How to get out of the loop? (Page 1 of 2)

Break down. Cry. Seriously though,  remove elements. Make space. Delete notes to let some silence peek through the curtain. Sometimes a breakdown to just a kick and a snare roll nudges me in a mew direction.
Leave everything the same, but change instruments slightly. Like a bass line that sustains less each cycle.
Harmonize.
Arpeggiate the stuff that sustains. 
Stay on one note and just rhythmically beat the crap out of it.
Variations of the loop. Instead of dun dun dun, give it a touch of dundun duh dun, and go back to the loop.
Stop. Do something else totally. Sleep on it. Let some time pass. Then one day you'll rediscover it and you'll be in a different phase of your own cycle. Then maybe you'll see it from a different perspective. A fresh, mew take on it.

Make another loop with  the same sounds. Or, how about this: don't loop it. Construct each new pattern by ear. Don't copy/paste any patterns. And don't sit there listening to it forever.

Last edited by breakphase (Apr 13, 2017 8:33 pm)

Minimal tech advice: Embrace it. Don't be afraid of making slowly evolving loop based music. Slightly iterate on each repetition. Remove/add/mutate an element one note at a time.

Prog advice: Smash cut to a completely different key, time signature, tempo, or all of the above. Even to something that sounds like it should be a totally different song. Then, figure out how you would go about getting back to the original loop, or a variation thereof. I do this all the time in my prog stuff and it helps me every time.

Other: Eno's Oblique Strategies are good for times like this:
http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
Often it gives seemingly unrelated advice but I've always been able to take something from it.

This is also good advice!

I've started putting some blank bars at the end of the loop, so that I can imagine what it leads into instead of getting used to it repeating.

one strategy i tried with great results was to start an entirely new section before the loop. then, try to work on ways to build a bridge from that section to the loop. sometimes an abrupt change is a really cool way to take things in an unexpected new direction

My experienced advice: Save the loop, leave it alone for a while and start something new. You may come back to it months or years later or you may not. I've got plenty of loops that have never seen the light of day and some still may one day... That's not to say you haven't learnt something or been inspired somehow by creating that loop - just because the loop isn't a finish track yet doesn't mean it was a waste of time. Not everything you create has to become a released track.