A loop pedal punishes you in real time: one wobbly take is the foundation of the next four minutes. A DAW stacks the same way, but lets you pretend it never happened.
The song is Brazil by Declan McKenna, built layer by layer — bass, doubled melody, chords, and natural harmonics on top — with the live parts played into the gaps on camera. Full workflow: how to loop without a loop pedal.
How to play natural harmonics on guitar (and where the nodes actually sit)
You do not fret a natural harmonic — you barely touch the string. Rest a fingertip on the open string above a node, pick, and lift the finger away. Pick nearer the bridge; it helps the overtone speak. Press down even slightly and you get a dead thud.
A node is a point that stays still while the rest of the string vibrates in equal parts. Halfway along — the 12th fret — it swings in two halves and sounds an octave above the open string: the loudest and easiest one. At the 7th you get an octave plus a perfect fifth, at the 5th two octaves. Past that they turn quiet and stop matching the frets: the next sounds two octaves plus a major third, its node a hair nut-side of the 4th fret, the one after slightly past the 3rd. So "over the fret wire" works for the 12th, 7th and 5th; above that, aim for the node.
And they are pure. The 7th-fret harmonic is a 3:2 fifth, about 702 cents; your tuner wants exactly 700. Two cents is nothing until you tune string to string and the errors stack up. The pure major third at the 4th fret is worse — some 14 cents below the tempered one. Octaves are safe — 12th and 5th fret — but the 7th and the 4th are lovely reference pitches and poor tuning references.
Four chords under the loop: C♯m – B – A – E
Brazil came out on 4 December 2015, a teenage Declan McKenna aiming at FIFA and the 2014 World Cup. Underneath sits a four-chord loop: C♯m, B, A, E. Against E major (E – F♯ – G♯ – A – B – C♯ – D♯) that is vi – V – IV – I — it opens on the relative minor and only gets home to E at the very end, so it keeps leaning forward instead of settling.
Tab and Guitar Pro file are in the Patreon post; throw a coffee my way on Patreon — purely for the riffs. If your first harmonic sounds like a kettle giving up: nearly-right.