Been there, done that. The real tracks and such with RB are actually much more useful for anything but drum and rhythm tracks IMO.

I used ACID, which was the software which popularized loops, for a couple years to build bed tracks, and found it actually kind of tiresome to be honest. It's quite a bit of work, compared to simply recording my own tracks. I spent lots of time auditioning loops to see if they might work in a particular song. Time I could have spent just recording my own thing.

For some, they are a God-send. Every time I think that I'll build a song using loops I seem to regret it. Exception are the very few raps that I have done in the past, where the base drum tracks are quite easy to build up from loops.

To me, there are two parts to the tedium:

1. auditioning tens or hundreds of loops to find the short-list of loops that I'll actually use.

2. Building the song, track by track, loop by loop within those tracks, then applying the scale changes on each loop, for each track, at the appropriate points, for the pitched loops (non-percussion loops).

Now, perhaps for the 2nd point, there have been some advances where chord changes could be applied easily across tracks and the loop pitches for all loops/tracks adjust accordingly. Is this how RB handles loops? If so, that would make use of loops much more useful in my opinion.

-Scott

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