>Step by step

Turning a 4-bar loop into a complete song

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At the end of last month’s tutorial, we finished up with a four-bar loop containing drums, bass, synth and piano, plus several different melody ideas that we picked out with a piano sound. Each melody has its own track at the bottom of the screen, and these are all muted for the time being, leaving just the backing track. 4

Use your DAW’s join/glue tool to join the four-bar sections together into eight-bar chunks. This is because with your song fully zoomed out, eight-bar regions are much easier to work with and look less confusing than loads of tiny fourbar regions scattered about. 2

It may sound obvious, but if you’ve been working on your looped section for a while, the chances are that it’s filling your screen, so the first thing to do is zoom out. This will refresh your perspective and let you look at your project as a whole, rather than just those few bars. 5

Here, we’ve repeated the section out again to a length of four minutes – about average for the kind of pop song we’re looking to create. At our tempo of 120bpm, this creates a 120-bar sonic block of stone that you can chip away at like a sculptor, muting or deleting regions until your song takes on a bit more of a discernible shape. 3

Next step is to double the looped section, including the muted melody regions, out to eight bars in length. There are a few ways to achieve this, either with your DAW’s repeat/duplicate commands, by copying and pasting, or by Option (Alt)dragging the parts into their new positions to copy them. 6

Now we can start defining our song sections, where they’ll be placed and how long they’ll last for. Let’s say that we want an eight-bar intro section to kick off our song. Get your DAW’s mute tool ready – we’re going to be needing it! Use it to mute all the regions in the first 16 bars.

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Unmute parts one at a time with the first eight bars looping until you hit upon a part (or combination of parts) that sounds good on its own – we reckon the synth and the toms work well together to begin with. For the second eight bars, we add the kick and the fingersnaps to create a verse section.

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Time to make some choices from our muted melody tracks. For each song section up to this point, audition melodies one at a time until you find one that suits that part of the song, then move onto the next section, building up until the end of the tag. You should end up with something that flows nicely throughout.

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The link section between the verse and chorus is known either as the bridge or the pre-chorus, depending on which part of the world you’re from. To give the chorus plenty of impact when it starts to come in, we’ll strip this part back to the synth, toms and snaps by removing the kick.

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After the tag, chip away more parts for a duplicate of the whole verse, bridge and chorus sections. Most songs usually have some sort of breakdown or change after chorus 2, known either as the middle-8 or bridge. We’ll make ours an eight-bar section of kick, fingersnaps and synth, with a so-far unused melody idea.

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For the chorus or (‘drop’) section, we’re going all-in with the kick, snare, hats, bass and synth, with the piano part introduced in the tag section that comes after the chorus. So we construct a 16-bar chorus section that includes all the elements we need, and add the piano part in for eight bars afterwards to make the tag.

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Following our middle-8, we’ll use a couple of repeats of the 16-bar chorus part again to make an outro. We have a spare melody part left over that we’ve not used – one we derived from the upper notes of the synth chords last month – so we give this a new sound to make an extra synth part just for the outro…