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ACID LOOPS - ALL:


ELECTRIC GUITARS:

JEFF BALLEW:
• 1-Classic Rk & Rk n Roll
• 2-Classic Hard Rock
• 3-Classic Rock
• 4-Hendrix Style
• 5-Blues, Rhythm & Blues
• 6-Guitar Sessions
• Volumes 1-6

ARTHUR LEE LAND:
• 1-Rock Land


ACOUSTIC GUITARS:

GREG DIAZ:
• Volume 1 45-64 BPM
• Volume 2 66-74 BPM
• Volume 3 75-82 BPM
• Volume 4 83-120 BPM
• Volume 5 120-158 BPM
• Volumes 1-5 45-158 BPM


BASS GUITARS:

DEAN CORTEZ:
• Ambient Bass - Vol 1
• Electric Bass - Vol 2
• Slap Bass - Vol 3
• Volumes 1–3

CHET SMITH:
• Electric Bass


VOCALS:

CINDEE NOBLE:
• Cindee Sings! Vol 1
• Cindee Sings! Vol 2

IJAH:
• Ijah's Bag

LAUGHTER:
• Hilarious Vol 1
• Hilarious Vol 2


KEYBOARDS:

• Rhythm & Grooves Vol 1
• Rhythm & Grooves Vol 2

• Swinglefunk Volume 1
• Swinglefunk Volume 2
• Swinglefunk Volume 3
• Swinglefunk Volumes 1–3


DRUMS:

• Drum Language Vol 1
• Drum Language Vol 2
• Drum Language Vol 3
• Drum Language Vol 4
• Drum Language Vol 1 – 4



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Here are some of the more "frequently asked questions" about acid loops, and my attempts to answer them.

If you click on the questions just below you'll be taken to where it's answered further down the page.

What is a loop and why is it useful in making music?

Isn't it more fun and isn't there more flexibility playing with a live musician?

What about midi? I like to use my keyboard a lot, can I use music loops along with midi?

What about transposing? Can acid loops be transposed without sounding weird?

What about royalties? What does royalty free mean?

What is a license and what is your license agreement?

What does "acidized" mean, and can I use these loops in other programs besides acid?

But if everyone uses the same music loops won't the songs all start sounding the same?

What programs are your acid loops compatible with, and what's the difference between the 16 bit files and the 24 bit files?

Why should I buy your acid loops instead of others? Is there anything that makes your acid loops stand out from the rest?

 


What is a loop and why is it useful in making music?

The word "loop" has many meanings, but in this context it means a short segment of music, usually one or two bars long, that's made so that when it's repeated again and again it creates a "rhythmic groove".

It's not necessary to play the music loops repeatedly but is a common quality they have, that they can be played that way. Many sound loops can be used this way to create a hypnotic sort of effect. Music loops are frequently more useful when they're not being played back to back. Think of a music loop as a short "riff" played by a musician on his or her instrument. In most instances that phrase will not be repeated again and again in a song. So for most types of music stringing different phrases together is more appropriate. The fact that they are usually only a bar or two long makes them ideal for arranging and rearranging into songs.

Using music loops is also a way of collaborating with a huge variety of musicians while keeping the cost and time consumption to a very small fraction of what it might otherwise be.  There's no travel time or travel expense involved, and there are no disagreements about what to play. Music loops can be a huge time and money saver when those factors are important. You can also pick which drummer you'd like for any particular song, which bass player, which keyboard player and on and on. You can have several of each if you'd like, and you can remove them from the song without offending anyone. 

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Isn't it more fun and isn't there more flexibility playing with a live musician?

The human interaction can certainly be fun and offer a different kind of flexibility than playing along with compositions you make with music loops. There's no need to stick to either one exclusively, each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages. A combination of approaches that depend on the particular project or situation is best if possible.

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What about midi? I like to use my keyboard a lot, can I use music loops along with midi?

