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What’s your Loopy foot pedal setup and workflow?
Hi!
I know there’s a dozen threads on midi foot pedals, but “I still haven’t found what I’m looking foooor 🎶🤦🏻“.
I’d like to know about how you wise people are using pedals to control Loopy.
I can’t decide if to go for a comfortable and easygoing setup with a Bluetooth device like the Blueboard that seems very popular, or go for the “look ma I can do it all” with a ton of pedals (fcb010, line6 shortboard mk2, etc).
It basically comes down to… How many pedals do you use?. What for?.
- do you map each clip to a pedal or do you select clip with touch and then just step to record?.
- Do you map monitoring and/or input switching with pedals?
- how do you go about recording different colors and a whole song?.
I currently use loopy to do songs but I don’t have a very fast setup. I envy guys like @supadom that have a super agile setup where you can improvise and do a song in real time. So I strive to move in that direction. I record a lot of guitars, bass, cgb so I definitely need a midi pedal, having to let go of the guitar to touch the iPad is stressful… But I don’t want an extra cable and 16 pedals if a nice little 4 pedal Bluetooth pedal is enough.
My starting point would be something like this:
I’d have amp sims and different fx on the colors… amp sim for bass, amp sim for guitar 1, amp sim for guitar 2, and so on… so I’d like to monitor what I’m going to record. Then arm the right Clío. Then record. And so on…
I’d love to hear how you loopy geeks are doing it!
cheers!
Comments
For a question like this, you will probably get more responses on the Discord server. It seems like there are more performers in discussions over there than here.
I use my Blueboard with two attached sustain pedals. One pedal does play/stop of selected (record if empty) and uses hold for clear. Another does next select next (previous on hold). Another select below (above on hold). The next starts/stops the transport (hold toggles my guitar between two effect buses). Another pedal ends record and starts the first clip playing (hold toggles my distortion effect). The last pedal toggles a couple of different effects.
I think one’s pedal setup depends a lot on how one organizes one’s playing. This setup is for building songs with different sections .
I have some projects set up to auto-advance the selection on play until using the “return to clip 1” which also switches the profile.
Thanks! 🙏 Reading about your setup was very useful. Precisely the kind of stuff I’m interested in. “ This setup is for building songs with different sections” is close to my use case. In this scenario I can see how extra pedals would be useful to solo audio sources. Say you have 2 guitar tracks/colors and one bass color, each with different sounds/fx, you’d want to have monitoring through color enabled for all inputs and then solo the one you want to record. Although I guess a dedicated button on screen would do just fine for this.
Would you mind explaining this?. I did find a follow action to select the clip below after recording which would be useful, but no auto-advance. Is that a setting?.
BTW I found a very good deal for a Line6 Fbv express (4 pedals + expression) plus a Pod XT. It’s cheap so I’ll go for it and then I’ll know if I definitely need more pedals. Having just one pedal to start/stop is gonna make a huge difference.
My Blueboard setup for building while playing guitar is as follows. I've tried to keep it as simple as possible because I suck at tap dancing.
Switch A Tap: Select previous clip
Switch B Tap: Select next clip
Switch C Tap: Play/Stop selected clip (Record if empty: Off)
Switch D Tap: Record or Stop selected clip
Switch D Hold: Clear selected clip
(Ext) Sustain Switch 1: Start/Stop transport
(Ext) Expression Pedal: free to assign for FX or volume.
This does require keeping an eye on the screen or mental track of which clip is selected, but I don't find that to be a problem. I can manage the rest of what I need to on-screen while not live tracking guitar.
If this were a performance oriented setup it would be significantly different (haven't really thought how yet).
@tahiche : auto-advance is just having a play action followed by select next or below. I have my main template set up to switch from ‘auto-advance’ to manual advance (which is done by switching the profile in use.
You could set up banks for the Blueboard by designating a pedal to switch through multiple profiles.
Btw, I find it handy to set up buttons with series of actions (sometimes different ones for press, swipe, etc) and I am triggering those widgets from the control profiles rather than have
I’m I see. So this together with…
Would mean going from “recording” profile to a sort of “playing” profile. That makes sense.
Why don’t you have “record if empty” on?. That would free up a button. There must a reason but I can’t think of it. Oh just thought of one, so you can overdub.
The part I’m more dubious about is selecting clips and preparing to record… I don’t know if I want to record on the same track (different part - clip below?) or the same part on a different track (next clip). With a combination of tap and hold like @espiegel123 does you can have both. I’ll try it but maybe I’d rather select with my hand than tap 14 times if I have to look at the screen anyway to see where I’m at. After all this is a touch device, it’s not like you grab a mouse!. But I don’t what gesture to choose. I wish there was a double tap!.
What do you guys do to monitor what you’re going to record?. I’m thinking.
Thank u 🙏. Very helpful. I know all this mental prep work is gonna pay off!,
@tahiche: i don't generally do anything fancy re monitoring.
What I did was sit down and wrote down how I wanted it to work and then just implemented what was needed to make that work. I have a few different setups that are slightly different depending on what my particular application is. My guitar jamming/practicing template is a bit different from my ambient guitar setup which is different from my guitar and synths setup.
