There is a demand for such loops, and it could become profitable if you can
get hooked up with the right business connections.Loops are generally two, four, or eight measures long to make them easier to
use, as most music is constructed in multiples of four measures. You can use
the same loop over and over again throughout your construction, or you can
break up the scenery a little and insert a different loop every so often. You
can also use a different loop every measure if you like. And of course,
you can have piano loops playing on one track while drum loops are playing
on another and a guitar loop is repeating over and over again on another.Loops are a bit like a collage of pre-recorded sounds. But keep in mind that
any commercially available loop is going to be available to everyone who
bought the same disc of loops. If you are comfortable with the idea that your
music is an assembly of phrases that are not uniquely your creations, then
loops may be for you. Keep in mind that they can certainly act as an inspira-
tion for your own creativity if you think of them strictly in that way and are
willing to get rid of them after they have performed their inspirational duties.Chapter 18: Composing Electronic Music 237
Music concrête
Music concrêteis a type of music that sprang
directly out of the evolution of music technol-
ogy. In the 1930s, French composer Pierre
Schaeffer began experimenting with splicing
bits of analog tape together to create music
completely different than the source material.
As a throwback to classical music being
inspired by poetic forms, music concrête has its
roots in the 1920s Surrealist literary practice of
cut-up and fold-in composition. In cut-up, writ-
ers would take existing pieces of literature and
rearrange the order of the phrases and words
by cutting up the source material and physically
rearranging it, whereas in fold-incompositions,
a group of writers would write random phrases,
one at a time, on a piece of paper, folding the
paper over after each turn so that the next
writer couldn’t see what the previous writer had
written.
Music concrête basically means that you are
making music out of existing sounds. This can
range from human voices (as in Steve Reich’s
“It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out”), spinning
around on a radio dial (Ben Azarm’s “Neoap-
plictana”), static (Apollon and Muslimgauze’s
“Year Zero”), or a combination of power tools
and bird songs (such as in the music of
Japanese noise rocker Rhizome). A list of sig-
nificant pioneers of the music concrête move-
ment must include Swiss musician Christian
Marclay, whose most notorious composition,
1988’s “Footsteps,” was created by having thou-
sands of people walking across many copies of
the same slab of vinyl and then taking the dam-
aged records and playing them on a turntable,
recording the best bits for an album under the
same title.Throughout the 1980s, rap artists used the ideas
behind music concrête to completely change
the way contemporary pop musicians would
create music. Through their use of samples
and loops of existing music and dialog, artists
such as Del Tha Funky Homo Sapien and Ice T
brought music concrête from art galleries and
other experimental music forums into the fore-
front of popular music.