Most of the major programs incorporate midi, music loops, and live audio recording as well. They will also synchronize with other programs so that you can use one program for midi and another for music loops and have everything playing back in sync.

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What about transposing? Can acid loops be transposed without sounding weird?

Acid loops are wav files that come from recording live audio. There are a host of programs emerging that are now able to transpose the audio without any type of weirdness. The number of programs that can do this effectively is growing rapidly and the effectiveness and ease of the transposing process is growing rapidly as well. Whole phrases, chords or only specified notes can be transposed. Not only that, but many other characteristics of the sound may be modified to produce very realistic variations of the loop. The notes within a phrase may also be rearranged or combined with other music loops to create even more useful variations.

When synthesizers and samplers first came out there usefulness was minimal. As time went on and the technology advanced they became more and more practical. I think that same is true about acid loops, only now that the technology in general is much more advanced, the practicality of using music loops will be able to grow more quickly. Acid loops are still in their infancy and they're already being used extensively in all sorts of commercial and non commercial projects.

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What about royalties? What does royalty free mean?  

Most acid loops including ours are royalty free. That means that you can use them in your songs whether they are for fun or profit without any further financial compensation to anyone. There is no need to pay any royalties to anyone if the song earns money from sales. This is referred to as being royalty free.

This is another one of the practical benefits of composing songs with music loops. If you sell your productions, you would usually either split the income from the song with each of the other musicians that played in the song, or paid someone usually a whole lot more than the cost of a loop disc to play a part in the composition. Not that those options are necessarily bad, but if you have music loops that will work well for your song you'll benefit more financially by using the loops.

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What is a license and what is your license agreement?

Most legitimate acid loop libraries come with a very similar license agreement. The basic idea is that you can use the sound loops within any musical composition without having to pay anything other than the original license fee. The sound loops are licensed to you as opposed to being sold to you. Only the producer owns the right to sell them as loops. Otherwise if the loops were allowed to be resold by anyone who licensed them they could just copy (pirate) the discs and sell them to everyone else, without having to create any of the material themselves. It removes the incentive for anyone to spend the time to create the acid loops in the first place. It takes quite a bit more than usually meets the eye to produce a disc of useful acid loops. Please be fair, don't pirate.

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What does "acidized" mean, and can I use these acid loops in other programs besides ACID?

Acid loops are an advanced form of sound loops or music loops. Acid loops are music loops that contain small bits of extra information within the file that allow the programs to utilize the "acidized" loop more fully. The information that tells the program the key that the phrase is being played in, and the number of beats to the phrase are the most important.

If a song is in the key of "A" but the acid loop was originally played in a different key, the program will be able to transpose the key of the acidized loop to the key of the song automatically, as long as the program has the information stating the key that the phrase was played in. Which program you use to do the transposing and the material being transposed will determine the range of notes you can transpose without sounding weird. A few semitones in either direction almost always works OK. Some material can be transposed an octave or so without any weirdness at all.

Including the information that tells the program the number of beats in the phrase is what tells the program how to synchronize the timing of the acid loop with the timing of the song. If the song is being played at 120.7 beats per minute, and the loop was originally played ay 103.1 beats per minute, the acid loop will immediately synchronize with the timing of the song. The acid loops may have been one bar, two bars, six beats, nine beats, or any number of beats long, but as long as the information specifying the number of beats is included in the file, the acid loops will automatically sync with the song. The song can also change tempo in parts, and the synchronization will remain intact. Usually the first time a person sees this happen (particularly seasoned musicians), there's usually a dropping of the jaw and a widening of the distance between the eyelids. Its ease and usefulness is astounding.

"Acidizing" the file has become the industry's standard method of including this very basic practical information about the acid loop in the file. Most of the mainstream programs that use loops are able to utilize this information to expand the usefulness of the loops, and the practicality their program. More and more programs are conforming to this standard as time goes on. Acid was the first program to utilize this information, so this is how the term "acid loop" came about.

