Inside the Box with Joe Albano: LOOPS

Songwriters' Little Helper

In the pre-computer era, when it came time to flesh out an arrangement, songwriters needed to head off to the studio and hire musicians for a tracking session. Today, software provides the modern songwriter with a plethora of tools for fleshing out demos as well as creating full-on professional arrangements from scratch, all inside the box.

While the traditional ‘linear’ recording approach (i.e., performing and recording parts from beginning to end) is still a mainstay, many songwriters now utilize contemporary DAW production techniques for building up arrangements with prefabricated audio and MIDI loops comprising short segments of a musical groove or part. This technology ain’t your daddy’s loops—today’s intelligent algorithms can make the production process feel like actual creative collaboration—far cooler than just fishing through libraries of static recorded grooves and snippets and hoping to find stuff that works.