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.
Towards a best-practice preset sound naming taxonomy
Towards a best-practice preset sound naming taxonomy.
As stated in a different thread, people crouch and repeatedly press a digit against a box listening to the first milliseconds of various honks and bleats, searching for that perfect one. After about seven or so fall into the mental shortlist, we go back and completely forget which ones they were, and start again, or pick some we initially rejected.
The names, again (as hinted at in that thread) are primarily at fault. The names are as far away from being truly useful as is possible to be. They’re just some artistic whim that floated through the mind of the synthesist, at the point they were faced with a save dialogue box.
I propose a scheme of naming. Many people name their own presets with their own initials, and this is a fair allocation of some characters as the initial “name space”, because it is the space for your name (or someones). Following that, we’d be tempted to do what? State what kind of sound it is? Certainly, yes, but how?
We could describe the sound, or alternatively, describe where it is to be used. Such different approaches have different outcomes. I would suggest avoiding the latter — the ‘where it is to be used’ direction, as what we might consider an appropriate use of a sound in 2016 may be cliched and dated later in a new genre of the future (think of orchestral stab samples in music of the past few decades, or crashing late ’80s snares).
I would therefore instead suggest describing the sound as it sounds, not where it should be used, and furthermore I would veer away from ‘artistic’ poetic descriptions, as these occlude actual guidance.
How to do it
My suggestion is to describe sounds first and foremost by envelope description. This sounds unusual but bear with me. A significant amount of the character of a sound is in the envelope, even ignoring what else occurs within the sound. After the creators namespace, therefore, I would place a taxonomic family description of envelope type. The envelope family names would be unambiguous to the extent that anyone — any generation, any language, anywhere on the world — would ascertain correctly what shape the sound is from the naming, most of the time.
Following the env type (and I really do think that that was the single most important characteristic in sound description), perhaps I’d suggest a property I could call “extroversion”, or “harmonic content”. This would simply describe how “in your face” or extroverted the sound is (and we all know how some sounds stick out in the mix like a dick in pyjamas, no matter what you do). It doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a higher pitched sound, or solo, or lead line. By contrast, an “introversion” naming indicates the sound will happily stand to the back, not demanding all the attention.
Following that I’d have an indication width or focus. What this would indicate is how “noisy” the sound is, whether it is spattered about all over the spectrum, like a noise hit of a cymbal, or shimmering orchestral strings, or voice “aah”s. Or, focused, such that it has a narrower area of leverage, like a piano melody or a kick drum or a synth blip, etc.
Following that, I’d have a classification of dynamic evolution — how does it change during the sound? Not much — it came out sounding more or less like it came in? A lot — once the note started it took you on a journey changing this way then that, then over the hill and back again with the shopping done. This is useful, but not as a “family”, more as a “species”, as some closely related butterflies are bizarrely coloured while their cousin is plainer, hence I’d put this last in the taxonomical naming classification scheme.
Comments
I like it. When are are you going to standardize and implement?
Seriously though, it would be interesting if the devs would run with this.
This makes me wonder if there's some area (Github?) where devs collaborate specifically in iOS audio/midi development? Given how often we see a hodgepodge of implementation variances, I wonder if such a resource exists and is widely understood to be available. Granted, your idea isn't necessarily restricted to iOS.....just a thought.
Great idea!
So now we could all use some examples: maybe some popular presets sounds we all know and love from our favorite iOS synths, followed by a u0421793 type re-naming. Pick your favorite synth, we all own them all...
What this idea doesn’t cover well is cases where actual “realistic” sound modelling, such as a very accurate imitation of a clap sound, actually do produce what everyone would agree upon as exactly that — a clap sound. In which case, you’d just call the patch “clap”, rather than IT_extremelyshort.mediumextrovert.widebandnoise.simple (which may or may not mean the same thing to most of the population, I’d suspect not) (IT are my initials, Ian Tindale). This idea is mainly to avoid the nonsense of purely synthetic sounds having “poetic” names.
Of course, you could combine both: IT_extremelyshort.mediumextrovert.widebandnoise.simple_clap1
I don’t know, let’s see where we can take this, everyone.
Nah much to complicated and Names like a telephone book
Just name them in categories
Pad
Bass
Keys
Percussion
Fx
12345
....
There is that, but personally I find a lot of good basses in other people’s pad or lead categories, and vice versa. Lots of genres used yesterdays x for today’s y.