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But if everyone uses the same music loops won't the songs all start sounding the same?

There are so many music loops available that for the most part this is unlikely, and as the volume of choices continues to expand, the practicality of using music loops expands with it.  There's a snowball effect happening. When you factor in the increasing number of loop oriented programs and rapidly expanding features to manipulate the sound of the loops, the usefulness of music loops becomes even more evident.

Using the loops in different contexts also makes them less likely to be recognizable. The music loops that are most likely to be noticed as being the same phrase that was used in another song are the leads, or other parts of the song that are attention-getters. These can still be used effectively, even in a commercial song, by modifying the riff in some creative way. Another version or creative use of a catchy, well-known phrase could be turned into a very useful thing.

The bottom line remains the same: Do people enjoy listening to it? If the listeners impression is that it just sounds like more of the same, it'll detract from the enjoyment level. If the impression is that it's similar to something they've heard before but in some way more interesting, it'll add to the enjoyment of it.

Another thing to consider in this context is the rising acceptance and development of "remixing" as an art form in itself. As this phenomenon of rearranging cool sounds in a creative way advances, more and more interesting results are emerging from it. Good "remixers" are becoming sought after by the major artists and labels because of the fact that people like hearing what they have done. As "remixing" grows, the acceptance of hearing the same sound used creatively in a different way grows with it as well. 

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What programs are acid loops compatible with, and what's the difference between the 16 bit files and the 24 bit files?

Acid loops are standard wav files, with a little extra information included in them which makes them acid loops. This "acidizing" makes them more useful when you use them in loop oriented programs. As wave files, they are "compatible" with almost every audio program and sampler made. Check with your program's documentation to see if it reads wav files if you're unsure. 

Playin' Music's acid loops are available in either 16 bit or 24 bit resolutions and are all 44,100 khz. The 16 bit files are the most commonly used files. The 24 bit files are a higher resolution and therefore a slightly better sounding file. It's been debated whether the human ear can hear the difference. High quality digital equipment and very trained ears can.  Not every program that can read wav files can read 24 bit wav files, and the 24 bit files take up 50% more memory and 50% more space on your disc or drive. The 24 bit files are the standard bit rate for movie or TV projects and are better if you are going to have your songs mastered at a high quality mastering facility. The 16 bit files are the standard for commercially made CD's and pretty much everything else. If you want the extra clarity then choose the 24 bit files. If you're not sure which to pick, the 16 bit files are probably better for you.                                                                                              

The material used for these acid loops was recorded at 24 bit (except for some of the older recordings) and then edited and processed at 24 bit or higher resolutions. The software can utilize the higher resolution to process the sound more precisely while keeping the sound quality as pristine as possible. The completed acid loops are then made available to you in this 24 bit resolution, and they are also then converted to 16 bit resolution, and are available in this resolution as well. 

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Why should I buy your acid loops instead of others? Is there anything that makes your acid loops stand out from the rest?

There are several things that I do to these acid loops that make them more useful than most of the others currently available.

All the acid loops on these discs are very tightly played. That's something that usually goes unnoticed until you try using them in songs, but then it makes a very big difference.

I've personally sorted through more commercially produced acid loops than probably more than 99% of all the people who use sound loops in their music. I've done that in order to create a library of acid loops to use in my own song productions. I keep the ones I consider useful and discard the ones that I think are not up to snuff for whatever reason. That way I don't have to audition the ones I don't like again when I'm looking for something to use in a project. I've kept about 1/4 to 1/3 of  the ones I've sorted through and discarded the rest.

The main reason I discard most of the music loops I audition is that they're not tight enough to the beat. They might sound fine when played by themselves, or even in the context of the song they were originally played in, but when played along with another appropriate beat or within another song they don't play tightly enough with it.

