Loopy Pro: Create music, your way.
What is Loopy Pro? — Loopy Pro is a powerful, flexible, and intuitive live looper, sampler, clip launcher and DAW for iPhone and iPad. At its core, it allows you to record and layer sounds in real-time to create complex musical arrangements. But it doesn’t stop there—Loopy Pro offers advanced tools to customize your workflow, build dynamic performance setups, and create a seamless connection between instruments, effects, and external gear.
Use it for live looping, sequencing, arranging, mixing, and much more. Whether you're a live performer, a producer, or just experimenting with sound, Loopy Pro helps you take control of your creative process.
Download on the App StoreLoopy Pro is your all-in-one musical toolkit. Try it for free today.
best SOUNDING drum machine
With iSpark getting a lot of discussion lately, and comparisons to Patterning being made, it got me thinking-
what's the best sounding drum machine for iOS at this point?
Personally, I've been satisfied with SeekBeats for electronic drums. Then iMaschine & Figure for everything else(processed acoustic drums, etc).
What is the consensus these days for the best electronic & natural drum source?
Comments
IMHO, Rock Drum Machine for me does the job. Not being a drummer or knowing how to program realistic sounding drum tracks is a always the hardest part of building a song. So RDM really makes that super easy. Patterning is also another one that helps a lot. A third for me is Drum Perfect which lets you select premade drum patterns. I love that!!!
For guitar players like me, this is what helps us with getting a groove going and laying the foundation of a song started.
Rock Drum machine for me, pretty much same as what T4Christ says about it.
Difficult question to answer. Some sounds are better on one machine than the other for different purposes. I think though once you get past synth or sample, it comes down to how the program lets you program the sounds. How it helps or hinders your creative juices.
Elastic Drums let's me create the weird and squeltchy with aplomb. It can do 'normal', but that to me is not it's forte.
Patterning is a joy to use and be creative with. Some nice esoteric kits have been included or are available for download.
DrumPerfect Pro really lends itself to acoustic drum beats, or anything where a more human feel is desired.
Different Drummer makes me rethink standard drum beats, but can be used for so much more.
iSpark is designed well and makes it so easy to get something going. Maybe one of the best all rounders.
Wanting to add some bass lines with drums? Oscilab and WR6000 are fun and creative apps, but as yet no Link.
Diode-108 used to be a go to, but unlikely to get updates at this time.
DM1 and Funkbox have vibes of their own, I just don't find they hit the spot to get my creative juices going.
Then of course we have the pad machines...iMPC Pro, BeatHawk, iMachine2 etc etc.
Best sounding? Maybe using high Res samples in Auria or Cubasis might be better sounding in some ways, but for myself, for live jamming, all the above work great and sound just fine when levels are set right.
O and never forget Drum Jam.....owwww YES!
For acoustic drums its funk drummer for me, outstanding app !
For acoustic percusion > drumjam
For Electronic, I use gadget/patterning/modrum or egoist(the drum machine effected by the fx sequencer gives really cool results)
I feed sector or samplr if I want to go experimental
I've found between Elastic Drums, SeekBeats, Tokyo in Gadget, and iElectribe that I can get all the drum synth versatility that I desire for my productions. You can get super weird and trippy, loud and distorted, or stick to clean sounding classic sounds with all 4. I don't care much for samples with the few exceptions of when I want to make a genre specific sound or go classic with 808 or 909s or if I sample my own drum hits made in the aforementioned apps.
The best sounding DM for me now is the new version of Garageband's drummer feature. It pretty much changed the whole game for me. The only problem is not being Audiobus or IAA friendly. That really changed my workflow. I have to go in and out between Auria and GB all the time, with track exports and imports...
Good and sensible list and one that makes you realize how well served we are at this point.
Some of the drum machines one would think sound good, sound good, but when their result accompanies a song, they don’t.
Stroke Machine, Sunvox. Both ship with tons of presets, comprised of drum synth and drum samples and can craft sounds that use both samples (with mangling) and multi osc synthesis, with unmatched filters, effects, modulation, eq.
Stroke Machine was coded by the guy that did the original Attack VST, then took that approach and made it work on iOS. And Sunvox is Sunvox.
Sunvox, (like StrokeMachine) can have samples shipped in but also can sample any hit you can make live
Gadget + Bibao + Curated, swappable samples = fun, fun, fun in the fluffy chair
Exporting the stems =
We are blessed with many great percussion apps, as well as apps that include percussion. I've used BeatHawk, and Cubasis for drums and percussion a few times. And yes, the new GarageBand drummer is pretty cool, too bad we don't have that as a standalone input app.
What do people think of https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/beat-machine/id505825861?mt=8 Beat-Machine?
