Fancy a little Ed Sheeran looping action? Look no further than this first episode in a new series of masterclasses exploring popular, modern production processes
Andy has been writing about music production, studio gear and technology for over 30 years, having edited magazines including Future Music, MusicTech and (twice!) Computer Music. He says we can look forward to several ‘How to sound like Gary Numan’ features in the course of this series…
The phenomenon that is Ed Sheeran’s rise to fame has, of course, been mostly down to great songwriting, but his live abilities have also been a big factor. One of the most captivating aspects of these performances is watching him build up tracks with live looping. We’re going to explore this kind of looping in this first tutorial in a new series where we analyse popular processes used by contemporary artists in music today.
Ed creates these loops using hardware loopers on stage, basically recording a loop of, say, his guitar playing, and then adding more loops one by one as the audio cycles around.
He has used a variety of hardware loopers in his time, including a Boss RC-20 and Boss RC-30, but now uses a looper called a Chewie Monsta Loop Station, and one made specifically for him. However, rather than using hardware, in this tutorial we’re going to look at a very basic way of doing live looping in your DAW. There are quite a few software loopers available that will do a decent job of live looping, and many DAWs ship with good examples. However, with some software loopers, it can be fiddly to export all of the loops you record as individual stems – useful for later processing.
Our tutorial doesn’t use a specific looper (although we will discuss them later) and also leaves you with all of the loops you have recorded on separate audio tracks so you can then use them in further projects.
> Step by step
1 We’re going to use Ableton Live in this tutorial but the main principles can be transferred to many other DAWs. First create an audio track which will be used to monitor whatever you are looping – in this case it’s a guitar like Ed’s. We have it recording on channel one on our interface and routed to the main monitors so we can hear it.
2 The idea is that we are going to send audio from the first track into further audio tracks that we set up – as many as we want to loop. So create another audio track and select the first track you created as its input, in our case ‘GUITAR’.
3 Keep creating as many audio tracks in this way as you’ll want to loop, always selecting the first main channel featuring the instrument you are looping as their input source.
4 Make sure only the source channel is sending sound to your main monitors as this is the only one you want to hear for now. So in this case w
