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.
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Comments
It’s totally a rabbit hole experience just loading up random folders of 32 voices - many of which are discreetly labeled something like “ANALOG11” or “bank052”, and hitting a bunch of keys to see what they sound like. Yeah, there’s probably hundreds of variations of a piano or flute sound, but the artificial sounds (many of which are meant to emulate analog synthesizers of that time) are pretty interesting. I’ve really come to love FM bass sounds - such an interesting mix of deep, mean sounds with plucky/percussive ones.
If you want to “bookmark” just a few voices that you really like, one trick/workaround is to save them as a “new” AU patch with just one voice. For example, I did that with “Solid Bass”, which is a pretty famous one, but I can never remember where the heck I found it every time I need to go look for it again. (It was in one of the three Steve Sims folders, 2001 I think).
This may be common knowledge but going through the presets shows me that FM synths dominated soundtracks for video games throughout the late 80s and early 90s
Whilst browsing through the many syx patches of the DX7 on Dixie I noticed a lot of sounds that the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used when scoring Dr Who in the 1980s.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop were apparently one of Yamaha's first customers according to one of the Workshop members who emailed me a few years ago. He went into detail and told me that he and Brian Hodgson visited Dr John Chowning at Stanford University in California and tried one of the Prototype DX7s and were instantly impressed. They ordered six of them.
I, myself own the original Yamaha DX7 and the mark 2 model.
Good call!
in very strict mathematic way you need multiply all variable values which can affect sound ( eg 6 ops x 32 routing types x 99 max valu of lfo x 99 max lfo>pich mod amount of op1 x .... )
you get gigantic number, possibly way bigger that number of seconds from big bang :-)
then you neefdsubstract at. least 20% (my rough estimation) or value combinations where synth, due to for example extreme settings of envelopes, doesn't produce any sound.. then maybe another 20% (from the remaining number) to get out patches which are soo similiar that in musical point of view can be take as same)
i'm pretty sure you still end with at leadt hundred of millions
i'm 100% sure no matter how big patch pack is, there is still possible to create patch which is NOT in that pack :-)
FM synthsesis is endless source of inspiration, my suggestion is forget all patches and just expetiment, even if you don't know what you're doung just slowly tweak parameters and listen carefully what it does with sound...
If anybody finds the UI controls too small (like me), the good old DXi might be an alternative - if you can live with FM'ish 4-operator sounds and missing DX7 compatibility.
@u0421793 said:
If you don't have your sunday job yet and know a little about scripting, you can take one of these collections that have every patch as a single file and use the command line utility "dd" to extract the pure parameters part of every file, then compare them by only the parameters that make up the sound (ignoring the patch name, settings etc.) and find the duplicates exactly.
What I did years ago is a bit different: I used grep to find patches by "keyword" (like "pno", "piano", "grand", "honky" etc) to avoid browsing through 1000s of sounds and somewhat narrow the choice for auditioning.
You'll never find all matching ones this way but who cares when the choice is aplenty
If you want a more elegant solution, you can check
http://tedfelix.com/yamaha-dx7/index.html
which links to dx7dump on
https://sourceforge.net/u/tedfelix/dx7dump
This one allows you to extract all parameters as human-readable, descriptive text so you can compare by whichever parameters you like
The auto-generated output would look like this:
Filename: rom-ted-faves.syx
Voice #: 1
Name: HARPSICH 1
Algorithm: 5
Feedback: 1
LFO
Wave: Square
Speed: 35
Delay: 0
Pitch Mod Depth: 0
AM Depth: 0
Sync: Off
Pitch Modulation Sensitivity: 0
Oscillator Key Sync: On
...
I’ve been lost in this synth since it suddenly came out. Nothing else on the iPad seems to matter It just took over
Completely agree. It may be dated, but the DX7 had both musicality and versatility. It rewards listening, too. I can happily listen to an epiano maj7 chord tailing away into silence (what this says about me, I don't know....)
I haven’t partaken of this vast mine of patches, but out of interest, what percentage of them sound like a sitar? More than 72%?
Has anyone figured out the way save a sound from one of the zip archive banks into an empty bank (aside from the save au preset route)?
While doing a similar exercise for my Volca FM, I remember coming across a lot more 80's brass sounds than sitar sounds.
I do hope a future update will bring better bank/patch management and make it easier to copy a patch from one bank to a slot in another bank. It's one thing to find a good patch but a pain to remember what bank they came from
Agreed. Need to be able to create an empty bank and drag and drop or c/p patches into it from other banks including from inside zips. Otherwise this app is brilliant.
I wasn’t using the app in standalone and found a patch I wanted to use in BM3. I was happy to find that when I opened it as an AU in BM3 the same patch was still selected
A hundred times.
There was a time when I could remember where things were. Alas...
@Masanga - That’s just a legacy issue from how/why these patches were developed. FM synthesis was intimidating and unwieldy compared to analog synthesis. Professional sound houses would create these banks or “carts”, often with a particular sound in mind. But the hardware worked with banks of only 32 voices. Those weren’t meant to be comprehensive. So you’d have a “Bass” cartridge or a “Harp” one, and then maybe 32 variations of that sound. It anticipated you would have a particular sound in mind, and then would find it using the appropriate cart. That’s why the .syx files you find online look like that.
I guess i’d agree with @Samu that a “favorites” system like Magellan would be nice. You could simple click on a star icon next to any voice, and then it would appear in a “Favorites” folder for easy reference. It would be nice if that folder was further sortable into folders, like “bass”, “keys”, and “effects”. But it’s not at all unworkable for the time being. I believe Cubasis allows you to store presets for individual patches when you best KQ Dixie there as an AU.
I have an AU bank with 32 init slots. Then as I browse patches in the zip files and come across one I want for quick access - with that patch loaded I select my AU bank and store the patch in to one of the slots. Banks can be copied, duplicated, renamed and deleted. It works.
I like your strategy. I like it a lot.
I’d go with a maj9
Would someone please be so kind to spell out how to do this in a “For Dummies” (for me) type of way?
All I’m able to do is copy full banks back and forth.
Thanks!!
I guess I’m missing something then. Any help appreciated.
Never mind - got it!
Ok I figured it out. I hope I can explain clearly.
Navigate to the patch that you want to save and load it. This part gets tricky. Navigate to the AU syx file you want to save to say Favorites.syx, make sure the patch is still loaded on the left side and make sure the Favorites syx contents are visible on the right side. Tap on the patch name on the left and a small window opens with the patch name in the upper left and the Fave syx contents below. Select the Store button at the top of the new window and then touch a slot and it will load the patch into that slot. At this point you must resave the Favorites bank where you just copied the new patch or it won’t include the patch you just copied over.
Thanks for that - perfect. I was doing it wrong! All’s good now!
Cheers, enjoy
Good. I think I have it now
The only remaining puzzle is how/where do you crate a new folder so you can start filling it with your treasures?
Highlight an existing bank and click store new, enter new name and save. That gives you a copy bank to play with
Thank you your Grace..