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.
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Comments
My first forays were on a reel to reel being discarded from my school. I had no clue how to do multitracking with it. Then I borrowed a pals cassette deck that had sound-on-sound capabilities. That was just magic. Then it was on to recording with another pal who had a Tascam portastudio. Occasionally I still pinch myself at how "easy" it is now.
Yup, see my post a page back or so. Same kind of thing I was doing as a kid.
Happy to know the dev of AUM comes from the same roots!!
edit: I had to Google the boombox I had: it was this:
I think some of the radio manufacturers at the time knew that kids were doing these kinds of things with their radios... as around the same time, Fisher/Sanyo came out with THIS
I'd totally want that Santo/Fisher thing now. 😂
Music software on Pentium PCs win Windows 95 started to be really powerful and accessible for everyone. Such a long way in good direction to what we have now. Kids have great creative opportunities now, if directed away from social media and other brain eating things.
I had one of these:
But I think this guy has taken his C64 case mod too far:
1977.
The timeline was an LED beat counter.
The funny thing is: In 2021, people are still lusting for hardware sequencers with 8 CV/Gate outputs 😂
Totally! You’d pay a pretty penny for one if it came up for sale I’m sure!
Jeez, look at that thing!
This explains the design of AUM to a tee:sync is up to the artist and pitch is NOT a given.
But it’s still a bitch to re-tune and that DX7 doesn’t have that retune.
Use Koala for that.
So speaking of timelines, I was just playing with my new cassette recorder and some of my old tapes.
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/45064/cassette-tapes#latest
And what I used to do, was mark the label or the little window somehow; either a pen or marker.
>
😂
I started making music at the beginning of the “bedroom producer” era. I remember Tascam, Mackie, Fostex multitracks. Akai MPCs, S3000, Roland Variphrase, XV-5080, Access Virus, and Clavia Nord Modular were all on my fantasy wishlist then Fruity Loops happened!
You were less concerned with things like a timeline or grid because you weren't chopping things up and moving things around so much. You just recorded a linear track from start to finish. If you made a mistake, you could punch in, but that was about it.
The bigger concern was lack of tracks! You had to plan things out and record in a certain order and (in a 4-track system) bounce 3 tracks onto the 4th track possibly adding an additional live track at the same time. All of which led to a degradation of sound by generations and forced you to commit to certain steps a long the way or locked you into certain directions.
Which made the ADATs a huge success - still no timeline, but a fairly sophisticated recording functionality, lots of tracks, no copy generation loss, sample accurate punch in/out.
Even though I didn‘t use it back in the days, I‘m about to engage their BRC (big remote controller) as the main interface in a virtual recording setup (since I‘ve solved the sync issues).
But the music kicked ass compared to now (for the most part).
I’ve (still) got one of these, bought for £90 second hand in 1983, paired lovely with a four track if you used its din sync abilities.
Good contemporary account of what it can do here:
http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/roland-mc202-microcomposer/4760
Like @rs2000 ‘s MC8 and an SH101 had a baby.
The internal sequencer is powerful, can generate that vital master clock sync pulse, (and is also duophonic even, sort of) but is a total pig to program, and unless you dump patterns to audio cassette (!) you lose them on power off.
(There is a software hack for that, called, um, MC202 Hack https://defectiverecords.com/portfolio/mc-202-hack/ - but it hasn’t been updated for a couple of generations of Mac OS).
Also, because the cv and gate ins go via the internal processor, it glitches out if you try to run it for long from a modern sequencer like the Beatstep Pro.
Fortunately, Kenton do a superb mod for it https://kentonuk.com/product/roland-mc-202/ which they will professionally fit for you if you want which lets your cv and gates bypass the processor.
Et voila, a superb sounding beast of bass dragged kicking and screaming from the 80s to pair with my Beatstep and modular... Still very relevant since, damn, nearly 40 years ago...
Nice! That's my dream synth right there, been wanting one for the past 12 years. Was outbid the one time I used ebay for it, and none had come up locally since then. One of my favorite producers (John Frusciante) uses 6 of them.. one for each string of the guitar. It also appears all over Autechre's Amber, one of the finest electronic records ever imo.
If down the line you ever plan on selling your 202, let me know, you have 1 buyer lined up! But that's like a life companion synth, so I won't hold my breath 😊
🤤
@aleyas : that pic! someone is just being plain greedy
I think this is the only way to work on an iPad since the screen is so damn small. It’s fiddly at best and the only reason I’d even put myself through it would be if I had no other choice, like Logic on a 27” iMac.