Pretty partial to what comes stock with Auria Pro in Lyra now, and the samples in Drumagog are fantastic. It doesn't do patterning of course, but if you are looking to drive something via midi, it's pretty darn fine. Nice selection of percussion as well. Add on to that you can add on any EXS samples you like to Lyra, and it's pretty complete. In addition to Drumjam, mentioned above, I also love most of the percussion drum sounds in ThumbJam as well. Mr. Sonosaurus makes good stuff.
That can pretty much be all drum machines really, as most don't have separate outs to FX and EQ the separate tracks
The best sounding drum machine is the one that makes what ever project your working on sound good.
this is particularly interesting, as I'll be upgrading to Auria Pro soon and in re-thinking workflow, I've been wondering about whether these newer drum machines are that much better sounding as well as how they'd integrate w/Auria Pro.
thanks to all for their comments so far.
There is a learning curve for sure with both (with anything worth while). The issue with StrokeMachine is that if u touch a blank space in the synth GUI, the app crashes.
The funny thing about it is that if you've seen the GUI there are very very few blank spaces...I've written Wolfram Franke about it, he was cool in email and will hopefully deal with it (he said he would when he could, was working on a new synth vst - Biotek, looks cool https://www.tracktion.com/products/biotek). I've been able to avoid the crashes pretty easily, but that's me and my fingers.
Both Sunvox and StrokeMachine include great presets to get you rolling before you roll your own.
I think one of the problems I have, is I change sound setting often on the fly. I also have thick shakey fingers
so for myself it is unusable which is a shame as I would love to use it.
Praxis Beats should not be forgotten.
I've not dabbled yet, but mean to some day
Mmmm.
Patterning wins for me in terms of playability (and the samples are great)
iElectribe and Elastic Drums and SeekBeats all tie in terms of creating great sounding synth drum sounds.
The problem with all of the above though, for me - is getting the results out and into your project. I'm lazy... and I also like to change things on the fly all the time - so don't like committing to audio.
Therefore - for actual tracks I find time and time again I go back to London in Gadget. Because the rest of my track is in Gadget. (Sometimes I'll load samples into Bilbao / Abu Dhabi - sometimes i'll try to coax stuff out of Tokyo, but I find it a bit limited).
My new favourite thing, though, is to really make use of the effects you can apply to London. E.g. I came up with a lovely artificial sounding snare sound made from finding the right snare sample, changing its' pitch, shortening it right down, adding some 'boost' and applying a ring mod filter. It really doesn't sound like the original sample at all and sounds more like something i'd make in Elastic Drums. Really pleased with that... and no need to faff around importing samples and realising you're not happy with them.
Don't forget the golden oldies..... FunkBox, DM1, GumDrops, Drumstudio, Boom 808 & 909, Diode 108, FingerBeat, Drums XD, Drumslive, FL Studio GM Mobile, DrumKick, Molten, & MoDrum.
Processing Processing Processing.
I process the shit out of my sample library, it really doesn't matter where I play them most of the time. It is more user interface over sound for me.
Some of the add-ons in imaschine sound good imo. Even though I have the real Maschine, on ios I prefer patterning's UI as it fosters different ideas. As someone mentioned, sample editing within the circular interface would be immense.
Yep, it's nasty when it crashes, and it's happened when I've "designed" 10 different "drums" in a kit without saving yet...not often but ouch. Hoping Mr Franke hooks us up with that bug fix.
Doing stuff on the fly, (playing with synth params) while set up inside Modstep, or Genome and AB into a DAW, or sometimes just recording into DAW, is something I expect to do in iOS that I find is not often doable- desktop spoiled me here, a I've had to either limit myself to the ultra stable apps (which leaves out my favs), or slow the f#%k down. So it's a little of both
Yep. For me I'm doing either pop stuff or Krautrock-inspired rock/ambient, so the important things to me are ease of loading my outside-purchased samples and the user interface. Patterning wins both. Drum Perfect has a good search as well, but Patterning is the only other I know of with a sample search so i can narrow it down to drum machine/drum type. The others don't really take into account outside samples with tons of different hits. And its interface wins vs. any iOS app period.
Oh and to answer the question generally, the best sounding drum machine is the LinnDrum, hands down. It has been forever and may always be the best non-synthesis drum machine.
I like it!
All the answers are here already but I want to mention Funkbox again. I find that it's always a little low but as soon as you put it through AUFX:Push or you favorite compressor/saturator, the quality of the samples really really shines. Plus, it's got good 'classic' drum machine beats built in for when you just want to start playing and has been the star of iOS MIDI Clock since day one.
Also want to double down on the mention of DrumJam. The ease of swiping your finger around along with the Bedlem settings sounds amazing and is just plain joyous.
Agree.
I think it sounds great if you're actually looking for a drum machine sound. Particularly if you use the lower the sample and bit rates a bit. I haven't actually used it in a while—thanks for the reminder!