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Comments
If your song is in one key there’s no reason to use 12et. JI sounds so much better.
the fact that we're using 12TET in the 21st century is sheer insanity.
Software could fix the problems of temperament, but people are so desensitized to the fact that the tuning system we've adopted (only for the last 100 years or so, mind you) that we can no longer hear that it's out of tune. It's pure laziness.
Please, please help voice the need for TuneUp to be adopted by more developers. It's the best solution to the problem, but there seems to be a collective shrug from most people. I chalk it up to a lack of education and ear training. Spread the word!
https://audiokitpro.com/tuneup/
Here is a true temperament guitar with squiggly frets vs a standard guitar. It sounds so weird to be in tune 😂😂
as pointed out in the video, that guitar is simply tuned to equal temperament a bit more precisely. It's not some different tuning system. just means that it will be more in tune with already out-of-tune system that is 12tet.
a few examples of microtonal music that go outside of the 12tet scale:
a few more if anyone's interested
@palm thanks for the videos. Some are just amazing. Microtuning is a world to explore. I hope we will have more possibilities on iOS. ScaleGen is in my opinion one of the best tool we have. It would be great to have a midi AU version of it !
Love microtuning as an "out" sound. The idea that JI is some kind of "correct" tuning is total bullshit.
Equal temperament has been used since around 1450 onward, JS Bach showed off its full potential with the The Well-Tempered Clavier and it allowed Jazz to exist. I love playing with different tunings but equal temperament certainly has its place.
I agree.
thing is, I'm not interested in what's correct or not. that judgement has no place in the world of art. if you're talking about what's in tune or not, then that's a different matter.
Tunings in JI are in technically in tune (if tuning is to have any real meaning at all) whereas temperaments by definition are wholly or at least partially out of tune. In the equal tempered scale, the only pitches that are in tune are the octaves. Call me a purist, but the facts are the facts.
I love equal temperament, it's a very useful and fun system if you like modulating. and it logically leads to atonal and serial musics. I find that it's a useful abstraction of harmony and so much interesting music has come out it.
If you play modal music that doesn't modulate it's absolutely silly to use 12tet and limits harmonic potential. Even in the world of temperaments, there are much nicer sounding ones than 12tet. Kirnberger and Werckmeister are much more fun and have much more color to work with imo.
I enjoy JI as an "in" sound. The idea that 12tet is some sort of correct tuning is equally absurd, you know. Harmonic tunings sounds better to my ear and don't limit the number of harmonics I'm working with to the first 5 of an infinite series.
nope.
this is the common assumption, but it simply isn't true that we arrived at 12 tone equal temperament after so much confusion about tuning and then it was all sorted once we figured out the 12th root of 2.
ET goes back much much further than 1450. It likely goes back to the 4th century BC.. but it was only theorized, as it's nigh impossible to tune properly by ear. (try it yourself, I've tuned pianos so I speak from experience here. Most other temperaments are fairly simple to tune with patience.) moreover, even when it was possible to tune, once the tuning fork was invented and the science of tuning was refined, it was always eschewed for sweeter sounding tunings. ET didn't truly come into use until the late 19th century and only became standard in the 20th century with the mass production of pianos and other fixed pitch instruments.
Well Temperament is not the same as ET, and we can be fairly certain that Bach did not compose in ET. It's called the well-tempered clavier because it's written in Well Temperament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament, ET was likely known by bach, but not used as it simply sounds terrible on clavichords and harpsichords aside from taking hours to tune by ear opposed to minute of most unequal temperaments based on pure fifths and thirds. Listen to any recordings of Early Music and you will not find 12ET because it simply wasn't used until the romantic era.
http://plaza.ufl.edu/wnb/baroque_temperament.htm
https://www.rolf-musicblog.net/what-tunings-did-bach-use/#bachtime
I agree that jazz sounds great in 12tet, but jazz came from the blues, and the history of the blues is not an equally tempered one. I disagree that jazz could not have existed without the tempered scale. It would be more accurate to say that serialist or "12 Tone" music couldn't have existed without equal temperament. That is in fact the logical direction for an irrational tuning system to move toward.
