tell” me what the structure needs to be.
Keep going like that until I’ve got a rough first draft.
Play that a lot until I’m comfortable. Adjust things as I go along.
Once I’m happy the song’s as finished as it’s going to get, record the song.
None of this has anything to do with loops. Sure I might write regular phrases but I’m not thinking of looping anything (even if that’s effectively what’s happening during a verse or a buildup).
You build the ideas and the structure together. It’s (sort-of) a conversation between the ideas you have and what idea naturally leads into what other idea.
It’s also an iterative process. Sure you can sit down and think “A song comprises a verse and a chorus so now I will write a verse and then I will write a chorus”. That can be a good way to get yourself off the ground if you’re a bit stuck. But once you’ve got your initial ideas going the thing will take on a life of its own. If you then try to make it do something it doesn’t want to do you’ll have a fight on your hands and end up with a track that sounds like it’s a bit artificial.
Can be good practice doing that from time to time - help you think about creative ways to make an idea fit different scenarios - but it’s not really how that flow state of things tends to work IRL.
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Songs can be anything you want, but generally you need
Intro
A section
A section development
Transition to B section
B section development
Return to A section
Outro
Of course it can be simpler or more complex and follow any structure you want.
Writing a song isn’t magic though, you have to decide on a structure, copy your initial loop and start making new patterns and decide where that initial loop fits. Is it your A section? If so start building an intro, etc.
Think of each section as something that introduces and/or removes elements from the composition. Think about how these additions build energy or emotion etc. think about call and response, resolution and other composition devices.
Study music you like to see how it is structured (when do the drums change, how do they gradually layer instruments, how many primary sections are there, why do you really like specific sections) and then build your own songs which have a similar structure.
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Non-electronic musicians how to do arrangement by covering songs. I feel like that’s less common in electronic music (maybe because of DJing?), but there’s no reason we can’t do the same.
Try to recreate some songs you like. How long is each loop? 8 bars? 4? Are there smaller loops within a bigger loop? How many times does the loop repeat before a major change? How many bars does it take for smaller changes (filter sweeps, drum fills, etc) to happen within a section? What carries over between sections, and for how long? Etc. Ideally choose songs from different artists, maybe even different genres, to get a feel for different approaches. Then, start using those ideas on your own songs
When you’ve made that lovely loop, and got stuck in it for a while, copy it to a new pattern and delete all the sequence data. And make another loop.
If you can, make it complement the original with an evolving narrative. Or do something nuts and contrasting. Repeat.
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Totally depends on what you’re trying to make, I’m guessing if it’s in a good loop there maybe isn’t a strong melody that suggests a further song?
Maybe try just modulating the loops over a few mins and you’ll have a live feeling track, use faders to work out an arrangement on the fly, whatever feels good, don’t over think it.
If you get into multitracking and editing etc you’re just creating this additional much harder task that might put off arranging in the first place
Like others suggested: Do the arrangement. I use the song mode for that and it works great. It’s not too complex to use and you’ll quickly see if your loop is worth working on. In that phase, I usually notice that I am lacking some transitions here and there and even glaring mixing issues will become much more apparent.
Then I relisten to that thing and if I don’t come up with a B-section immediately, I might add a small intro, just something fun to work on. Or you derive an outro from that.
You can also do it the other way around - create new instruments but keep the sequence data. Change drum sounds to synths, add some drones, whatever you like. CTRL ALL is also very nice for that.
I personally don’t multi-track at this point (I rarely do it anyway) because I like to keep the exploration phase free from even more possible distractions.
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I recently started using way more modulation(or automation) on a loop, making it different each time. This definitely helps, same as mutes. Easy and fast way to break out, and find new loops within loops.
Melody is def something I struggle with overall but especially on the DT2
Do 1,000 takes, and then pick the best 100. No one will notice if it loops after the 100th different melody.
I like the same sequence, different sound approach you mention here
I’ve been wrestling with this problem for many years and I can confirm that it doesn’t stop in the daw.
