About the Performance Loops® series
The Concept
The main purpose of the Performance Loops series is to give you enough loops, variations, fills, and hits/samples from real instrument performances so that you can chain them together in a way that fits your song and that sounds like a real live performance instead of just one loop over and over!
Also, instead of hiring session players to come into a studio and do a sterile and lifeless sampling session, we take the majority of our loops and samples from the original recordings of actual songs recorded and/or produced by full time professional producer/engineer Stephen Sherrard. In some cases we did set up extra sessions just for the purpose of creating more material to fill out a product, but the player we hired was almost always playing along with other pre-recorded songs or grooves in order to get more of a real performance feel. Whenever we did these extra sampling sessions, we always made sure to also record plenty of one shot samples (drum hits, or guitar chords, for example) to give you even more flexibility.
Our Performance Loops products always have the ACID loop properties defined for the Wave files to allow easy tempo and key matching in all programs that support these properties (ACID, Sonar, Audition, Cubase/Nuendo, and others).
Most of our downloads are also available as AIFF files with the Apple Loop Format properties defined for use in Apple’s Garageband and Soundtrack software. Most of our drum products are also available in Recycle RX2 format.
No matter which direction we take the Performance Loops series in the future, the focus will always be on creating high quality products that allow you to create realistic sounding performances for your productions.
How It All Started
The Performance Loops series originated in 1999 when producer and engineer Stephen Sherrard was looking for an easy way to add realistic sounding drum tracks to some low budget projects. Trying to program convincing live drums via MIDI and samples (or drum machines) was too time consuming to be worth the effort if you wanted it to sound anywhere close to realistic. Although there were already many drum loop CDs on the market at the time, most of them were merely collections of several hundred unrelated loops. If you found a loop that you liked, rarely were there any variations or fills that went along with it, making it hard to assemble a realistic sounding performance that didn’t sound like the same loop over and over.
Stephen decided to create his own drum loop library, primarily for his own use, and he went through his catalog of tapes from various bands and artists that he had produced searching for outstanding drum performances that could be used in a wide variety of music styles. After obtaining permission from the artists and drummers, he proceeded to mix down all the drum tracks from a variety of songs. Then, from each song performance he cut up the drum mix into as many usable loops, variations, fills, and hits as he could extract. To make the loops even more versatile, Stephen defined the ACID properties for each loop so that the loops could be automatically adjusted to any tempo using Sonic Foundry’s (now Sony) ACID software. He also kept all the loops and samples from each song in their own folder so that it was always easy to find loops, variations, fills, and hits that went together.
After using the loops for a while on some of his own projects, as well as some projects for clients, Stephen realized that this was quite a versatile collection that other music producers might be interested in as well. So, he called up several companies that produce and distribute loop and sample CDs to see if they might be interested. EVERY company that he sent a sample CD-ROM to for review was very interested! After talking with several companies, Stephen decided to go with Big Fish Audio as his exclusive worldwide distributor of the Performance Loops series of products.
Company Info
The Performance Loops series is produced by DBAR Productions & MusicTECH in the greater Seattle area, which is owned and operated by StephenSherrard.
Editing, format conversions, and additional support for LoopLibrary.com from the late “Bigg John” Mason.
We also work with a wide variety of professional session players and musicians to create content for the Performance Loops series. If you are a talented artist or producer and feel that you have something to offer to the Performance Loops series of products, or for LoopLibrary.com, please feel free to contact us.