ABSTRACT
With the introduction and maturation of MIDI and digital audio, new and wondrous tools have made their way into the mainstream of music production. These tools that can helps to use technology to forge, fold, mutilate and create compositions that make direct use of rhythm and other building blocks of music through the use of looping technology. This chapter focuses on many of the approaches and software programs that have evolved (and continue to evolve) into what is one of the fastest, interactive and most accessible facets of personal music production. Because groove-based tools often deal with rhythms and cyclic-based loops, there are several factors that need to be managed in order to be musically and technically effective: sync, tempo and length, and pitch. The aspect of sync relates to the fact that the various loops in a groove project will need to line up in time with each other.