I don’t think recording “in the dark” is viable on machine/software built from the ground up to rely on the screen. If you want that experience I suggest you get yourself a hardware machine. The last thing I’ve used was Korg D16 but I’m sure there are more professional and up to date solutions out there.
It’s certainly a viable direction but it will definitely affect the final product.
How about that moment when you and your friends sat there in silence, while the tape rewound, before you could hear your stoned masterpiece.
Nice story.
Nothing to do with the screen vs blind though?
People still record stuff live in a couple of takes if that’s the sound they want. Multi-tracking is a compromise when emulating the whole band experience. There is more magic in the interplay between musicians than people realise. Musicians play off each other.
You can rec guitar and Vox guide track first. Then lay bass and backing vocals. By now you probably want to re-record the guitar and vocals. Then you record drums after which you probably want to re-record every other instrument to get it to sound like a live band. What a nightmare! Fun though….if you’re furloughed in a studio
@supadom : as I recall, the o.p. asked: “ How did people record music before DAWs and visual timelines?”. Dunno. Seemed to me like Roy’s story was an illustration of just that. A rather fine illustration of the skill and musicianship involved, in fact. Before DAWs. Before multitracking.
Wow, that’s way advanced. When I was around 13 I used to use 2 tape ghetto blasters to multitrack too. Just I’d record first track on one, then play alongside that while recording to another and so on. I’d get a lot of saucy tape noise iOS musicians would kill for. 😂 (I actually read your post again and it seems we were doing exactly the same thing).
I remember cutting cassette tape too to edit, gluing it back together with cello tape. I did not know the trick of cutting it diagonally so there’s always been a bit of an artefact, especially when I didn’t get my zero crossing right!
Another remixing technique I remember using was playing recorded song on one deck and recording it on another while rhythmically pausing and restarting the transport of the recording machine. That was mind blowing. I wish I still have those tapes!
Good times.
Cool!
An absolutely perfect summation.
Yes. Virtually all small studios would have gone bankrupt weren’t it for all the delusional local musicians.
I used to use a Fostex R8 Reel to Reel for audio tracks, which I had synced to my Mac running (at first) Opcode Vision then the first version of Emagic Notator Logic (What became of that?) so even before DAWs existed there was the famous Logic arrange window timeline. I had an Opcode Studio 4 MIDI interface with SMPTE sync to stripe the tape and sync the tape to MIDI.
One of the main reasons I switched to Logic in the early 90s was that it could control my R8's transport directly with Fostex's own proprietary format. I've just checked, and this feature still exists today in LPX 10.5! This meant I could start playback anywhere and the tape would wind to the correct place automatically and it all worked flawlessly. You could even remote record arm the R8s tracks via Logic and that feature still exists in logic today too (a weird hack whereby you had to select the MMC/Tape machine icon for it to work -- it's still there, you have to hold down the option key to find it today though as it's hidden by default).
I've recently-ish re-discovered the R8 when helping to clear out my Mum's loft. I've also found a bunch of reels.
Next step is to see if the tapes have held up well enough to transfer to digital. I'll need to find some way of syncing the tape to logic as the studio 4 never made it to OS-X land.
We didn't need a timeline though as the songs were all worked out in advance the old fashioned way by writing them with guitars and piano. The structures were fixed before a single note was recorded.
I used to record the vocals and guitars to tape and run all the other backing tracks including drums played via MIDI from the sequencer all of which was run into the mixer -- the final mix was automated by moving faders using actual hands (!) and recorded to cassette or later on, DAT.
I had one reverb, one compressor and one multi-fx box (Boss SE-70). My sampler was an Ensoniq EPS 16 Plus which had built in fx (which were and still are fantastic sounding).
Listening back to some of the stuff I did, it sounds raw and 'bedroom' ey but in some ways the mixes were better than I manage these days in-the-box. Having a permanently set up studio with nice monitors didn't hurt though. I've never been great at mixing on headphones which I have to do these days. In hindsight, having to use fx sparingly probably helped me mix :-)
One day I'll plug it all in again and sound like 1996 all over again.
However, from when I started, the progression from MIDI only to full-on DAWs was remarkably quick. It wasn't too many years after I first started using the R8 that I had a MOTU 2408 audio interface in a blue and white G3 Mac.
I'm actually really looking forward to trying out the R8 again... I hope it still works!