I tend to go with the simplest setup that gets the job done - rather than the most complicated flexible template. For me a few different setups targeted for the different ways I build up tunes works well for me.
Figure out what you really need and then build to that spec -- and if there are things that can't be done, I let go of that need and adapt myself to what is possible.
I see what you mean. I’m in a “planning phase” and I might be being over enthusiastic. The idea being if I get something flexible but easy enough I might be able to improvise and write on the go, without having to stop and think about monitoring, what inputs goes to what color, etc…
I haven’t been too worried about monitoring either because at the moment I stop and do a thing at a time. Let me bore you with a real use case…
I have a CGB guitar with an octaver pedal and 2 outputs (A/B/Y switch pedal). The octave down goes to a bass track, the regular goes to a guitar track. Then I’ll have a second guitar track to do solos or noisy stuff.
So I might want to record a bass line, and I need to monitor the bass color track. Then the rhythm guitar and monitor that because the sound will be different to the solo or noisy guitar… Or I’ll record bass (octave) and regular cgb at once in 2 clips and want to monitor both… That’s why I’d love a nice way to say “monitor whatever color is the clip selected” so that I can hear what I’m going to record.
I might try with a Mozaic script I saw around here for the Blueboard that enabled “spaces” on pedal long press. I could maybe have one of those spaces dedicated to monitoring by soloing whatever input…
Most of the time, I put my effects on buses and have the hardware input muted and pedal that switches between buses. The buses feed both the main outs and whatever colors i might record to.
Yeh, overdub. It also just feels easier to keep straight in my head that one button is for play only and one is for record. I want to avoid as much as possible accidentally recording.
I can understand the other approach, but again, like to keep each button as simple as possible. I don't want to be thinking about whether the fastest path to get to a particular clip is a combination of up/down/left/right movements. A quick glance generally serves to know how far forward or back the clip I'm going for is. I don't work with that many clips and the moves are rarely more than a tap or two away since I'm only focused on one live instrument at a time anyway and can arrange things easily. For the rare big shift I just use the screen. I can't think of any time I'd have big moves that I would need hands-free.
I haven't completely settled on that myself. The reason is I vacillate between being brave and just committing to clips with FX applied, and recording to clips dry so that I can tweak FX later (speaking about my guitar here). One thing I never do is put the FX on the input.
I used to put my guitar FX rack on a color, then just monitor through that color. But that means the recorded clip is dry and I have to keep the FX chain live for playback. Fine for later tweaking, but harder on CPU, plus then I need to go through more routing setup than I want to get a wet clip recorded. Also, every clip on that color is affected if I tweak the FX chain.
So, now I put the FX on a send and monitor through the send. If I want to record dry I send the color of that clip to the same bus. If I want to record wet I output the bus to that color instead. I can have it both ways as well, but I really don't like to do that to myself. I'll typically have more than one guitar FX chain set up on separate busses so it's relatively easy to swap between different sounds.
Similar to my current approach, except for rather than multiple inputs, I have multiple bus sends on a single input and just dial up the one I want at any time. This is rather clunky though, which is why I continue to think about improving it. I could do this with widgets I think, but haven't bothered.
Thanks for the mention, much appreciated! ☺️
I use 8 pedal Actition pedal.
It goes like this:
Bottom row:
Top row:
The pedal has an expression pedal input that I normally assign to either a low pass filter on master or probability humaniser that allows me to reduce number of midi events on certain tracks in Drambo.
Not thinking of it it could be great assigning it to turnado’s dictator.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for this. You’re definitely a trusted and qualified source!.
So do you only record and work with 2 loops?. Or do you swipe the recorded audio to new empty loops?.
@espiegel123 and @wim I’m quite interested in the approach of using buses to monitor instead of colors. Like you explain it let’s you have both options with the same setup, record wet to color or dry to color and send to bus…
If I’m to use loopy live the “recording wet” option is probably a lot lighter on the cpu and less prone to errors. In this “record wet through bus” scenario you’d only use the bus (fx and cpu) while recording. Imagine you have 4 audio tracks/colors… in my current setup that’d be 4 lanes of amp sims, fx and so on.
In the “bus setup” you’d still have 4 lanes of fx, but only 1 would be active while recording, the other 3 would be idle. Right?.
If not recording wet, like when writing a song and allowing for post-tweaking… In this setup I’m assuming you don’t use the volume faders on colors, and use the bus send instead to control output level. I wish you could just output a color to a bus, it’d be simpler. I think I like the bus approach for live performance, for sure. But I don’t see any real benefit on using buses instead of colors if recording dry.
I finally bought a Line6 FBV shortboard mkii, it should be arriving soon. It was a FBV mkii + PodXL bundle for 150€. Not too sure about the PodXL, might be old tech and I don’t think I’d be able to control the Pod AND Loopy at the same time, but for the price it’s worth checking out.
I’m thinking of using some of the pedals to switch scenes in loopy… actually to have say 4 widgets labeled like the pedals, so p1,p2,p3,p4 and just map the pedals to the widgets. Then setup in loopy whatever the widget does. For example “p2” might switch to scene 2, select the first clip on that scene (guitar 1) and solo the monitoring for guitar1…
I chose it over the convenience of Bluetooth because it’s got 12 pedals which should give me enough options to do scene selection, monitoring, etc…
I only ever use 6 loops. 3 go straight to the master out and 3 go through Turnado for possible post fx.
