Tired of loading up and cycling around a load of looped ideas? Break out and turn them into songs with these loop-busting tips…

Don't get us wrong; for some music styles, using loops as the basis for your tune is not just fine, it's as near-as-dammit essential. Indeed for some genres – stand up minimal techno – the loop is the genre. And of course, the very basis of DAW production, and the reason you are reading this, is the software's ability to do mundane things like loop beats, basslines and other melodies for you.

So don't misunderstand us, we love looping as much as the next producer. But if you have as many four-, eight- or 16-bar ideas kicking around on your hard drive as we used to, you'll know what we mean. How do you turn those ideas into songs? It's easier than you might think, so come with us to smash through your start and end points.

One of the standout pieces of advice we've heard from many producers that we have interviewed is: never leave looped ideas as loops – 'repeat until done', right away. While repeating chunks like this can be seen as barely more creative than having loops in the first place, it is one of the 'main use' scenarios of DAW production, so why not at least tap into it and repeat those blasted loops until they fill the length of an entire song? Then start deleting, building, dropping and generally chipping away at the resulting breeze block of melodies and beats to at least carve out the beginnings of a masterpiece. If nothing else, this avoids lingering loops and gives you a skeletal song structure to flesh out later.

Once you've done that, it's time to turn to that other masterstroke of DAW technology: automation. The quickest way to move away from the loop is to make loops sound, well, not like loops! You'll be amazing by how introducing automation on certain parameters – filters, envelopes, velocities and so on – suddenly makes your repeated loops sound like part of a compositional masterplan. What is a great minimal techno track* other than loops with very well thought out (and very slowly evolving) automation?

Once you have loops with variation, it's time to tap into another feature that DAWs now do very well: arrangements. Most of the big guns have marker sections where you simply label great chunks of your breeze block as 'intro', 'verse', 'chorus' and so on. If you do nothing else today, then use this feature! Just giving blocks of tracks a name psychologically brings you one step closer to the finish line. Then you can start tweaking each and moving them around as sections – inserting, copying, and (heaven forbid) even deleting. Suddenly you've gone from editing the minutiae to pile-driving your blocks into a song.

BUT!

Never forget why you wanted to create a song from your original loops in the first place. Two things to consider here are:

1. You will be distracted and new ideas may well spin you off in other directions. This could be 'a good thing'; a great new route for your tune to take. If so, name the result differently and consider it a different song – a remix even – so you can at least keep it separate from that initial idea of loops. And…

2. Do keep that initial idea. Yes, we want to lose loops in terms if creating a song out of them but you should always cross reference with those initial ideas. They contain the vibe and the very reasons you wanted to create a song, which could all quite easily disappear as you create your song, so keep the loops at the start of your song (better still in another 'ideas' file) for future reference.

Still Nervous About Arranging?

Well, here's another good tip. Many engineers will load in a well-mastered track into their sessions as it gives them a sonic standard to aim for when mixing. You can do this with arranging too. Load in a song you love the structure of, examine it, match the tempo, apply your sections to its structure and, hey presto, you have a winning arrangement of your own tune mapped out for you.

Then there's speedy arranging: use hardware to 'play' your DAW and come up with a song. Ableton Live and FL Studio especially – although not exclusively – lend themselves to this one. Trigger loops, play them live, record the results and you'll have a song that you're more proud of in terms of its spontaneity and the speed at which you came up with it.

Finally, explore those more creative and compositional aspects of your DAW or some of the third party apps you can install. These can take your ideas, chords and melodies to new heights by suggesting either chord progressions or melody lines – maybe even random incidents of both – that will have you busting out of those loops in all sorts of ways. DAWs with chord tools include Studio One (Chord Track) and Tracktion (Pattern Generator) while Ableton Live’s Random or Reaper’s MIDI Ex Machina offer more random elements. Third party tools are many and varied including Plugin Boutique's Scaler 2, Mixed in Key’s Captain Chords and Audiomodern’s Random Chords Generator PRO.

Whichever method you choose, never completely turn your back on the loop. Those songs it helps to create and the ease at which loops work should never be ignored, but like all great technical innovations, good loops just need a little human touch to take them to greatness.

* If it sounds like we're not knocking minimal techno, we're not, we love it!