Splice is NICE.
When I was teaching middle school students with GarageBand back in the 2000’s, I would always run into a problem about half way through the school year. Even though there were over a thousand loops for the students to choose from, they would always hit a wall around January, and ask me if there were any other loops they could use. The teacher in me always used this exact moment to try to steer students away from their reliance on pre-made loops and have them compose their own, either with a tool like O-Generator, or using the keyboard or step entry tool to create their own. In theory, this is a great idea. In reality, it was tough. To help out the situation, I bought all of the GarageBand Expansion Packs, which were cool but expensive - especially as I had to purchase them for every computer in my keyboard lab. In reality, all it really did was extend my students from hitting the wall for another few months
Today, with online DAWs such as Soundtrap, Soundation, and others, students will inevitably run into the same situation. While some of these companies are always adding loops to their libraries, students will always get bored of them at some point. Enter one of my new favorite tools: Splice? Splice is a HUGE online royalty-free sample library. Users get access to millions of sounds made by top artists, labels, and sound designers.
When you first open up Splice, you realize that it is highly likely you have found the single source for sounds that you will ever need. Beautifully organized by a wide variety of genres and instruments, if ever there was a music tech rabbit hole you can go down - this is it! I absolutely LOVE browsing through the libraries and finding sounds by amazing producers as well as unique sounds create by the Splice team. They have also released a beta version of their AI tool that helps creators write songs/beats/whatever. The AI tool actually puts together combinations of instruments and loops to give you something that is brand new - every time. These snippets can serve as inspiration OR you can download what the AI tool creates and use it in your own projects. It’s VERY cool and I look forward to seeing where this goes.
Splice pricing is VERY affordable in my opinion, and they can provide you with a 30% discount if you are a student or a teacher! This is what you get at each price point:
The best part? Whatever you download from Splice is yours forever. Those loops don’t disappear once your subscription ends. Its a very similar model to stock art sites such as iStockPhoto. For $12.99 you get 100 loops forever. That’s the Sounds+ plan. If you want more loops you can either upgrade your account to Creator or Creator+, or you can keep the basic plan and just keep your account open until you have everything you need (this will likely never happen :)). If you are using an online DAW like Soundtrap, all you need to do is download the loops and import them into Soundtrap. From there, you can import them directly into your loop library.
Anyway, Splice is NICE, and I highly recommend you check it out. It will seriously upgrade your DAW loop library. You can sign up for a FREE account today and explore what they have to offer. Enjoy!