I’m in a place a lot of people get trapped in: lost in 4 or 8 bar loop hell.
Whether I’m sampling or arranging chords and melodies purely with synths, I’m generally able to come up with really catchy loops but I nearly always hit a wall face first when it comes to expanding on what I’ve created.
The laziest approach to this (and one I kind of default to) is to just keep adding elements to the original loop (add some hats after a while, add another synth playing an arpeggio off to the right with the gain low, etc) , but this just leaves me with a really heavily dressed up version of the loop by the end - at its core, it’s just the same exact melody for 32 or 64 bars or whatever with a bunch of crap that’s been slowly tacked on over time.
Alternately, I’ll remove elements or remove the drums for a few bars… these things can be nice and are certainly very useful techniques for general variation, but they don’t tackle the core problem: creating actual melodic variation in what I’m working on.
Interested in hearing your tips and tricks for switching up melodies.
One of my favorite tricks is to use the transpose track in Logic to shift everything. I’ll just do the 4 bar loop like you say, keep it going for a few minutes, and noodle some melody over the top, staying in the same key. But then you add some transpose events every 2 or 4 bars and boom, you sound like a genius. You can hear this technique in action on this track I did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7bhQVhycAQ
(Around 2 minutes once the bass line kicks in.)
Thanks for the tip I’ll start tooling around with transposing a bit and see if it leads me anywhere good - really fun track, btw!