Loop like Ed Sheeran in your DAW
Fancy a little Ed Sheeran looping action? Look no further than this first episode in a new series of masterclasses exploring popular, modern production processes
Andy Jones
Andy has been writing about music production, studio gear and technology for over 30 years, having edited magazines including
Future Music, MusicTech
and (twice!)
Computer Music.
He says we can look forward to several ‘How to sound like Gary Numan’ features in the course of this series…
The phenomenon that is Ed Sheeran’s rise to fame has, of course, been mostly down to great songwriting, but his live abilities have also been a big factor. One of the most captivating aspects of these performances is watching him build up tracks with live looping. We’re going to explore this kind of looping in this first tutorial in a new series where we analyse popular processes used by contemporary artists in music today.
Ed creates these loops using hardware loopers on stage, basically recording a loop of, say, his guitar playing, and then adding more loops one by one as the audio cycles around.