Sonar has a unique feature that is one of the coolest ways to take music loops and make them your own.
Cyclone would easily win the "Most ignored Sonar feature ever" award in my book.
Take a music loop, Press Cntl+L to groove clip it.
Drag it into Cyclone and start redistributing the audio slices around the pads. Then set the loop points to create new timings and repeats.
Drag in a couple more groove clips and keep going. You will soon be twisting those looped cliches into alsorts of new directions.
Once you have something interesting, start putting pitch markers in the timeline to create an arrangement.
I cant understand why Cyclone has been left to rot. i cant find any other tool that does what it does.

PilotGav
For example - musicians use samples and loops. No harm no foul... but when thousands of musicians are buying the same loops, sample packs and soft instruments... what's the point?

I was in a local blues bar a few months ago. Mostly for the food, but anyway. The band came on, and started playing. And it was a 12-bar blues song. They played, and every single part of that performance was predictable, because that's what the song structure requires. The lyrics may differ, the bass and drum fills might alter a bit from player to player, but really there's not much variety from song to song. Yet people love that and think of that as 'real' music.
 
So we see that giving people real instruments and getting them to play them manually is no guarantee of originality or variety. We also see that it doesn't really matter to the listener as long as they're hearing what they want, or to the performer if they're playing what they enjoy. And I think 'real' musicians often start drinking their own Kool-aid and saying things like "the tone is in the fingers" (no, it is not, and it is trivial to prove why the majority of the timbre comes from the rest of the signal chain) to pretend that human-performed music on physical devices is somehow intrinsically more diverse than computer-performed music, even when those humans are slavishly recreating the same style that existed 50 years ago.
 
As for the other side of the equation, i.e. whether it's possible to get great variety out of the same loops and sample packs... certainly. Give me 10 drum loops, 10 chord/pad loops, and 10 lead loops, and that's 1000 permutations. Do that again for a second section and you have almost a million possible ways to have arranged those 2 parts. And that's before you consider that usually the percussion part will be formed of 3, 4 or more separate loops, that the parts might be edited or have automation to change them significantly, that they may be pitch-shifted to create different chord sequences, or - and here's the shocking bit - someone might actually play a real instrument and put a completely new melody over the top of the loops. ;)
 
You also suggested that soft instruments are somehow a limit on variety... but I think you know, when you think about it, that's not the case. Soft instruments are an order of magnitude more versatile than physical ones because they're not constrained by needing to fit in a room, needing to be playable by a human, needing to be cost-effective to produce, needing to be made out of real world materials, and so on. I have VSTis of pretty much every tone and timbre. And I have soft synths that give me access to real instruments I will never be able to afford and will probably never see in person. That makes my music more diverse.
 

So I guess what I'm asking is where can I learn how all these factors... loops, samples, etc. are used today in order to produce fresh original music? What's the process? What's the secret?

 
I think the process is to use them as scaffolding for songs. You can plan out the basic structure of the track with loops alone and add to or remove them as necessary. And don't forget the power of editing and automation to change the character of the loops.

Anderton

Kylotan
I was in a local blues bar a few months ago...

Your post has an extremely high wisdom quotient. Well done.

I agree.  I need to order some loops and MIDI clips and quit whining about there being nobody around to collab with. 

This has turned into a really educational thread for me and generated some ideas. Over the weekend I was going through my music library and managed to find 1 record that has a rap/dance feel to it. Todd Rundgren's New World Order. I've been listening intently to it and find that he's done exactly what Craig and others have been talking about. All the pieces start with a looped groove and then he just takes it into a frenzy. I suggest folks that are behind curve (me) give it a listen to see what a rock/pop master can do with them.

Another true story:
 
At one point I was spending a lot of time in Germany playing concerts with Rei$$dorf Force and Dr. Walker. But it was a helluva commute from Florida. So I created a loop library of my playing, and sent it to him so he could load me into his MPC and have a "virtual Craig" when I couldn't make the gig. (That library became the basis of the AdrenaLinn Guitars loop library.)

ampfixer
What/where is this famous AdrenaLinn loop library you keep talking about?

It's no longer available, it came out well over 10 years ago. When M-Audio got out of the library business I asked why, I made a bunch of $$ off AdrenaLinn Guitars. An M-Audio representative said if all the libraries had sold as well, they wouldn't have gotten out of the business.  However, I did have a rights reversion clause and now own all the rights...hmmm...
 
Anyway, Roger Linn loved the library (I got his permission to use the word AdrenaLinn) so he put a mention on his site, along with the "hot" music demo and the "cool" music demo, which thanks to the miracle of the Interwebz are still accessible. (FWIW all the sounds are from the library except the drums.)

It's a subscription deal.
 
You pay 29.99 per MONTH, at least that's how I'm reading it

Bristol_Jonesey
It's a subscription deal.
 
You pay 29.99 per MONTH, at least that's how I'm reading it

Still a fantastic offer, making instruments available I never would have had before! Can't wait to see how NI reacts.

Of course it's per month,   its such a great deal I thought you'd know.  I can finally have a choral sample library, monstrous  trance sounds, orchestral sounds , storm drums everything!  Thus my comment about other companies,  this is going to put some out of business.

Thanks for all the links Craig.

No, sorry the it is real news.  The big kahuna, the entire catalogue used to be $50 per month.  Now it's $29.99.  Sorry for the confusion and again sorry to their competitors

Anderton

eph221
No, sorry the it is real news.  The big kahuna, the entire catalogue used to be $50 per month.  Now it's $29.99.  Sorry for the confusion and again sorry to their competitors

Okay, I see...the $29.95 used to be for seven collections and some extras. Now it's for all their samples. Still nt sure what this has to do with musical applications of loops, though.
 

As you say Craig, it's a pure rental system.
 
The very moment you miss a months payment, all of the instruments will cease to work.
 
You are locked in until hell freezes over.

It's not for everyone, haha.  sorry professor craig...carry on.

To me loops, presets, midi... it's just as valid as collaborating with other people and their ideas. So a particular drum loop isn't exactly what you want. But usually, if the drummer is in the room with you, it's still not gonna be exactly what you had envisioned, but a combination of what you liked, with the player's own style having a strong influence on the outcome. But if you find it cool, and you find a way to modify what you're playing to sound cool with it (collaboration), you might end up with something better than the sum of the parts (hopefully).
 
It's all blurred the lines between musician, performer, producer, engineer, etc. After all... a lot of the loops ARE real people "moving air". You just have the opportunity to play with what are some of the best in their field, whether they be musicians or programmers or sound designers. And then you have the option to mold and modify it even further depending on your own skills... as an instrumentalist, as a collaborator, as a producer, an editor, an engineer.
 
To me only the final product matters as a whole piece of recorded art, as a recording that I want to listen to. It's all the same, only different, with more access to sounds, sound designers, and players you may have never had a chance to collaborate with when doing things the "old" way. But the "old" way is just as valid, too. As long as the end justifies the means to you... it's all good. And maybe every once in a while, it turns into something great!

Since going fully digital in my humble space I've had two drummers in my room. One live and one Edrummer. Even though I have an e-kit I don't use it that much since I have every XLN midi pack, the entire Groove Monkee MIDI library, a hefty bunch of Slate MIDI grooves, some Platinum Samples MIDI grooves, the entire Toontrack MIDI libs (sans the Independent SDX), all the BFD2/3 included grooves and some Looploft MIDI loops. I tend to use MIDI for drums as I can typically find what I need or, as javahut said, adapt accordingly.