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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Creative Process
What’s your creative process? Do you go into it with an idea or do you play around until you get something that sounds cool? Do you start with presets and tweak or start with the init and build from scratch?
Figured it would be fun to see what different people do.
For me, it depends what I’m doing. For my lo-fi stuff, I find a jazz sample I dig. I chop it up and play with an arrangement that sounds good. From there, I work with some basic drum patterns that are familiar to me and make small tweaks based on the flow of the arrangement.
For EDM, I tend to start with a sound I like, either a factory preset or one I created during a sound design session. I then play around with chords until I find a groove and build from there.
While I haven’t done much with beatmaking, as a beatboxer, I am better armed to go in with an idea already in my head.
Comments
I often go through presets, or tweak\create sounds until something starts to inspire and kick off ideas. If one sound is playing and I start to hear other sounds accompanying it in my head, then that's usually where I stop preset surfing and start building something.
But I have many other entry points e.g. exploring what I've just bought, or a "let's try something I haven't used for a while" thing.
Also I like to read app manuals in depth to really understand what they can do and often this sparks ideas.
Sometimes I start with a "process" e.g. beatslicing a drum loop with Turnado, partly to keep learning new things and explore the tools I have, and this will often plant the seed of an idea to build on.
I regularly need randomness in my process to keep it fresh, which is why I love apps with randomisation, or generative elements. I find that if I don't have enough fresh ideas coming in, everything seems to converge on the same old ideas.
One latest tool is those radio internet streaming apps such as the free Strom from Erik Sigth, which can be a great source of random inspiration, especially if you run it through an effects rig to really mess with it.
Also gain a lot of inspiration from watching others doing things e.g. the FACT 10 minute track videos, or from others on the forum, which I guess is why you ask the question
I always start with a beat, usually one I've created in Slate (NS2), and then write either a bass line or a chord progression over it.
Once I have a chord progression I will then write additional sections: a chorus, maybe a bridge, then finally I will write vocal melodies, either by improvising over the existing music or by adapting melodies that I might have come up with in the shower or just walking around the house.
I also usually create many iterations and variations of all the different parts, and ruthlessly delete anything that isn't working. At least 50% of the material I write in any given track will be discarded, and then at least 75% of the finished tracks will also eventually going on the "reject" pile.
Interesting. In my case an awesome synth preset will definitely trigger stuff for me; but i wondered if a beat or bassline will do it also. I tried to do it with iBassist but for some reason, i don’t feel the bassline triggers stuff for me. Usually i wanna add the bass after i have a synth melody going. But still quite interesting.🤗😌
I think the reason I like to start with the drums (and then add either bass or a chord progression) is just to have a foundation on which to build the melodies. Interesting bass lines are quite hard to write, but very satisfying when you manage to get something good.
Yeah, that’s why I’m trying hard to learn iBassist cause Bass and drums are always hard to make for me.
I have an idea of a ‘feel’ or ethos of an impression and imagine the melody for that and try and aim for it using that impeding interface with black and white long pushing buttony things. Once the tune is down to my satisfaction, I strengthen it or oppose it with bass, distract it with chords (sometimes relevant ones), each of these stages involving patch creation from scratch for the most of the time, and then it's finished. Then I come back to it because I remember I hadn’t done any drums and fuck me they’re the most tedious part. You can’t just have one bar looping for the whole three minutes, it sounds boring, but having to actually have me hammering in drum parts that vary enough is too tedious, I’d rather my listeners share the pain. Drums make no sense at all, why does pop music have to have them? Anyway, the final thing is usually not the forgotten about drums, but the vocal melody, which I do using a small set of samples of me singing “baa” through the chromatic scale from low-comfortable to high-comfortable. That’s the song, until the lyrics are made.
When I’ve got the collection of feelings and emotions represented as a set of tunes, I sort through them to see if I can find out what they were really saying in terms of timidness, aggression, suggestiveness, friendliness, surprise, that sort of thing, and put them in the order I want. Around about that time I’ve also independently arrived at a list of points I want to make or things that need to be said or messages to the world, and I’ll match them up. Then I write the lyrics. Music is finished, must never be altered now. Words are the only thing. Rhymezone and thesaurus website tabs are never closed at this stage.
I’m not a fan of noodling, jamming or just aimless exploration. I hate that, I hate randomness, I hate elements that aren’t totally under control, I hate stuff that someone else could have done. It all has to be preconceived and designed, either up front or as it goes along, or it's a failure.