LoopBasedMusic

Quora Answer : Is most loop-based music, e.g., pop, hip hop, and R&B, made through just putting in layers of different sonic ideas?

Mar 28, 2018

To an extent.

Loop based music tends to develop quite a lot by adding and removing layers.

But it does also do things like longer term filter sweeps or builds and breakdowns.

I think this is something that electronic musicians and software makers are starting to do something about.

YouTube is full of tutorial videos about "how to break out of dreaded loop syndrome" which are actually hints for beginners (and not so beginners) about how to think in terms of larger scale structure.

I think software, and even more so, hardware including modern hardware that likes to emulate old, limited hardware, tends to push electronic musicians in the direction of fairly restricted repetitions.

It's easy to create individual loops and stack them. But there's relatively little support for, for example, taking a longer chord sequence and then fitting a riff to it.

There's no reason, in principle, why DAW software shouldn't let you do this : define a long 12 or 24 bar chord sequence, define a riff / arpeggio pattern and then tell the computer "fit this riff to those chords". But right now, this isn't mainstream DAW functionality (At least as far as I know. I'm sure there might be plugins).

Nor are there tools to help you write a canon like this :

Or to develop two themes in sonata form.

Again, we've had automated composition systems for decades that know about these structures. And there's no reason, in principle, that DAWs couldn't have this knowledge built into the tools they provide.

But they don't.

The demand isn't there. But that's a slightly self-fulfilling prophecy. If the tools were there, more people would discover and use them, and then more people would listen to, like and demand more music like that in an electronic context.