Loops are easy. What separates a loop from a record is that the energy goes somewhere — up, down, and up again — across six or seven minutes, in blocks of eight, sixteen and thirty-two bars. This page lets you build that shape, hear any point in it instantly, and export the whole map as a multi-track MIDI file you can drag straight into Live as a scaffold.
Ten elements down the side, the whole track across the top, one cell per four bars. Click cells to add or remove an element; drag to paint. Click anywhere on the ruler or the section blocks to jump there and hear it immediately — that is the part worth playing with, because arrangement problems are almost always audible in two bars and invisible on paper.
What the MIDI export gives you. A type-1 file with one named track per element plus a Sections track. Each active region becomes one sustained note, so when you drag it into Live's arrangement view you get a visual skeleton at the right tempo — eleven tracks showing exactly where the kick drops out, where the pad enters, and where each section boundary falls. It is a scaffold to write against, not musical content: delete the guide notes once your real parts are in place.
Real arrangement shapes with real bar counts. The differences between them are mostly about who the track is for — a DJ needs thirty-two bars of beats to mix into, a streaming listener needs the hook inside twenty seconds, and those two demands are irreconcilable, which is why club edits and radio edits exist separately.
A four-bar loop is running. Every pad below fires in time — press it and the effect is armed for the next bar line, the way it would be if you were performing it. That timing is the point: transitions that land off the grid sound like mistakes, and this is the fastest way to feel where each one belongs.
The one people get wrong is silence. A single beat of nothing before a drop does more than any riser, costs nothing, and needs no plugin — but it has to be exactly one beat, exactly on the bar line, and it only works once or twice in a track. Try firing "Cut to silence" and then "Riser" and notice which one you actually believe.
What each device is for, how long it should run, and where it goes.
| Device | Length | Where | How to build it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low-pass sweep down | 8–16 bars | Into a breakdown | Auto Filter on the drum bus, cutoff automated 20 kHz → 400 Hz. Add resonance as it closes. |
| High-pass build | 8–16 bars | Before a drop | High-pass everything except the kick, sweeping up. Removes the bottom so the drop's return of bass is the event. |
| Noise riser | 4–8 bars | Before a drop | White noise, band-pass sweeping up, amp fading in. Should be inaudible when it starts. |
| Pitch riser | 2–4 bars | Last bars of a build | A saw with a pitch envelope climbing an octave. More aggressive than noise; use once. |
| Snare / clap roll | 1–2 bars | Final bars of a build | 8ths → 16ths → 32nds with rising velocity. The oldest build in dance music. |
| Impact / boom | 1 hit | On the downbeat of a drop | Low sine drop plus a reversed cymbal. Marks the landing so the ear knows the section changed. |
| Reverse cymbal | 1–2 bars | Leading into any section | Reversed crash or reversed reverb tail, ending exactly on the downbeat. |
| Cut to silence | 1 beat | Immediately before a drop | Mute everything for one beat. The most effective and most overused device here. |
| Delay throw | 1–2 bars | Last hit before a break | Send one chord or vocal to a dotted-8th delay with high feedback, then mute the source. |
| Reverb wash | 2–4 bars | Into a breakdown | Freeze or 100% wet a long reverb on the last chord, then pull the dry. |
| Tape stop | 1 beat | Section change, rarely | Pitch and speed falling to zero. Extremely recognisable, so use once per track at most. |
| Drum dropout | 1–2 bars | Anywhere | Remove the kick for a bar and let the top end run. Costs nothing and resets the ear. |
Dance music counts in powers of two. Breaking that is a decision, not an accident, and almost everything should sit on it.
| Length | What it is |
|---|---|
| 1 bar | The loop. Almost nothing changes here. |
| 4 bars | The phrase. One small variation — a hat pattern, a filter move. |
| 8 bars | The sentence. Something enters or leaves. The minimum unit of arrangement. |
| 16 bars | The paragraph. A real change of state. Most sections are a multiple of this. |
| 32 bars | The section. Intros, main sections and outros in club tracks are usually 32 or 64. |
| 64 bars | Roughly two minutes at 126. A whole DJ mix window. |
The shape is the song. Everything in the other five field guides — groove, low end, drums, patches, chords — is material. This is the one that decides whether the material becomes a record, and it is the part almost everyone leaves until they are already sick of the loop. Do it second, not last.
All audio synthesised live in the browser — a deliberately generic house/techno sketch, so what you are judging is the shape rather than the sounds. The energy curve is a weighted sum of what is playing, not a loudness measurement.