Looping: December 2025
24 Jan 2026Here are the loop jams I captured from month of December.
Loop 1
I think I was looking back at some old loops and wanted something with a slow groove. With a modulated held chord. I remember playing around for a while before I landed on a bass line that I liked. Well, mission accomplished, because this jam is slow AF.
Loop 2
Let’s do phaser distorted percussive funky chords and a bunch of chicken scratch. What next? Well, I’m not exactly clear on that. I’m just making all of this up as I go.
Loop 3
Whenever I go to lay down a new loop I have to clear a memory slot, because the 100 available on the looper pedal have all been used. I’ll generally give what was in there one playback before deleting it. This was an example where I liked something that was there and decided to do it differently. Inevitably the new becomes unrecognizable from what was there before. The chord progression here is two parts, once descending and one ascending, both with a chorus effect on. The lead line is some fuzz doing what felt right, which is another layer of stair step motion.
Loop 4
This started as the chord progression for the sea shanty “Bully in the Alley.” I was contemplating doing a straight take of the vocal melody, but once I laid down the main chords with that phaser effect and rhythm I had no interest in that anymore. So some simple fuzzy lead line it is.
Loop 5
It’s unrecognizable now, but again I was aiming to cover a sea shanty, this time “Drunken Sailor.” Don’t hear it? Yeah, I didn’t stick with that idea. I really liked the syncopated rhythm over the dreamy chorus-laden chords. It all came together and created a delightful base to play over. This was one of my favorite grooves to get into this month.
Loop 6
Keeping the theme of wanting to cover and reinterpret songs, I was listening to “Glory Box” by Portishead and had the idea to take the string section and do it with guitar. But of course that string part has many sources doing a bunch of different harmonies and that all came out very different with the guitar layers. Loud, really. That didn’t leave any room sonically to put more guitar on top (which is usually how I finish a loop). Plus I didn’t entirely stick to the original string bit. So this was… an experiment. A fun one.
Loop 7
Not exactly a complicated riff to start, but what I was looking for was a bit of a “pedal tone,” where the motion came from the second layer of chords on top. Which came out great, in my opinion. Very emotive.
Loop 8
I remember really struggling to figure out the final chord on this one to go with the tiny little riff. It feels a bit like a question mark. Continuing a trend for this year, this really came into its own once the bass line came together and gave it grounding and momentum. What felt awkward earlier on became cohesive.
Loop 9
Not a lot of complexity in the base loop here. I pretty much raced through to get to the point of adding a fuzzy lead line on top. I like when that traces over the base riff.
Loop 10
Enough electric tomfoolery, it’s time for raw funky acoustic guitar. Which… I immediately felt needed a muted electric rhythm on top of that. There was so much going on with the rhythm that I wasn’t exactly sure how to accompany. I’m trying to decide if that’s a problem or not. In some ways, if a thing is ever to be a song it probably needs vocals and those need a melody. And that could be traced out with guitar. But not always. I’m not technically songwriting here, so it’s fine. I think.