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.
Comments
P.S.: by the way, the idea has potential: do your full song and show us!
P.P.S.: oh, and thank you for the review for my latest song.
P.P.P.S.: perhaps we should move our posts to a new thread to not hijack this. Is there a way to do it in this forum?
No.
P.S. But private in-forum messaging can be good when you suddenly have that urge to get a room
Hey, @aaronpc: your latest has a strong eastern asian flavour. Like it. Liked it a lot, so just listened to it four times in a row. Congrats!
EDIT: I quoted myself instead of editing: how silly.
Thank you for clarifying, @JohnnyGoodyear!
Thanks appreciate it. Thanks for the thoughts and ideas on drums. And the examples. I will check them out!
@theconnactic You have an insatiable appetite for making good music & that's great for all us listeners. This one is no exception. You've maintained that happy party flavour but added an extra sweaty edge to your tune by some interesting changes of accent in the rhythm department. Your usual high standards of playing are on show & yep, your bass plucking & sound is top notch.
"Frenesi" is an apt title indeed. If I could add "controlada" (hope that's correct) in front of it to show you have it all sussed out sir.
@aaronpc Such an interesting piece of music. Cool unique style & pushing boundaries. Transfixed by that methodical, comforting hooky rhythm, my head went off on one to its beats. It was like 2 normal functioning heartbeats followed by a third that gently explodes but all the time being controlled & monitored in its flow rate of sky blue blood. Always keeping back just enough to sustain life. The vocal is lovely, sparsely used but enough to wet the whistle. I'm firmly on the love side of the reaction-o-meter. Great stuff.
Thank you oh riff meister. Yep, good old Guitarism played through a crunchy Amplitude Slash Marshall AFD100 with the hiss setting on the gate pedal set low (he says like a real guitarist. Well, I can pretend, it's Friday)!
Good luck with your "Techno Blast" project.
My entry for the month.
lyrics here: http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/lyrics/bittersweet.txt
@High5denied the new mix sounds clearer and I think it's a little easier to follow the lyrics. It's a good rock song and I like the guitar riffs and the vocal melody, and the silly lyrics as well
On a technical level it could probably still do with a tad more in the bass, and also maybe some overall bus compression/limiting.
@crouchie
I've got something in mind already...I PM my mail...
Yes I'm serious, I'd like to try a remix, really !
@theconnactic "Frenesi" some great guitar playing as usual, and it does indeed evoke the feeling alluded to in the title.
@aaronpc creepy and very very cool. Unlike a lot of more experimental tracks this one made me want to keep listening, primarily because of the melodies. The music-box style melody at the start sets the tone, and I love the middle-eastern/greek flavour melody at the end. The sounds are all great, such as the squeaky/ghostly "ooooeeee", and the female vocal sound at the end.
Great atmosphere and vibe, and despite it's simplicity the music works tremendously well. Normally I would scold you for not including a vocal, but I think this one actually stands well as an instrumental - it could be the soundtrack to a crazy stop-motion animation.
Thanks for the comments! So glad you enjoy the song. I appreciate the technical thoughts as well. I will apply them for sure.
No worries. In another thread you asked how to make your songs sound "louder" in a playlist. What you could do with your song is just to apply some bus limiting on the Master strip to increase the overall volume.
Just for comparison's sake compare the SoundClound rendering of the waveform of your song:
And mine:
Those vertical bars represent the volume at that point in the song (it's simplified/stylised, but you get the idea). Your song has a range of bar lengths, some short, some longer, which means that your song has more dynamic range (which is a good thing!), while mine has less - however if they are both next to each other in a playlist mine will sound louder. So I win!
And that's how the loudness wars begin.
Truth be told my song is overcompressed (it's been compressed twice, once by Microwarmer, and once again in the Lurssen Mastering app), so please don't follow my example. However you could probably do a little extra limiting to your track without completely killing the dynamics like I did.
The way you could do that is by opening the FX tab on the Master Strip in Auria, and there you have two limiters available: one is the PSP limiter, and the other is Auria's native brick wall limiter.
