Groove-oriented musical genres were my introduction to loops, but it didn’t take long to realize they had a future in virtually all my musical and video endeavors — although maybe not in the conventional sense. Here are five reasons why.

1. You can tell your DAW’s metronome to get lost.
TICK-tick-tick-tick-TICK-tick-tick-tick-TICK-tick-tick-tick-TICK-tick-tick-tick…not very inspiring. Most DAWs come with a selection of drum and percussion loops that are a lot more fun to play with when writing songs. Some of these even have grooves and swing that can make a rhythm come alive and kick-start your creativity. And because most of them stretch with tempo changes, you can experiment with locking down the ideal tempo while still playing with real drum sounds — instead of TICK-tick-tick-tick-TICK-tick-tick-tick…

2. Rock your percussion.
I admit it. For rock music, I like to add tambourine in the background — maybe I listened to too many Rolling Stones records growing up. (Fun fact: A Ludwig tambourine used by Mick Jagger at a concert in 1964 sold for $4,396.) So I would dutifully set up a mic, check the levels, play the part, tweak the timing as needed after recording, and spend at least 30 minutes in the process — until it dawned on me (I’m a little slow sometimes) that I really only play about half a dozen types of tambourine parts, augmented by occasional flourishes. So I found my best recordings and used Propellerhead ReCycle to convert them into stretchable loops.

Now whenever I want a tambourine part jangling away in the background, I grab the appropriate loop, rearrange if needed for more variety, drag in a couple of flourishes — done. (For some great ideas on arranging with loops, check out my 5 Tips for Better Loop-based Music article.)

3. Think of loops as virtual studio musicians.
Oddly, some people who consider using loops (and Sweetwater offers lots of loop libraries) to be somehow “cheating” wouldn’t think twice about hiring a studio musician to play a part they couldn’t play. Well, think of loops as studio musicians: they show up on time, they don’t complain, and they play the same part over and over again — perfectly — while you figure out how best to adapt it to fit with your music. And even though it’s doubtful anyone in your neighborhood plays dilruba, a loop library can, even at 3AM.

4. Audio for video soundtracks.
If you’ve ever done soundtracks, you know the deal: “Hey, you can get it done in two days, right?” Which of course is always followed 12 hours later by, “Oh, and we cut about 15 seconds from the scene where the giant intergalactic Barbie doll eats Cedar Rapids.” Loops to the rescue, like Vir2 Q, because they can follow tempo changes.

When you need to speed up or slow down a section to fit the new timing, anchor your hit points to the absolute time and change tempo so that the loops follow. As long as the tempo changes aren’t too extreme, the fidelity will be fine.

5. Yes, you can have acoustic drums.
You don’t play drums, you don’t have a drum set in your home studio, and you wouldn’t have a way to mic one even if you did — or have the budget to fly in Matt Sorum, Terry Bozzio, Alan White, Lonnie Wilson, Michael Shrieve, Sly Dunbar, or other world-class drummers. So you use MIDI drum sounds, but when you’re trying to do musical genres that depend on the real thing, the electronic versions often come up short. Well, you’d be shocked by how easy it is to adapt acoustic drum loops to your songs. For example, the Sonoma Wire Works DrumCore 4 Prime plug-in has 10,000 loops (thankfully with an internal search engine) from the aforementioned drummers and others, as well as 100 multi-sampled drum kits and MIDI editing if you prefer to take that route.

While you’re at it, buy a couple of real cymbals for overdubbing cymbal sounds (there are plenty of cymbals under $100), and the result will be drum parts that sound like real drums. Almost all the drums on my album Simplicity were from acoustic drum loops (click for free previews), and even drummers think I used a real drummer — because essentially, that’s what using acoustic drum loops is all about. They do the playing, you do the arranging, and no one knows the difference. Ain’t loops grand?

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