Our friends at Looplabs have released Looplabs Taster Pack, an exclusive sound set containing over 2GB of royalty-free loop content for BPB readers. Continue reading to download your copy of the freebie and to check out our interview with Craig Swann of Looplabs.
Back in high school, it was so easy to find time for jamming with my friends, going to rehearsals, or making music at someone’s home. As I grew older, work and everyday life made collaborating with fellow musicians somewhat of a luxury, to the point where I don’t remember the last time I made music with someone outside of my bedroom studio. That’s why online collaboration platforms like Looplabs seem so appealing nowadays, and why I wanted to hear more about the project from its creator Craig Swann.
The Interview
Tomislav: Hi Craig, thanks for sharing this huge free loop pack with BPB readers! Can you please provide a quick introduction to Looplabs, what it is what can new users expect to do with it?
Craig: Everyone that frequents BPB knows how amazing and awesome music is. Especially making it. But there’s a whole world of people out there that have never had the joy of making their own music in any way. Expensive software/hardware, complicated DAW’s, no music theory or experience, etc. There are just lots of barriers for many people to make music.
Our idea with Looplabs was to provide a way for these people to dip their toe in the waters of music production. Looplabs is a free, cloud-based DAW that’s the quickest and easiest way to make music – right in your browser. Stocked with more than 60,000 royalty-free loops and samples and the unique ability to automatically snap every loop to the same tempo and – even better – the same key means you can instantly start building, sketching and creating tracks as fast as you can drag and drop.
It’s not just online music making software – it’s a full-fledged, thriving social music community with built-in chat and collaboration capabilities. Whether you want to audio/video chat in session, drag and drop musical ideas or chat with the community while making beats – Looplabs was built to make music together.
Tomislav: Is Looplabs a free service and how can new users sign up? How many Looplabs users are there already?
Craig: Signing up is as easy as connecting with Facebook or signing up with email (you can explore and listen to posted music without signing up). The community has grown to more than 400,000 members from all walks of life. We have 7-year-olds and 70-year-olds on the platform. It’s an incredibly diverse community of music lovers.
Tomislav: I’m interested in the collaboration aspect of Looplabs. Is this something that can be done in real time (as in jamming), or do users send each other pre-recorded ideas and arrangements?
Craig: We are working on a number of different ways to collaborate as the feedback from producers has been varied from openly wanting to share screens and sessions to being somewhat private with their process. Currently, you can audio/video/text chat with multiple people while in the studio (or social site). Musically, you can drag and drop channels and assets from your session to other users that can add these channels directly to their sessions. The interesting thing is that you could both be working on different genres at different BPM and different keys and when you swap channels they will automatically shift tempo and key to work in your session. So the idea remains but gets contextualized for the session it is being added to. It’s been an entertaining way to see how music and ideas can change through that process.
Tomislav: How advanced is the provided DAW and do you think it could, in part, work as a substitute for software like Cubase, Pro Tools, Ableton Live, etc.?
Craig: Looplabs supports advanced editing, effects, and automation – however in no way are we trying to convince someone to switch from say Ableton to Looplabs.
We are targeting people that don’t know what Bedroom Producers Blog is, or Ableton, or Loopmasters, etc. We are like the gateway drug to music production. We make it easy. We make it fun. We make it free. Certainly, for current producers, it still remains an excellent place to play with new sounds, come up with sketches that could be taken into your own productions, but there are much more exciting ways for current producers to participate with our community through sound pack releases.
Tomislav: The project seems to still be in beta. What are your plans for the future and when can we expect to see the official launch?
Craig: Looplabs is built using Web Audio which is still in ongoing development. Although we feel the platform is solid, with changes still happening we are happy remaining in beta – heck Gmail was in beta for 5 years! Before an “official release” there will be the launch of our MIDI engine and our unique take on instruments and samples.
Additionally, we are actively working with producers interested in promotion on our platform via sound packs. We started our Producer Showcase with Ghosthack last month and AfroDJMac and will continue to provide sounds from producers interested in exposure to our community.
Tomislav: How can Bedroom Producers Blog fans participate in the Looplabs community?
Craig: BPB has always been an incredible source of community-shared content. The problem is that these amazing sounds and loops are only available to people that produce offline by downloading the sounds and importing into their DAW. What we are looking to do is invite the BPB community to share those sounds with a massive growing audience of new creators via the Looplabs studio. Importing these sounds directly into our library to be accessed in the studio and having us help market and promote the community of producers creating incredible music across all genres.
If you are a producer interested in exposure and promotion to our community and believe in sharing sounds, we’d love to help spread your word and your music. Simply drop us a line (iwantmymusic[at]looplabs[com]com).
Tomislav: Many thanks again for the loop pack and we’re looking forward to seeing where Looplabs evolves from here!
Craig: Thanks, Tomislav! We’ve been fans of yours for years and excited to share what we have been working on with you and look forward to potential content collaborations in the future.
Free Loops
The team at Looplabs has kindly provided an exclusive collection of audio loops (2.19 GB in total) for BPB readers. The included loops cover a wide range of styles from hip-hop to EDM and are royalty-free for use in your music projects, free or commercial. Redistribution of this pack or any of its parts is not allowed.
Download: Looplabs Taster Pack for BPB (1.53 GB download size, RAR archive, contains 1013 audio loops in 16-bit WAV format)
Last Updated on October 14, 2017 by Tomislav Zlatic.