This is the PSP limiter, you activate it by pressing the "LIM" button at the bottom, and then if you turn the input dial clockwise it will increase the volume of your track and push the peaks into the limiter (so the peaks will be held at their original volume while the rest of the track gets louder, this is to avoid clipping).
You can also use the brick wall limiter by tapping the "LIM" button to the right of the master fader:
The controls for this are in the "Limiter" tab at the top. They work in a similar fashion, turn the input clockwise to increase the volume:
It's also useful to click the "Meter" button for the Master meter, which shows peak and RMS levels. Peak is the two bars in the middle, and RMS the two bars on the side. RMS gives you a better feel for the actual loudness.
If you want to get fancy you can also use Pro L, or Microwarmer. Pro L is a very good limiter that will make things really loud without adding distortion, and Microwarmer does the opposite: as peaks are pushed into the limiter it will add tape saturation effects. You can hear microwarmer on my entry this month, the slight fuzziness to the cymbals, and the overall fuzzy "veil" are from the tape saturation effects.
@richardyot Thanks for that! Very very very helpful. The screen shots are worth a million. I have ProL, use it. But, I can see what you mean with the two wave forms you show. Thanks again!
@richardyot "Nothing is complete & our lives are bittersweet." How true & I second that.
Aching lyrics that you've written & sung again here. Quite a haunting intro......what is that de, da, de, da-da sound played on? Hey, great brush work on the drums Richard. The easy, laid back feel to the drumming totally complements the feel & delivery of your song.
Highlights for me are the parts .57 to 1.04 & again 2.16 to 2.24. That sweeping 2 chords part prior to the chorus. The more I listen, the chorus hook sinks deeper into my sound gills. It's a melody that took me a few times to fully get but now it's concreted in & the foundations are firmly in place. The dynamics from verse to chorus are evident & gives power & punch to the "We found out years ago." The deep bass at the end of the chorus is also effective & adds a slightly darker texture which I liked.
"The price of love is loss." Oh yeah sir! .............and that chorus gets better every time I listen. Great stuff.
Off to listen to your tune, but your limiter post was very generous and very helpful also.
@Bluepunk - thanks. The de-da sound is just a Lyra electric piano (one of the stock ones, can't remember which), with a smidge of PSP Echo on it.
Brushes are courtesy of Drum Loops HD, I created the fills manually by getting the individual drum samples (single share hits etc) and just placing the audio on the timeline! Extra percussion from Lyra + Drumagog (shaker, ride, and of course more cowbell).
Pre-chorus is suspended chords, which I love for the tension they create, and which you noticed
AmSus 2 into AmSus4.
I tried to make the verse dark and the chorus sweet, you know, like bittersweet (OK I'll get me coat). Lyrics are so-so to be honest (I'll forever be in the shadow of @JohnnyGoodyear there) but that is the one good line in the song
Well Pro L is super easy to use, just use the slider on the left, the more you bring it up, the louder your track will get. If you look at the waveform, the red peaks at the top will show how much limiting is being applied. With Pro L you can push things really hard, not that it's advisable.
@richardyot As I've just gotten through a second listen let me start with the end first and say I like that variation, the quiet crash/stop, it works very well in the context of the tune. Endings can be hard to get right and we (me) can be lazy (let's just get done with this), but of course they are the last taste left in the mouth, so well done here.
My instinct is that you lag behind where you are. Perhaps we all do. By this I mean we concentrate as best we're able on the areas we feel need work, but then get those areas upto speed (if we're able) yet still remained primarily focused on them. With your vocal, you are so much further along with keeping in your chosen tune etc. that I feel you can/should begin to take off some of the thickness of the effects. These aren't unpleasant but make things furrier (technical term) than they need to be and I think, often, this kind of furriness takes some of the immediacy/connection out of the misery, or this case personal bittersweetness, that the 'I' of the singer is communicating.