I mean — here’s the first 60 patches of an Oberheim Matrix 1000 synth (which I’ve seen reports of people wanting to sell purely because they waste too much time prodding through it trying to find something they like, and the patch book is no help at all with names like these):
totohorn
1000strg
mooog_b
ezybrass
synth
mibes
chunk
mindsear
castillo
destroy+
big pik
m-choir
stringme
)liquid(
pno-elec
bed trak
stellar
syncage
shivers
+ zeta +
steeldr.
taurus
powrsolo
interstl
reztful
watrlng
beels
likethis
nthenews
soft mix
obxa-a7
breath
mutrono
slowater
haunting
flanged
tension
echotron
pirates!
ep swep
dejavue'
drama
violince
bounce
sagan'z
ob lead
feedgit
sample
tinypian
galactic
dou ciel
wa clav
dreamer
xa str
church
kidding?
thunder
echowurl
blabinet
strungs
african
…need I go on? Yes, about half of them suggest something (and you’d not necessarily be correct) and the other half are just meaningless.
I was thinking abbreviations...
RB_S7E4N3_Rhodes
Cryptic yes, but if it were standardized, it wouldn't take much effort to pick up on, and if the devs built the search tools in, you should be able to zero in on what you want pretty quickly.
Yes, and it could be partially machine-readable / human sort-of readable that way. Although this is metadata (that accompanies a silly poetic name, whereas before that was all we had), it should also be a good human discoverability means.
Another spanner I should throw into the works, here, is that a hierarchical tree is not always a good thing compared to tags. For example, if I had a big red thing, small red thing, big blue thing and a small blue thing, and I want to find the latter, should I be explore small things first, or blue things first? A design based on a tree imparts a decision up-front that may prove to be broken later down the line. Tags can avoid that.
What about a succinct use of adjective/noun that is something the majority would agree sounds appropriate. "Bright Piano #5", "Silky Saw #11" "Growling SynthBass #21.5"
--descriptive title, a number so people could choose other similar sounds, a 21.5 could mean it's the basic #21 sound with a little difference..
Bad idea?
I'm fine with people just naming their presets bass, lead, pad etc. with an extra description, but I agree it is annoying when the preset title is cryptic. Ultimately it doesn't matter much anyway you still have to go through all the sounds to hear them, just favorite the ones you like best.
IMO initials should go at the end. It's always good to give credit to patches, and sometimes we even hunt them out based on who created them, but very rarely. Why take up the primary sort with the initials?
Good point.
Perhaps there is some scheme for converting these synthesis parameters to alpha-numerics (perhaps something like hexadecimal) that - once you learn the scheme - you can get an idea of what the sound 'looks' like you're working on. I see it as some sort of standard in music app synthesis - a window/readout shows the code for the current sound setup and after time and practice one could see what direction to move what parameter in to change the sound.
Sounds logical!
Anyone fancy pooling resources and putting together a joint preset selection together for Modstep, using this kind of system? It has an interesting little synth and weak/limited built in presets!
When is a bass not a bass ?
When it is played 3 octaves higher.....I have never understood why a sound would be labelled as a Bass, and others as keys - both could be used as bass or in the higher octave ranges. The same applies to a tuned sound (playable by pitch) labelled as a Kick, in higher ranges would it be a Tom? and a tom played in lower ranges would become a kick ?
I have had THIS bass conundrum for many years, do you make a preset that plays at c3 and lower the octave of the OSC's to make it play in the bass range, or do you use the default octaves for the OSC's and play the notes in the c1-2 range ?
I guess the answer to this would lie in the individual synths and how the OSC's respond to being played in different octaves as opposed to tuned down using the OSC frequency itself.
Your suggestion @u0421793 for naming based on envelope is a valid one, but isn't this what using Pad, Keys, Drum gives us anyway, at least in a rough form. It is when someone uses Bass or Kick that it all falls down.
Prefixing with P (Pad - Slow Attack), K (Keys - medium to fast attack) or D (Drum - Fast Attack (Id prefer P for percussive, but we already have P on Pad)), it uses 1 char and gives an instant indication of the sounds basic nature, then as suggested higher up something descriptive
P-Fizz for a slow attack sound that fizzes !
One fly in the ointment, what to do if you have a patch where the envelope is linked to Key octave, so it behaves like a pad with longer attack in the lower octaves and more like keys with a shorter attack in the higher ranges ?