I agree that equal temperament has it's place. It's hard to miss being that it's the most widely used system today. But I disagree that we got to it by "progress". I think we got to it by laziness. And now we're so used to it that when we hear something tuned to the harmonic series, it sounds weird.
If you've ever worn colored sunglasses and then taken them off after wearing for several hours, to find that everything looks off.. well imagine if you'd worn them your entire life. Yeah, things look/sound weird when you get used to something that is altered. Spend some time with these weird tunings and if you let your ears adjust, you will hear new things.. and when you come back to 12tet, it will be the one that sounds weird. Try it!
Yeah i take your point about well temperament and it being adjusted to certain keys. You are correct and i agree it desired to change the tuning per key using this form which bach obsessed over. However I dont fancy tuning my piano every time i play a different key of the wtc.
fair point, lol. It wasn't written for piano though.. and clavichord had to be tuned every time you sat down to play, much like a guitar.. and anyhow, the little squiggly thing on the manuscript of the Well Tempered Clavier was a shorthand to Bach's preferred tuning system so that you could tune your instrument once and play all the tunes.
https://davidlouiepiano.com/index.php/bach-louie-temperament
It's not a Just tuning, but a well one, so it's designed to have different color in each key center.. The thing about Bach is that his music is extraordinarily forgiving. It sounds pretty good even when played badly, and even in a tuning it wasn't written in. But a lot of music relies heavily on using the tuning it was written in. especially music from before the baroque era.. If you tune a piano to Werckmeister III, Bach will sound incredible on it, in every key. I started as a jazz player, and I love playing on pianos in werkmeister iii, it's a great tuning system that really allows full modulation but has stronger resolutions to some key centers and the power chords are POWERFUL! I highly recommend it.
I play synths and they can be retuned at will (the good ones) and so it's not a problem to change tunings quickly. I used to spend my days retuning pianos, clavinets, harpsichords, homemade instruments, old combo organs and reed instruments... it's time consuming for sure, but there's no better way to develop the ear imho.
.> @palm said:
I use the beating of the equal tuned tones to play in time which is an amazing part of equal tuning, i don’t know if this works on other tunings? But i will take your suggestions on board (i respect piano tuners very much) and mess with werkmeister III 👍
If these topics interest you, check out Wilsonic by Marcus Satellite. It’s an app with a wide range of non 12 tone scales which are arranged in a structure appropriate for the scale. Playing non 12 tone scales using a traditional piano keyboard can be problematic as the relationships between the tones is lost in the translation. Perhaps at some point these will be a way to 3D print templates for various scales so that you can modify a controller to reflect the scale you’re using.
That's cool that you use the beating of tones to keep time. Gamelan ensembles do that. Listen to the low gong and often you will hear that the inharmonic beating is the basis of the pulse in slower parts.
Different temperaments will have different beating. Werkmeister favors pure fifths (8 of them!) so it's great for power chords. But if you like that 2 cent beat of the flatted fifth, you might just stick with 12tet. I just find it fun to play with different tunings and inspires me to play things I'd never have thought to play in 12tet.
It just strikes me that people obsess so much over finding new timbres and sounds to play with, but rarely if ever consider playing with different tunings. Microtuning can be as subtle (ie stretched octaves tuners use on a piano to make the enharmonics sound more "in tune") or as drastic (non-octave scales with hundreds of novel pitches) as you like. It's a totally open and infinite world. Perhaps that's why people are so shy to dip their toes in the ocean
Well i do love my fifths! You got me on board 🙂
Yeah, Wilsonic is an absolutely incredible resource for exploring tuning. Admittedly many of the diagrams are beyond my level of understanding of tuning systems, but one of these days I'll get the book https://www.amazon.com/Microtonality-Tuning-Systems-Routledge-Studies/dp/1138857564
and try to make sense of them. The man was a mad genius.
