nicky flowers

think in larger structures, consider the bigger picture! instead of an 8 bar loop write a back half to it and now you've got 16. loop that once with some new ideas and you basically made a whole section and there's opportunity to make a new contrasting section to follow. repeat the process with that, gradually bring back in old ideas, and you got yourself a stew. a song stew.

I have not written a song in a long time but I’ve taught song form to a lot of undergrads several times. One thing you can try is start thinking about smooshing your loops into traditional song forms like AABA which were used to maximize minimal amounts of musical material. We often associate AABA with older popular music like tin pan alley, but a lot of early Beatles songs are AABA rather than verse-chorus.

I don't have an answer, but I very deeply empathize with this feeling

you sleeping alright? thats a big blocker ime if I'm not. I don't do music, but it seems to hold for anything creative

try DJing with those loops. I generally tried to draw out the "vibe" of a song as pictured in the GYBE album "Lift Your Skinny Fists[...]" and then matched my loops vibe to where it'd be in the song,

then used the results to record new tracks played the whole way through, including actually playing the loop's pattern over and over like a talking heads song.

i struggle with this a lot too, i have a lot of 4/8 bar loops i just never turned into anything bigger. the main thing i've found to help is just forcing myself to write some sort of completely contrasting section by taking away the main elements of the loop or forcing myself to use a different chord progression or things along those lines (otherwise i tend to end up with something which feels more like a variation on the loop, not really a different section often). even if i only then end up with 2 ideas, alternating between those can make a decent song, and trying to transition between them smoothly can inspire other stuff.

a bit of a weird one but another thing which helped me is like, reminding myself that whatever i make isn't final. often i keep relistening to the same loop i'm working on until i'm really happy with it, but then i'm scared to add to it in case i "ruin" it, so kinda reminding myself that if i don't like what i add i can just delete it can help. sometimes i also try to avoid that feeling by trying to make a whole rough structure with a really really bare arrangement which sounds like shit; that way there isn't much to "ruin" and i can just improve it until it's decent. oh and time limits can help with making me not dwell on any one section too long

i guess templates are another thing some people use, i never use very complicated templates because of making a lot of genres and such but i guess they could help, also i haven't tried it but there's this thing i came across a while ago which can rearrange an 8 bar loop into a rough full arrangement given it's in a particular edm genre https://jukeblocks.io/rearrange/

hope some of that helps, if you find anything which works really well for you i'd be curious to hear as it's an issue i have a lot too

Here's what I like to do with loops:

Step one, collect a bunch of loops into a folder.
Step two, open a bunch of VLC windows
Step three, play each loop in one of the windows, set to the "repeat" function
Step Four, while playing all loops at once, experiment with volume, pause, play, and playback speed
Step five, if I want to have a record of what's happening, I can open up Audacity and set it to record my computer's speakers.
Step six, if it needs something more, bring up youtube and search for what you need (does it need 1960's film grain sound? how about an educational film from the 1970's on psychedelics? or even a technology connections video, lmao)

Just play. That's where it began with me as a musician; I wanted to play and have fun. Give yourself space to do that.

I wish you well!

I...tend to make 8 bar loops and that's the whole song, but I just fuck with a bunch of filters and VSTs and whatnot to make something cool and impressive and song-adjacent. I've never really figured out how to compose songs beyond that...