4 loops are controlled by hand from my LCXL and only 2 from the foot pedal. I reckoned I’d only use a foot pedal for recording loops where my hands are busy like when I play guitar.
It’s certainly great to have an unlimited number of loops but I realised that I already have many sound generators in my set up. Samplr and 4 parts in Drambo plus 6 loops in loopy.
My thinking was that If an average rock band is 4 members then 11 parts in total should be more than enough to rock’n’roll!
I’m finding that using ‘rec next track’ bindings confuse me as I have no visual reference of what’s being recorded where. Loopy is always off screen so it’s a no go for me.
Good thinking!.
Except that would apply to a James Brown band or a Kraut rock quartet! 😀
If you have varying parts in a song they’d each a loop. So you’d have, say, 3 loops for the bass member.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Mostly about how silence is totally under appreciated and underused in music. This not only in electronic music but also in a regular band situation.
Everyone’s motto is: I have an instrument so I play it all the time instead of trying to serve the song/arrangement or whatever.
When looping it is even more crucial.
Firstly because there is a tendency to layer at nauseum without considering de-layering.
Secondly because repetition causes fatigue and..
thirdly because there’s only one brain in charge of the process which while can be great for control it also lacks external perspective.
As far as parts are concerned that’s where scenes are concerned that’s where scenes come in.
That’s however too much for my little brain. Capturing different parts parts of the arrangement and then moving between them sounds very stressful.
Yes.
You can put Bus sends on colors if you like. I’m not sure if the FX on the sends automatically idle if you do it that way though. I’m pretty sure if you send outputs to sends, the FX automatically idle when there’s no signal going to them. (No access to test that atm)
Something to keep in mind… you can simultaneously record to a wet loop and a dry loop. Just have the wet loop set to not start playing when recording stops. That way you can preserve the option to tweak later while Keeping lean while performing.
@tahiche if you haven’t seen this, it might be if interest:
Monitoring through color channels is a convenient way sometimes to monitor wet but record dry. Sometimes it is more convenient than buses, sometimes not.
Thanks!. Great watching this, as this is exactly what I was thinking and what I’m working around!.
Here’s some buttons that solo (double tap) or toggle mute (tap) the corresponding input that’s being monitored through each color. In my case 4 inputs to 4 colors.
And after some thinking this is my approach with the FBV Shortboard… Id love to hear what you guys think about this…
Instead of having some complicated setup in the midi control section I thought it’d be easier to read and manage if I had sort of a reproduction of the physical pedals on a loopy screen. As you can see I have 2 states, “press” and “hold”. This means that when I press the pedal labeled “stomp” on the pedalboard I trigger the corresponding “press / stmp” if I long press the physical pedal it will trigger the widget “hold/stmp” so all the actions and so are done on the loopy widget which I find more visual and accesible.
Say in a song I want to do something different, like record bass (octaver) and guitar at the same time… I can just change the widget, the midi profile will always just trigger the “press” and “hold” versions of the widgets. So I have all the actions in one place and they’re available for hand or pedal operation.
Top pedals are for selecting clips, transport toggle, undo…
The middle row is for scenes / monitor which I mention above
The bottom row will be for play, rec, and general stuff plus maybe a couple of “per project” widget triggers to do fx or whatever…
I have mixed feelings about the FBV mk2. I like the sturdiness, the amount of pedals (+expression) and the editing is really easy with the FBV control app (Mac/windows only though). But the switches are veeeery noisy and hard. Probably good on stage but they feel stupid when playing in a room at home.
I’ve set a goal, to see if for a change I actually commit to… I want to have a solid setup, play a lot with it, perfect it and build some muscle memory so that I can do things live. If I get to 30% of the agility and skill of @supadom it’ll be a victory. Embrace the limitations and gain some confidence and speed through repetition and knowing the setup well.
@tahiche : I have taken a similar approach by creating a page that has a physical representation of my blueboard and the actions mapped to it -- and have a few different setups for different types of approaches. And my midi actions are triggering the widgets on the page -- which I have found convenient for testing since I don't need to use my blueboard to test the functions (for those where a few actions are tied to a widget).
I think there is something to be said for clanky buttons -- the downside of the blueboard is that there isn't really much tactility.
Whatever one uses, some daily practice with the pedals goes a long way I am finding.
Another thing that I have been exploring is using profiles as a way of implementing 'banks' that I can switch between easily. So I can switch to a 'bank' that is targeted at changing effects and amp or synth settings and then switching back to my looping commands.
I think there is a lot of value in committing to trying a setup and giving it time to gel. There are so many "right" ways to do this all.
Indeed switching profiles would really expand the possibilities. You could have another page of “physical representation” widgets with all new actions and have another profile to match the pedals to those. One “toggle” pedal on the board to switch profiles (off - profile A, lit-profile
. You’d switch to that second profile once all recording is done, for performance fx and so on…. So much flexibility.