In the meantime, it's a great way to create interesting tunings and can export scala files to retune other instruments.
regarding the problem of scales with fewer or greater than 12 tones, check out the new keyboard on Synth One. You can send scales from wilsonic to the synth and there's a color coded keyboard that adapts to the number of pitches (ala Partch's color coded 43 tone scale). It doesn't solve the problem of controlling it with a midi controller, but it is fun to play with.
I tend to stick to a handful of scales and spend some time with them. I gravitate to 12 or 24 tones/oct so that things line up with a familiar key mapping.
Marcus has done some great work on Synth One to add a lot of the Wilsonic integration with it. Hopefully at some point we’ll be able to have the diagrams in Wilsonic be able to play synths directly rather than just the sounds the app comes with.
interesting, thanks.
I play around with JI in the way that Terry Riley used it for Modal improv.
Overall though I have a preference for 12TET & 24TET. I love Gamelan but a lot of music made by westerners in alternate systems just makes me irritated. It just sounds out for the sake of being out and not really thoughtful composition.
certainly! yeah, it's interesting to note that equal temperament was born from european classical music that grew an insatiable desire to modulate ad nauseum. If you don't modulate much, there's little point in using it. Modal musics, such as most non-european classical and folk forms have historically been tuned in ratio based systems. Exceptions are with metal based instruments with crazy enharmonics (as with bells and gongs or other metal instruments)
Yeah, Riley is a huge influence for me as well. I completely agree, so much music is either too theoretical or too ethno-fakey for my taste. But it's like music in any domain: the vast majority isn't very good. Look at the modular craze.. how much of the music being made with it is actually compelling?
I think a part of the problem is that we haven't had to think about tuning at all for the last century. We trust the electronic tuner over our own ear. 12tet is just a given, whereas prior to its adoption, you were confronted with the issue of how to solve the problem of the comma and the tuning system was integral to the composing process.
So when people do get into "xenharmonic" these days (I personally don't like the term one bit), it's often treated with this obnoxious exoticism. Like when someone raised on white bread tries a curry for the first time, and has their mind blown.. then they start adding curry powder to their pb&j's.
I think it's interesting to consider that all music prior to the invention of the electronic tuner was microtonal. Even nowadays, pianos tuned to equal temperament by ear (as all the best tuners do!) are fudged toward rational intervals to find the sweet spots, thereby not really being "equally" tuned.
It's also a bit ass-backwards that a harmonic tuning, based on human hearing, sounds weird and exotic, and a system of fudged intervals that's pretty much arbitrary has become the "normal" one (ie not microtonal). It's sort of insane if you consider it.
ET has been known of for a long time, but didn't really crowd out alternatives until the 20th century. Bach certainly did not use it.
ET is great for music that modulates a lot. But it doesn't serve much purpose for music that stays home (unless you really like that sound).
Great post. I agree with 99% of it, but I take exception to the above. Jazz and blues emerged roughly contemporaneously in the second decade of the 20th century.
There is "Modular Music" (yawn) and music that just happens to be made on a modular (cool.)
Great post.
ha, well said!
thanks
well, I'm no expert on the matter, you might be right. "the blues" is sort of a fuzzy thing. Fairly hard to put a finger on where and when it solidified into the various forms, even wikipedia claims that it got started in the 1870's and the standard forms were codified in by the 20's or so.. Music forms and genres don't exist in a vacuum. They evolve and melt together and there's always more to the story than what gets documented.
Yes i already mentioned my mistake as i was referring to WTT , my bad 🤗 and i said Et was used since 1450 and i agree with you that it was not exclusively used at that time. It is possible that bach was into ET at least for a while 🤔
Aaaahhh, the master played by Richter! I better go practice now. I got pianoteq so I try WT mode.