Help! I seem to be in the midst of a huge mental block thang and can´t seem to get beyond playing with loops at the moment. Have I lost the will to arrange...? ARGH!

Hello mate, no, you have not lost the will to arrange, and you do not have writer´s block either.

You are suffering from Loopitis.

Loopitis is common malady suffered among electronic music musicians. Especially those working with computer sequencers and other machines capable of setting up an easy looping situation.

Some common symptoms are:
1. Not being able to arrange/ get outside the loop. It's as if you have a Left/Right locator set in your brain.

2. Thinking that an musical idea/groove/part sounds absolutely fantastic, only to later ask yourself later how you could have possibly thought that it was a good part/sound in the first place. Which then usually culminates in trigger happiness with the delete key or even worse, in severe cases, binning the entire project.

The cure is threefold:
1. Discipline yourself only to use the looping facility when absolutely necessary (and it is often necessary) and never to let it play any longer than required for the task. Hit that spacebar!

2. Realize that the musical idea/groove/part that you originally created does indeed sound absolutely fantastic, and it will probably sound absolutely fantastic to your listener, when they hear it for the first time. It just starts to sound like shite to you because you have heard it 1,486 times in that loop - which you didn't turn off.

3. Create the parts for a track with the minimum of looping and arrange it out into a track as soon as you can, coming back to fix the details afterwards, rather than tweaking all the details in the loop at the start.

Any musical idea/riff/groove no matter how great will start to sound pants if one treats it in this way. If you wish, you can easily corroborate this assertion by sampling a small loop of your or anyone´s music, setting it to loop and play continuously it while doing something else. Just don´t do it with a favourite track that means something to you, because it will eventually ruin it for you :)

Good luck, Dr. Bilbo Bagginz