Tutorial - Using Loops to Create Original Music

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Whether you want to build themes and variations for large-scale productions or as signature music for your promotional videos, make catchy music beds for 30-second spots or produce ambient music with subtle mood-fitting changes for wedding videos, the following looping music production tutorial gives you the basic tools to get you started.

Adding music to your productions presents you with a wide spectrum of questions, possibilities and challenges. Do you:

• Rip music from a CD or download a catchy tune from the web and hope that the copyright police don't track you down?
• Use so-called royalty-free music, which isn't free and which can sound canned?
• Use your deep music composing skills, superb performance talent and copious spare time to create music from scratch?

Depending on your circumstances, all of the above might work for you. But I think there is a single solution that, in the long run, is the best of all worlds: music loops.

Loops are snippets of music that you can repeat and layer to create a whole composition. The Beatles were the first popular music artists to use loops. Paul McCartney was a fan of Karlheinz Stockhausen, a 20th- and 21st-century electronic music pioneer (his face is on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) who featured electronic music loops in his compositions.

McCartney replicated that concept in vocals by taking the erase head off his home reel-to-reel tape recorder, spooling a continuous loop of tape through the machine and recording his voice over and over. The Beatles used those tapes on Tomorrow Never Knows, the final track on Revolver. They employed the same approach on Revolution 9 from the White Album.

These days you don't have to go through the laborious process of rewiring a recorder and overdubbing your own voice or instrument. You can work with computer loop files. A number of audio software products feature looping techniques, notably Apple's GarageBand, Digidesign's Pro Tools and Sony Acid Pro.

The product I work with is Adobe Audition. It started its life as Cool Edit Pro from Syntrillium Software and was a radio station audio production staple. Adobe bought it in 2003 and changed its name to Audition. Since then, Adobe has updated Audition three times to bring its interface in line with other Adobe products and to add professional features to make it competitive with digital audio workstations like Pro Tools and Acid Pro.

Audition ships with 5,000 loops on its Loop-ology DVD. Each was recorded by professional musicians playing real instruments. These are not MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) files, which can sound too precise and too manufactured. Each Loopology loop is typically one or two measures (four to eight beats) of a single instrument playing a single riff. File folders and file names give you a basic idea of what each loop sounds like. StraightAheadGuit01-A.wav in the Thick and Vintage Rock folder is a rough-edge, driving guitar with A as its root note.

In this tutorial, I take you through the Audition Loopology basics without getting too specific. In the accompanying online video tutorial, I present additional detailed instructions on how to create a sample musical selection, including which Loopology files to use, as well as tempo, measure counts, key changes, tracks, panning and mixing.

If you want to follow along with either tutorial, you can download a trial version of Audition (www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=audition&loc=en_us). The trial version is the full product with no limitations to its use other than that it expires 30 days after you first use it.

That download does not include Loopology content. The Loopology download site is www.adobe.com/special/products/audition/loopology.html. The caveat is that you can download content by genre only, rather than the entire 5GB collection. For this example and the video tutorial, I use loops from the two funk rock collections (1GB total download). Each Loopology file is a 32-bit, uncompressed 44.1kHz (CD-quality) WAV file with some Audition Loopology data in the header, including key, tempo and beat slices.

For this tutorial, I suggest you create music in the key of C major (no flats or sharps), using the most common rock and blues chord progression: I-IV-V-I. In this case: C-F-G-C. We'll lay down tracks as in a typical studio session: drums and bass first, then rhythm and lead guitars.