While repetition is used in the music of all cultures, the first musicians to use loops in the sense meant by this article were
musique concrete and
electroacoustic music pioneers of the 1940s, such as
Pierre Schaeffer,
Halim El-Dabh,
Pierre Henry,
Edgard Varèse and
Karlheinz Stockhausen. These composers used
tape loops on reel-to-reel machines, manipulating pre-recorded sounds to make new works. In turn, El-Dabh's music influenced
Frank Zappa's use of tape loops in the mid-1960s.
Terry Riley is a seminal composer and performer of the loop- and ostinato-based music who began using tape loops in 1960. For his 1963 piece
Music for The Gift he devised a hardware looper that he named the Time Lag Accumulator, consisting of two tape recorders linked together, which he used to loop and manipulate trumpet player
Chet Baker and his band. His 1964 composition
In C, an early example of what would later be called
minimalism, consists of 53 repeated melodic phrases (loops) performed live by an ensemble. "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band", the B-side of his influential 1969 album
A Rainbow in Curved Air uses tape loops of his electric organ and soprano saxophone to create electronic music that contains surprises as well as hypnotic repetition. Another effective use of tape loops was Jamaican
dub music in the 1960s. Dub producer
King Tubby used tape loops in his productions while improvising with homemade
delay units. Another dub producer, Sylvan Morris, developed a slapback
echo effect by using both mechanical and handmade tape loops. These techniques were later adopted by
hip hop musicians in the 1970s.
Grandmaster Flash's
turntablism is an early example in
hip hop. The first commercial drum loop was created for the song "
Stayin' Alive" for the movie
Saturday Night Fever by
Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson. It was created by recording two measures of drums from the song “
Night Fever” and recording them onto a two-track
analog tape which was then fed between the capstan and the pinch roller. Because the loop was about 30 feet long, it was fed out to a 7” plastic reel for ballast which was hung over the arm of a microphone stand before the loop of tape returned to the take-up reel. This same loop was later used by the Bee Gees for the song "
More than a Woman" also from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. That same loop was also use – though slowed down quite a bit, for the Streisand recording of “Woman in Love” produced by Albhy Galuten, Karl Richardson and Barry Gibb. When
Jeff Porcaro of the band
TOTO came to work with Galuten and Gibb on a Bee Gees record, he was shown the technique of creating drum loops with analog tape. Porcaro subsequently went back to California where he used the method he had learned to create the drum loop that was used by Toto as the foundation of the song
Africa. The use of pre-recorded, digitally-
sampled loops in
popular music dates back to Japanese
electronic music band
Yellow Magic Orchestra, who released one of the first albums to feature mostly samples and loops, 1981's
Technodelic. Their approach to sampling was a precursor to the contemporary approach of constructing music by cutting fragments of sounds and looping them using computer technology. The album was produced using
Toshiba-EMI's LMD-649 digital
PCM sampler, which engineer Kenji Murata custom-built for YMO. ==Digital looping==