This seems to be something I come up against quite a lot, so here we go:
Last night I decided to make a version of ‘Happy Birthday’ to send a funny video to a friend and also as a fun learning exercise, but I came up against a little puzzle in that the melody of ‘Happy Birthday’ actually starts on beat 4 of the lead in bar. Not an issue as I usually record with the loop off and start recording a bar earlier either with a metronome or a copied bar of drums. However, after finishing recording in the melody, if I now loop the whole thing, I’m missing the ‘Happy’ from the lead in. I could have started playing the melody again whilst recording, but then if I wanted to stop that lead melody in my arrangement, I’d have had to cut out beat 4 of the melody track, and with a sound with a slow release/reverb, you’d hear that get cut off.
Last night I lifted the beat 4 lead in (The ‘happy’ if you were singing the song) and used it to overdub onto the end so I had a loop, but I’d ideally need to keep that version separate.
Hmmm, and with, say a slow pad sound, you’d need 3 versions of a loop:
1 - Where your 1st chord comes in from nothing
2 - Where the 1st chord comes in, but you can hear the decay of the last chord in the loop
3 - a version where the last chord rings out but the chord progression doesn’t start again
Or maybe you just keep the start ends of these loops somewhere.
Orrr maybe I’m just overthinking everything, hah!