Sorry, poor job of explaining myself, but I would like the vocal just a bit (10/15%?) crisper somehow. I also think there's room for micro-variations in your delivery of (especially) the verse melody. Yes, you have a tune to follow, but if it's too regimented/exact the predictability undercuts believability. Not that the listener does (or should) even think about these things. I think it's a matter of the 'performance bonus' (tm). That extra little bit of something. But this is also something that probably comes on 200th time you sing it
Your backing here is very accomplished with all the right grace notes and bits and pieces, to the point that I might also like to hear a stripped down version, but I suspect that's my own taste/preference/bias rather than a functional critique.
I've noticed (or feel) that a preponderance of your work talks to or focuses on 'you' not 'I'. Quite unusual. Just an aside. But interesting from the nosey analyst's viewpoint
@JohnnyGoodyear thanks for the considered feedback - all being taken on board.
Every month I am asked to reduce the effects on the vocals
, and honest-to-goodness I am gradually doing this. This time there is only reverb and relatively mild compression (and the obligatory fix in Melodyne, but that's not really audible). The reverb is always too thick, but it's less thick than it used to be. The fuzziness in the chorus is actually not an effect, that's how I sang it, it's pure vocal tone. I couldn't sing that phrase more cleanly, not sure why, maybe it's at the top of my comfortable range. I did roughly 20 takes for the chorus, and used the two best ones (double tracked) but they all had the fuzz. Anyway, I will (maybe) consider dialing back the reverb and the limiting/saturation more in future.
Agreed completely on the delivery of the verse, I have some early demo versions with a more varied melody, which somehow got forgotten on the way, and I wished I had used them. Maybe if I still like the song six months down the line I can re-record, but the verse is a bit monotone.
I do have a stripped-down version, just me and acoustic guitar, but I think all the swells, synths, pianos (and cowbell) actually add to the overall vibe. Last week I stumbled upon the acoustic demo for my January effort (Days), which was just me and an acoustic guitar, and it sounded much better than my "finished" effort, which admittedly was badly produced. But generally I tend to always start with the stripped-down version of just me and the guitar to write the song, before adding all the bells and whistles. Production-wise though, I always find things that could be improved once some time has passed.
As for the "you" not "I", I hadn't thought of that - on the one hand it makes me sound less narcissistic than average, but maybe I'm just hiding it
On a related note, I read a good joke the other day in the Guardian: How does Morrissey change a light bulb?
Click here for the punchline:
He stands still and the world revolves around him.
I wouldn't say the voice in the chorus was fuzzy, @richardyot: I prefer to describe it as "driven" and, my opinion, it suits the song well and add a necessary edge to the chorus.
About the effects, it's always very subjective. I'd use less reverb throughout the song, pouring more of it on the choruses, and perhaps a HW compressor during the record stage (fast attack, long release and circa 5dB of reduction). Bear in mind that if you seek that Madchester effect, I dare to say you are processing your vocals on the conservative side.
Finally, I loved the instrumental: full of details and little jewels here and there, and your choices for the drums were quite thoughtful.
All in all, a very good song. Congrats!
I'll do my best to dial it back next time. I'm real sucker for reverb though, but it always gets criticised
I do try and bear this in mind nowadays and dial that AUX send back a quarter turn, but I need more discipline to dial it back even more 
Stone Roses and My Bloody Valentine songs usually have the vocals soaked in reverb and other FX and yet I love them. So don't take it as criticism but as a different approach in production. I personaly prefer dry verses and wet choruses (with more gain to the vocals) to add drive.
Thanks for that. You did a marvellous job with the drums & of course the cowbell. I just fired those 2 chords into Guitarism to play together. Lush. I never realised there were so many variations on chords. I mean what the hell is "madd9" & "m7b5" all about. Never noticed them at the bottom of the choices before. Think I'll stick to single & double stroke rolls. Less taxing on this brain.
@Bluepunk I'm not usually mad on extended chords (add9 etc...), and I only rarely use 7ths (Am7 etc...), but for some reason I really like Sus2 and Sus4, especially when they resolve back to the "parent", like: AmSus2 --> Am.
If you don't already have Firo, you should get it (it's free), it's great for exploring progressions with chord variations:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/firo-music-maker-instrument/id905878913?mt=8