A loopy introduction

There are so many programs today that allow you to create music from your home with out even stepping foot into a professional recording studio. In fact you can even create great works with out even knowing how to play a single  instrument.

Apple's Garage Band & Logic or Sony's Acid Pro are 3 great programs that allow you to create a masterpiece with loops. What are loops? They are short sections of a pre-recorded instrument that seamlessly repeat to a specified length of your choosing. By layering various loops in these programs you are able to create a song. You may think to yourself if you strictly using a repeating section of music wouldn't the song sound the same? Well if you think about most songs there are a lot of repeating sections. the instruments in verse 1 are usually the same in verse 2 and 3 and each of the choruses are the same and the bridge(if there is one) is sometimes just a key change but the percussion is usually the same. It's all a matter of opinion but some people argue that loops sound too repetitive and can easily tell if a song is created with loops or not. But if you think about it, if you layer sounds, add effects and add your own personal touches to the composition then your repeating loops wont sounds so loopy.

There are many sites that have free loops that you can import into your program, but if you want some higher quality and more unique sounding instruments then you may want to consider purchasing loops

Learning the interface of these programs vary in difficulty, Garage band or Acid are on the easier side of things, but once you learn the basics of layering, cutting and adjusting the various parameters of the loops you can easily translate that to the more difficult programs. You may wonder why would you want to learn to use a more difficult program? Well some of them are more robust with a lot more options for creating something more original.