Arranging a song on the drag-and-drop grid in Loop

Most music software opens on a blank screen full of tiny buttons and expects you to know what to do with them. Loop by Zaweba opens on a grid. Tracks run down the side, bars run along the top, and the job is simply to put sounds in the squares. If you have ever moved tiles around in a game, you already have the basic idea.

The grid is where nearly everything in Loop starts, so it is worth getting comfortable with. Here is how I use it to go from an empty song to something with a shape.

Dropping loops in

The loop library sits alongside the grid. Find a drum loop you like and drag it onto a track at bar one. Press play and it plays. Drag a bassline onto the next track, a chord loop onto the one below, and you have the bones of a song.

You don't have to worry whether they will fit together. Every loop follows the song's tempo and key, so a bass loop recorded in one key moves into yours and plays at your tempo. That is the reason the grid feels so forgiving: it is hard to drop something in that sounds outright wrong.

Before you drop a loop, click it in the library to hear it. It plays in time and in key with the song, so you are hearing it as it will sound in place, not on its own.

Stretching, moving and copying

A loop on the grid is a clip, and clips can be stretched to repeat. Drag the end of a four-bar drum clip out to sixteen bars and it simply plays four times. That is how you fill a verse or a chorus without dropping the same loop in over and over.

Clips can be moved and copied around too. I tend to build one section first, say eight bars with drums, bass, chords and a lead, then copy the whole lot further along and start taking things away. Remove the drums for a breakdown. Leave just the chords for an intro. Bring everything back for the end. Suddenly a loop has become an arrangement.

Every edit can be undone and redone, so there is no harm in trying things. If a change doesn't work, step back and try something else.

Thinking in sections

A trick that helps a lot: decide roughly how long each part of the song is before you start filling it. Eight bars of intro, sixteen of verse, eight of chorus, and so on. The bar numbers along the top of the grid make that easy to see, and it stops songs turning into one long loop that never goes anywhere.

Bringing your own sounds

The grid isn't limited to the library. Audio files and MIDI files drop in too. A vocal you recorded on your phone, a sample you made elsewhere or a MIDI file of a melody can all go straight onto a track.

Your own audio loops get the same treatment as the built-in ones: they are time-stretched to the song's tempo with their pitch kept. MIDI files become notes you can open and edit, and you can import a .mid file as new tracks too.

You can also make your own loops without leaving the app. The riff editor lets you tap out patterns on a step grid with any instrument, and save them to My loops, where they sit ready to drag onto the grid like any other.

Where the grid leads

For plenty of people the grid is all they will ever need. Drag, stretch, copy, export to WAV or MP3, done. When you want to go further, Studio mode adds a piano roll, instruments, recording and a mixer with effects, and everything you built on the grid comes with you.

Loop by Zaweba is free software for Windows 10 and 11. It works offline, needs no account, and every loop it comes with is yours to use royalty-free. Open it, drag a drum loop onto bar one and see where it takes you.