How to Loop a Section of a Song for Practice
Set point A, set point B, hit play. The hardest two seconds of the song repeat until your hands know it.
What A/B Looping Is and Why It Works
An A/B loop is a practice tool that repeats a specific section of audio on an endless cycle. Point A is where the loop starts, point B is where it ends and jumps back to A. For learning, it's the highest-leverage tool you can use. Here's why: muscle memory forms through repetition, not through playing a song end-to-end once. The bottleneck in learning a song is almost always two or three hard bars — a fast lick, a chord change, a weird rhythmic figure. If you play the whole song every time, you get ten reps of the hard bars and fifty reps of the easy ones. If you A/B-loop the hard bars, you get fifty reps of what actually needs work.
Step 1: Find the Section You Need to Work On
Play the song through once at full speed. Where did your hands stumble? Where did you lose the beat? Where did you guess instead of knowing what note comes next? That's the loop zone. Don't make the loop too tight. Give yourself a beat or two of context on either side — it helps you feel the downbeat and approach the phrase with momentum, rather than starting cold on the hardest note.
Step 2: Set Points A and B
In loope, click once on the waveform to set point A. Click a second time to set point B. A blue marker appears at A, a second marker at B, and the section between them becomes your loop zone. If the markers aren't precise enough, click again — loope moves whichever marker is closer to the new click. Or clear both with the Clear A/B button and try again. Aim for loop points that land on a downbeat — the start of a bar feels natural to restart from.
Try A/B looping nowStep 3: Loop and Practice
Press Play. The loop starts and repeats seamlessly — there's no gap between B and the next A because loope uses the Web Audio API's native loop mechanism, not a stop-and-restart. Strategy: play along with the loop for 10–15 reps at full speed, then stop. Can you play it? If not, slow it to 75% and do 10 more reps. Then 65%. Then 50% if you're still stuck. Once it's clean at a given speed, bump up 5–10% and repeat.
Step 4: Move the Loop Window
When that section is locked in, move the loop to the next trouble spot. Click a new A, click a new B. Repeat. Over a 30-minute practice session, you might loop 4–6 different sections of a song. When you stitch them back together by playing the whole song, you'll notice the difference immediately — those problem spots flow.
Try it now in Loope
Drop a track. Slow it down. Loop the tricky part. Change the key. All in your browser — no upload, no signup.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Click the Clear A/B button above the waveform. Both markers disappear and your next click sets a fresh A.
Not yet. A/B points are session-only — they reset when you close the tab. A bookmarks/session-save feature is on the roadmap. For now, jot the timestamps down or use the loop start time as a rough bookmark.
A loop pedal records what YOU play and loops it back. A/B looping loops a SECTION of a recording so you can play over it. Loop pedals are for performance and layering; A/B loops are for practice.
Yes. loope doesn't enforce a minimum loop length. Very short loops (under a beat) are useful for drilling a single chord transition or a single note's articulation.
Yes, and that's the killer combo. Set A/B on the waveform (in original song time), then slow the speed slider to 50%. loope scales the loop correctly — your 2-bar loop is now 4 bars long in real time, but still the same 2 bars of music.