Think Like a Composer

We've covered Jaron Lopez here before, someone with an excellent grounding in musical theory well explained. This time he's looking at taking those simple 4 bar loops and turning them into full tracks - using commonly used methods to provide a journey for the listener, beyond the simple and often stationary loop. Here's more... 

If you want to turn your loops into songs, you don't need to escape the loop, you need to develop it. In this video, we'll take a simple 4-bar chord progression and transform it into a song using three techniques. First, we'll turn chord blocks into melodic units by breaking them into perfect fifths and shaping them rhythmically. Then, we'll use octave displacement to create escalation and momentum without changing the core musical idea. Finally, we'll take a musical fork in the road, shifting by 2 semitones instead of 1 to move into a new key center and then journey back to our home key. If you're into chords, music theory, music production, and beatmaking, this video will show you how to think like a composer, instead of a loop maker, and turn simple ideas into musical stories.

Chapters:
00:00 Turn Blocks into Units
05:50 Octave Displacement
10:20 The Fork in the Road
15:05 The Churning Waves
 

More from Jaron Lopez

• Bubblegum: Free Pitch Editor 08-Oct-26
• DestroyFX Buffer Override 08-Oct-26
• Oxygene 50th Anniversary 07-Oct-26
• The Great Debate: Firmware Hacking 07-Oct-26
• Scanner:Library VST Instrument 06-Oct-26