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.
Download on the App StoreLoopy Pro is your all-in-one musical toolkit. Try it for free today.
iPad guitar amp app - transpose tuner to use open tunings
Hi,
Is anyone aware of an iPad guitar amp sim app where you can change the tuning of the strings in the app, but not on the guitar itself? For example, I would like to keep my physical guitar in standard (EADGBE) tuning, but to have the app transpose my playing so that it sounds like the guitar is actually tuned to open E tuning (EBEG#BE)?
I would like to switch between these two tunings without actually retuning the guitar, if this is possible. This would make life much easier when playing slide for certain songs.
Hope that makes sense - many thanks for any help!
Adam
Comments
I know you can do that using the Jamstik Studio guitar because it’s a MIDI guitar which uses audio modeling for the string sounds, which means you can instantly change your tunings to whatever you want. I’m waiting for any company to offer this kind of feature for a standard guitar, because there’s absolutely no reason this could not be done today.
Thanks, yeah it seems like a feature that wouldn't be too tricky to do, thanks for the tip and hopefully an app with this ability for regular guitars will arrive one day!
You would need an app with hexaphonic input. The same pitch on guitar can usually be played on more than one string . To transpose as if the guitar had an open tuning, the needs to know which string was played. Also, you would need pitch-shifting of a quality that would be pretty CPU heavy per string.
Considering the growth curve of computing power vs. cost for the last 40+ years, this is no longer a distant thing.
I believe this is impossible with a non MIDI guitar.
There is no way for the app to know what string is being played since you can play most notes on any of the strings. All the app has to work with is pitch detection and there's nothing about the pitch that tells it which string you're on.
If you only played in the bottom 4 frets (3 on the G string) it might be manageable, but it would add considerable latency and probably not be able to handle more than single notes at a time well (polyphonic pitch detection is really tough).
Oh, I don’t think so. I think with the use of one or two cleverly place cameras on a guitar, it would be quite possible to detect which string was being played when that data is combined with the signal information being collected by the pickups. Micro-movements are detectable now and are used to simulate focus and depth in single-lens phone cameras using machine learning.
Cameras. Hadn't thought of that. Interesting idea. OK, I'll nudge it to "impractical" from "impossible".
This is definitely a non-trivial thing to do, even with lots of computing power. The only system I've used that does it really well is the Roland/Boss stuff with a hex pickup. When you add in using a slide or fretless, it gets way more complex.
Chord voicings can confuse a a non-hex pickup in a setting where you aren't even using slide. The systems that try to pull apart the chords using overtones get confused and add inferred notes or drop notes.
When you get more processing power, you can try to do things like have a library of possible voicings to match the overtones against, but that increases latency. It is a really hard problem to workout in realtime.
The Boss GP-10 does actually do a good job of this when you are using a hex pickup setup. This is when you aren't using the MIDI conversion from it. The MIDI aspect works OK too, but it isn't as good as the direct on device conversion. The big downside of the GP-10 for me is that I'm not thrilled with the onboard sounds in general. Some of them are OK, but none of them are great.
LOL. I used to think a lot of things were impossible until I learned just how powerful machine learning is. Check out the YouTube channel called “Two Minute Papers” and prepare to have your mind blown.]
https://www.youtube.com/c/KárolyZsolnai/videos
If a Tesla car can be trained to navigate the streets and roads (and unpaved areas) of the real world using only black and white cameras and machine learning to crunch the data, then I think this problem is eminently more solvable.
I'm only saying "impractical" because this is in the context of 1) iOS devices, 2) latency, and 3) return on investment for R&D.
Pitch detection already adds latency. That is unavoidable. AI is amazing but also compute intensive. Too much latency is tough for live playing. No iOS device today has near the performance to pull it off. The market for such an app would be tiny but the R&D needed would be huge. I can't imagine anyone taking it on.
Now, maybe if you could forget about pitch detection altogether and get all the needed info from cameras, and that AI could be blazingly fast and CPU efficient...
Nah. Maybe some day, but definitely not on iOS for a long time.
It's not really more solvable. AI and neural nets have been tried and used for years now to do this problem. Check out the Terratec Axon for example. One thing that these techniques does get you is lower latency because they can use information in the attack to start the pitch recognition faster.
Most AI tasks don't have the issue that 5ms is too long to take. It's similar to the problem that you've got all this vector computing power in the GPU, but it is mostly useless for audio processing.
I'm sure that it will be done, but it isn't easy and people have been trying for a long time now. Also, I wouldn't get in any Tesla that was trying to drive itself.
Lower notes have longer waveforms, so it takes more time to find their pitch.
Maybe in 10 years. (That's what we said in the 1980s.)
Good correlation with the current state of MIDI guitar.
I imagine something like this, https://blog.endaq.com/8-vibration-analysis-software-packages combined with tiny video camera and image analysis could do the trick.
And remember this project from Google? https://nsynthsuper.withgoogle.com/
It could be possible that some kid who plays around with Arduino or Eurorack kits as a hobby and has an interest in machine learning could engineer a solution using Google’s open source materials.
That's the main reason that figuring out how to use the attack portion of the signal is really important.
Even if you could kick back and play your guitar in alternate tunings while it drove you to work?
BTW, this course on YT from MIT on AI is really good,
Funny thing in there is that they had to change the section on NN after a couple of years because of the advances that were made.
Does it come with a good bass player that can reharmonize my mistakes in real-time?
I've used the Axon and Roland systems for years, and imo neither is good enough without being forced to use thinner strings with a 'special' setup, and most importantly - playing without expression, which makes it feel unnatural. It doesn't feel like a guitar anymore. imo, It's unusable on a resonant semi-hollow - a flat plank of wood for the body works the best. I've experimented with the Steinbergers and other non-wood bodies, and it just ain't happening. Just my 2 cents.
I mostly fingerpick. Every system I've tried is worse with fingerpicking than with a pick. I'm at the point where I've mostly given up using guitar to MIDI. I'd really like to get it to work, but I'll buy a Linnstrument before I spend anymore money on a guitar solution.
These help, but stay away from the metal ones.

Aren’t there little finger covers for use on the fretboard also?
Seems like it’s considerably more effort than just retuning your guitar to the tuning you want.
There we go. All you need is tiny pressure sensors in the tips and micro wireless transmitters in each one.
How about if you want to completely change your tuning in the middle of a song without changing guitars?
..as well as cutting off your headstock and installing a locking nut and a new bridge. smiley:
A zero fret helps too.
What do you mean?
The other hand. The one on the fretboard. Are there “finger savers” for that hand?
Who knew the solution was so easy?