From loops to songs - help me break my mental block

[DJMillsy]

I asked this question to a top selling producer on beatport. and his exact words to me were:

"steal ideas, the greatest songs have already been created"

Scary stuff.Copying ideas is fine but the real trick is to understand a genre and then throw the rule book out of the window. I still hear some amazing new tracks that have new sounds and ideas and there are still whole new genres (well maybe sub-genres!!) being spawned. If you think the greatest songs have already been created what does that leave you to aim for?

[triss]

If you think the greatest songs have already been created what does that leave you to aim for?

girls.

[Jekblad]

tarekith at tarekith.com has a cool little article on arranging a tune.

[spiral]

stop working in session view and switch to arrangement
work in 1 bar, 2 bar, 4 bar, 8 bar, 16 bar sections
before you know it you'll have a track and some kind of structure
sometimes i find it helps to map out the timeline into structures then fill in areas i work on a track

[moodles]

Thanks everyone for all the terrific tips!

I have a fairly complete version of my track done now.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

[Nick the Zombie]

Nice thread. This is by far the biggest problem I've ever run into as a producer using software to write with rather than a traditional instrument. My 2 cents: Take the loop that you are really liking and lay out copies one after the other in the arrange view. Now go through each copy and change it up in some way to make it different from what came before. At this point, don't worry yourself about song structure or anything like that, just keep making variants of the original loop that are interesting on their own. After you make 5 or 6 of these, rearrange the variants into different orders, taking note of which sequences you like, i.e. which ones are actually starting to sound like a song progression.

For instance, you have 3 variants of your original loop, labeled A, B, and C. You try some different orderings of these such as: ABC, BAB, CBA, CCBA, etc. You decide you like CBA, so take note of the reasons why you dig this progression. Now take that inspiration and riff on it, expanding it into a more complete idea.

This process always gives me a huge amount of ideas that help in getting ideas to lay out a cohesive track.

- Nick