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.
My rule of thumb is to have 3 ideas before I call something a song, but if one of the ideas is weak, I may eliminate it and still have 2 ideas.
Instead of trying to come up with variations on a looping idea, I’ll contrast 3 different loops. It’s okay if it sounds like you’re switching from one song to another. Try to avoid repeating anything more than once. The third repeat legitimized, but it also causes the idea to disappear in the listener’s mind.