Using prefab drum loops to quickly make beats is probably one of the first things that you did upon coming face to face with a DAW for the first time. It’s a quick, easy and fun way to make music, no matter what genre you produce music in, and it can be a hugely creative, valid and rewarding technique. You just have to look at hip-hop, a genre that began with DJs creating extended, looping drum solos by using two turntables and two copies of the same record, to see just how innovative and exciting loop-based music production can be. DAWs are hugely powerful audio editing tools, and by fully exploiting all of their features, we can turn loops into flexible musical building blocks that offer endless scope and potential.
Not all loops will sit together perfectly, because of differences in timing and/or tuning. Thankfully, both of these issues can be resolved pretty easily with the advanced timestretching and pitchshifting trickery that today’s music software is capable of.