The songs inevitably sound much better and more professional when the musicians are all playing very much in sync with each other. The advantage of using only the tightly played acid loops is that the songs that are made from them will also automatically come out tighter and more professional sounding. It usually takes a lot of practice for bands get their sound tight. A tight sound is usually associated with professionalism, and a band that doesn't sound very tight usually needs more practice. In short tighter songs sound more professional.

Try it for yourself; Pick out some of the music loop libraries that you already own and consider pretty descent. Play a tight drum loop of the genre of the loops that you want to check for tightness in your loop program. Pick one that's not too annoying to listen to over and over again. Then, while the drum loop is playing, audition the other music loops and notice which ones are really playing tightly along with the beat and which ones sound like the musician was a little bit off here and there. You might even discover that the drum loop seems to be off from the rest of the music loops. In that case, try a different drum loop; it may not be as tight as you originally had thought. It may be surprising to you how many music loops you find that you thought were pretty good until you tried this little experiment.

That's basically how I learned about the versatility of a tightly played music loop, and every acid loop on these discs are checked that way. It's surprising how rare it is to find a whole acid loop library that is consistently tight, let alone all the acid loops in all of the libraries coming from one company. Most of the discs that I've come across that are as consistently tight have usually been "quantized" or in some other way artificially tightened up. Not that this is always bad, but it usually loses some of its natural feel when done that way.

It takes a lot more recording, editing, and eliminating than is usually done in order to keep only the tightly "in the pocket" acid loops, but to me it's well worth it.

To me this tightness factor alone makes these loop collections about 3 or 4 times more valuable than most of the others. Because it takes 3 or 4 times as many of the most of the commercially produced ones to trim down to this amount of tightly played acid loops.

The keys that the acid loops are being played in are included in the file structure, and also noted in the file name. These are both very important, but not yet very commonly included time saving features.

The information about the key of the acid loop is part of the "acidizing" process and allows many of the loop programs to automatically transpose the acid loop to the key of the song. It makes the acid loop useable in songs in other keys than the original playing.

At this point in time not every acid loop is transposable to any key, at least not without sounding weird. Most everything can be transposed 2 or 3 notes up or down ok, and some acid loops do fine transposed much more, it depends a lot on the instrument type and the program being used. There are some programs already that can transpose most material an octave or so and still sound very realistic. The technology for transposing music loops is still just barely getting underway but holds a lot of promise for the future. The ability to transpose the material further and potentially into all other keys will increase as the transposing technology improves.

At very least, having the keys set makes the acid loops several times as useful in the programs that can read the embedded information, because the acid loops can be much more easily used in several additional keys. Several programs are doing this now, and it is rapidly becoming a standard feature in loop programs, since the loops and the programs are more useful when they do.

Noting the key in the file name makes it much easier to find the loops that will work in the song's key. Most of the time the key of the acid loop needs to be within a few semitones of the song's key in order to still sound realistic. Without knowing the key of the acid loop, the time needed to audition prospective loops is multiplied several fold. It's a big time saver having the acid loop's key in the name.

The file names also contain the instrument name so that once it's entered into the song it's easier to find it when you want to arrange where you want it in the song. It's much easier to find a bass loop in a song if all the bass loops say bass in the name, the guitar loops say guitar in the name and so on. It's much better than just a number or some other interesting words. It's another time saver.

The file name also contains the tempo of the acid loop. This also helps narrow down the searching process quite a bit. The closer the acid loop's tempo is to the song's tempo the more likely it is that it will work well in that song. It's another way to streamline the audition process and save time.

The acid loops are also arranged into folders of material that can be used in the same song. The folders usually contain lots of variations of the same theme. Unless there are variations to choose from and arrange, a music loop would mostly be useful to create a rhythmic groove, and not very useful in composing the parts that change with the chord structure and melody lines. The folders contain either cuts from the same take, or in the same mood, so that if an acid loop is found that fits well in a song, there are probably more loops in the same folder that will work in the song as well. This also helps keep the creative process going and the searching time down to a minimum.

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