A good loop is one nobody notices. These techniques work in any editor or DAW.
Start with music designed to loop
The simplest loops come from tracks with no intro, no fade-out and no big ending. When generating, add "seamless loop, no ending, ends on the starting chord" to your prompt. Ambient, lo-fi and game-style tracks are naturally loop-friendly.
Find the loop points on the bar lines
Music is organised in bars. A loop that starts and ends exactly on bar lines keeps the rhythm intact. Set your editor’s grid to the track’s tempo, or find two identical downbeats by ear and zoom in on the waveform.
Most loops work best at lengths of 4, 8 or 16 bars. At 120 BPM in 4/4, one bar is two seconds, so an 8-bar loop lasts 16 seconds.
Avoid clicks
Clicks happen when the waveform jumps suddenly at the cut. Fix them by:
- Cutting at a zero crossing, where the waveform crosses the centre line
- Adding a very short crossfade, around 5 to 20 milliseconds
- For pads and ambience, using a longer crossfade of a second or more
Watch for reverb tails
If a sound at the end of the loop has a reverb tail, cutting it off is noticeable. Either loop from a point where the tail has died away, or copy the tail to the start of the loop so it overlaps naturally. Game engines often handle this with a "tail" section that plays over the next loop.
Vary longer loops
Even a perfect loop gets tiring if it is short and repeats for an hour. For streams and long videos, combine several related tracks or use stems to change the arrangement every few minutes. See adaptive music for games for layering techniques.
Written by the Sonvela editorial team with AI drafting assistance, then checked against the sources linked in the text. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.