Live app looping while playing setup. (Spoiler- Modstep wins)

tahiche

I believe my "case" should be pretty common, yet I've had a hard time finding info about a good approach. Im just gonna go ahead and start ranting in case it helps anyone.
I'm basically a singer/guitar player (currently in love with my cigar-box-guitar).
Just too tired to face yet another "get a band together, practice for months before anything sound remotely decent just so the drummer leaves and you have to start over", I want the iPad to be the "skeleton". Simple, small, doable. But having a background track to play over is definitely not my thing. I want to play and construct live, so I can properly f**k it up!. So the desired scenario is to construct rhythm loops, some fx, maybe bass and synths, and play and sing along (guitar looping too).

First approach was to head for the "known", audio loopers. I've tried a few, some worth mentioning like Everest looper (haven't tried Group the Loop or Looptree that look great), Loopy is the most reliable, but I don't like the "donut" UI in Loopy, I can't tell what's what, they all look like the same donut to me. Anyway, the hardest thing with these loopers is syncing the looper to the synth or generator app. Even with a count-in (Loopy is great at this, Everest is not) I find it very hard to be consistent in triggering the loop at the right time. From the tiny AB transporter it's just fiddle. It's easier to do it from Loopy (have the synth app in the background hooked to a midi controller) but switching back and forth is confusing, plus you get the "double loop" until you stop the synth... Also, even if using something like Group the Loop that lets you handle "sections" as a whole (change beat and synth at once, for example), you have route and de-route the apps to record as a loop.

So I went for midi loopers. First I bought Infinite Looper and recently purchased Modstep. Infinite Looper is great and straight forward, but it's got a terrible UI and design. I say this with the uttermost respect for the developer, they really need to make it better. Specially if you consider it's not cheap and it's about the same price as Modstep. So yes, Modstep. A beautiful beast.
Instruments per lane with easy access to all the apps, a well-structured and modern UI, effects per instrument, amazing editing capabilities, the internal synth, sampler and drum sounds are surprisingly good, extensive MIDI control, etc, etc. A steeper learning curve?. Maybe, but just cos it's so complete, you can perform basic looping in no time. The "scenes" are just wonderful to switch song parts/arrangements. Everything is just well thought of. And it's all in one place. For instance, I can't seem to find an good way to work with drum machines, either they go out of sync or they stop when you switch to change pattern (DM1 - AUM). With Modstep I don't have the drum pattern somewhere and the synth somewhere else, I can control all from within Modstep.

I've only owned Modstep for a very short time, but it just seems like the right gear. I'm just hoping it's stable enough to perform live!. Anyone can comment on this?.
It also seems like a perfect composition tool, love how easy it is to move and copy/paste just about everything (missing in many apps). If I could also record guitar as loops in Modstep to be able to just access everything from the one app, rearrange the song parts, etc, it would just be killer. Can you do that?. Maybe with the sampler.... I'll get on that and see how it goes.

So there , I'm not endorsed by Modstep, but I sure wish I was.