At the end of the day, especially in electronic or instrumental music, a good arrangement is what makes a good song.
You can take a great loop you’ve created on your favorite gear and move it to a daw just to continue being stuck there.
One thing that really helped me progressing is something that previous posts are suggesting:
Take songs you like, analyze them until you understand:
- what are the different elements of the song
- When are they introduced and removed
- How are they composed to move from one section to the next
- What actually makes each individual section
- Why do the sections work?
I’ve done this with a handful of songs I enjoy listening to from various artists and genres and it really opened my eyes.
I realized that in almost all of them:
- there are not as many drum elements as one might think
- Each section has a main focal point and it can be a different one for each section
- There are typically: drums, a bass, some mid range instruments (keys, synths etc), a melody and effects for transitions
- The number of main instruments is typically surprisingly low. Layering and modulation is what makes the song sound more complex than it is
- Usually there’s always some sort of contrast that makes things work (applies to sound selection within each type of sound, but also on a „macro“ level in the arrangement)
What’s cool is that, once you’ve done this for a few songs you end up with a bunch of templates you can use for your own songs. You just replace the sounds with your own but you know that for certain sections you want to cover certain ranges of frequencies.
Anyways, as with everything I believe it really takes time and practice to get good at it.
Hope this helps.
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Yeah I need to try reference tracking a little more. I also saw advice that said on the DT2, try to add LFO modulation or a conditional trig to each track.
That way it feels more organic and has consistent movement without overthinking it. What to LFO? I haven’t figured that out yet but seems like a good way to keep things interesting
I’ve started realizing how much easier it is to cover a primarily electronic song in a satisfying way with a groovebox than it is when I’m just trying to learn a fully arranged rock or metal song on my guitar and it’s been educational. Just trying to reconstruct stuff like New Order and Depeche Mode and noticing when the music is actually simple and when it’s got tricksy little rhythms that sound like 4/4 loops but aren’t, that kind of thing.
Most often it shows me that I’m probably using too many sounds in my own compositions.
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One thing that I think is really important that isn’t mentioned a lot or thought about a lot is the repetitive structure of different parts of the arrangement. In other words, you don’t just have a one bar loop where everything repeats together.
Even in a highly repetitive piece of music, it becomes more interesting if different elements are different lengths. So for example maybe your drums are just a 1 bar loop, your chord progression is 2 bars long, your bass line is 4 bars, where the second repetition of the chord progression has a variation on the bass, you might have a lead melody line that’s 4 bars but at the end of the second repeat it does something different so that it’s effectively 8 bars, then maybe you have some fill like elements that come in at the end of 8 bars and some different elements that come in at the end of 16 bars and there you go you have a 16 bar section that doesn’t feel like a static loop. Basically none of the individual elements are longer than 2 or 4 bars but the way they are structured with variations and fills gives it variety.
I think the very static “loopy” feeling comes when all of these elements loop at the same point, like your drums, bass, lead line, and chords are all a 2 bar loop. Even if you add variation with muting/unmuting, fx moves, etc. it’s still fundamentally going to sound very musically static. Which might be what you want with certain dance music but either way, worth a thought.
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Sounds like a silly detail, but best thing i did to combat this, was get really really comfortable with muscle memory wise with the copy and paste combos for:
- trig
- page sequence
- pattern
- tracks/presets
This lets you fly around experimenting and thinking less man synced with machine.
Watch all the power users, they all crazy quick with their copy and paste game!
Sounds easy, but as 8 year user of digitakt, only really got quick with it recently!
GLOBAL/PATTERN Mutes
Elektron save structure aka temp save and perform kit mode
Then use the wise words of:
The other thing is getting the most of my loops, getting really familiar with all the types of conditional trigs and probability.
Once these foundations are in place you will have much more meaningful pattern segments of the same idea and you string it together manually, what i usually do, or then utilize the song mode.
IMO there is a big difference between casually knowing this ish exists and really knowing how to use them to your benefit!
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