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.
Comments
😂
I know it looks like I’m joking, but I have actually tried this before and it does sound pretty interesting when you push the source level over the edge.
Source —> Tape Adapter —> TapeDeck Output —> Recording Destination
If it works, it works!
I'm curious - what kind of music is Steve Davis into? 😮
Lots of prog, experimental electronic stuff, krautrock...
Here:
Awesome, thanks 👌
Well, you learn something every day. Steve David had a reputation as the most boring man in Britain for a while. Maybe it was sarcastic. Confused. And thank @Kashi
@Tarekith just wondering what your thoughts are around Dolby Atmos as a thing.
From a mastering perspective is this something you have much to do with? Are you considering it as a potential?
What are your thoughts about it as a format?
I haven't gone down this path yet properly - just working with it in headphones...the monitoring set up is a bit beyond my current space.
Personally, I think it would be cool to have a dedicated mixing app for it on the iPad. It's not necessarily a compositional space although I guess that depends on what you are composing. The M1 iPads are definitely powerful enough to deal with something like this and it's native to Logic so it's already in Apple land.
Just curious about your thoughts...
I've looked into it extensively over the last year, but at this point I really think it's not something that's going to gain any more traction than any of the other surround sound options the music industry has tried to adopt. With Dolby holding all the licensing requirements it's expensive ($200) for your average producer to experiment with. It's not the easiest thing to set up monitoring for unless you want to work entirely in headphones, and there's some debate how useful that is.
And I think the biggest hold up is the distribution aspects. Similar to say Apple's Mastered For iTunes initiative, unless you're a big name artist or label, it's hard to find a way to actually release music in that format. You make a brilliant Atmos master, and then how do you get it to people?
I'll keep watching it, but at this point I think it will remain a rather niche thing.
Personally I've yet to hear something with Spatial Audio on Apple Music that really grabbed me as being better than the original. I can't get past that fake reverb sound you hear all too often based on the depth setting for each instrument in an Atmos render.
When they first got it going on Apple Music I had a listen to Sgt Peppers and it was very disappointing. I don't know who was responsible for the remix, but it really didn't enhance the original.
I like the idea of exploring the sound stage and how it is presented, but maybe this remixing of old product to resell it for a new format isn't the way to new ground.
Since the alien invasion pandemic lockdowns (everywhere except Japan, which just wore masks indoors and outdoors all the time and avoided ever needing a lockdown) I’ve been remaking the songs I did in previous years, in Logic Pro X with hardware synths (well, the OpSix was a hardware synth back then when I started).
I decided to make each project based on Dloby Atmos as my MacBook Pro’s superb speakers can do positional audio as long as I’m sitting reasonably in front of it. As to my audience, fuck you all, I’m not even releasing these songs (I was intending to, as NFTs, but the world decided to act stupid and wreck the whole NFT concept by turning it into an obvious obvious obvious pyramid scheme, so my songs are going to be even scarcer than any NFT - only I have them).
Two points about Atmos
1 - I started out mixing everything in Atmos and had a lot of fun positioning things all over the place. Not really with any meaningful intent, just all over the place because I could. This gave way to a more restrained positioning spree where I positioned things and then mostly left them where I put them. One or two things might gradually move, but mostly things didn’t, because they didn’t need to.
After listening back to a lot of this full-on Atmos work, I realised that it made the songs sound thin and, well, the opposite of thick and strong. Inadequate girth. So, phase two of my Atmos learning was to go back and take out a lot of tracks from surround and decide that much of the instrumentation shouldn’t be positional audio, it should be stereo at most, and mono at best. The (fewer by now) positional audio tracks should then suspend around this solid plinth of thick predictable reliable relatively central audio. That way my songs had their strength back. So – don’t Atmos everything. Decide what is and isn’t best as positional audio.
2 - these remixes have stretched from coming into 2021 to, well, even last night. I’m finding a disturbing phenomena. I have opened up a few of the lockdown remixes to do further work on them (like singing better) only to discover that the entire soundstage is now very extremely leftward, with a bit of evidence of some sounds elsewhere in the soundstage. It’s not spherical, it’s completely corrupted. If anything, it’s all coming from a tiny soundstage way over to the left of my MacBook Pro and completely outside it. About another MacBook’s width away from it to the left. As I say a minority of the sounds are over the other side too, so it’s not just a technical ‘channel missing’ type of fault. It’s more that something has happened recently to render all my previous year or so’s Atmos work as ruined. It didn’t sound like this when I left those songs to go on to the next. I can’t even do a bounce mixdown now, it produces the same wrecked soundstage image as I hear. Obviously it used to work, I did get a usable bounce mixdown back then, and everything sounded acceptable, how I wanted it, how I left it. Something has recently happened to Atmos in LPX on my MacBook Pro to make it interpret prior work incorrectly.
My solution to this is to tediously un-Atmos the whole project, and make it stereo only. This is tedious because as I’ve discovered it’ll still think it’s working in surround until you’ve got even the last invisible effects routing internal bus set back to stereo — and unbelievably, the metronome sound too — you have to weed out everything. So for now I’m back to stereophonic, but when I discover why today’s Atmos implementation is wrecking last year’s Atmos work, I’ll be making Atmos mixes again.
That sounds like a complete nightmare, I wonder if Apple updated the Atmos side of thing’s that rendered previous projects incompatible in some way. I don’t think a massive soundstage really works for music project’s, the human expectation is for a musical rendition to remain fairly static in the stereoscopic field and low frequencies mono. With cinematic content a broader soundstage works better.
It doesn’t really need to be ‘massive’ so much as, well I used to think ‘immersive’ but now I think more ‘environmental’ (which is what I think Atmos is aiming at, rather than the ‘cinema viewing and listening’ type of intent of the old surround systems like 5.1. The big difference is that in the latter older film-based world you’re static, the screen is static, the room you’re in is static and the speakers are static.
This newer environmental approach aims to present the listener with a soundstage that is like a sphere (could be a cube, that’s a philosophical difference with possible real differences if we take corner penetration into account) (in much the same way as a lens tries to map a spherical scene ‘out there’ onto an inconveniently flat plane in the back of the camera, a more telephoto lens samples a small section of the scene making it very little difference whether it’s a chunk of sphere or more like another plane ‘out there’ (it isn’t), whereas a wide angle lens (like every lens ever on every phone ever, or every webcam ever) will actually bring in a section of sphere and try but fail to map it onto a plane (either by rectilinear conversion, or basically not bothering with that and calling it a fisheye) so you always get a big nose because it’s in the centre of the fake plane that is actually a section of sphere)))))))) (can’t be arsed to count the out-brackets, have a few spare)
The upshot of this environmental approach is that with modern technology we can do head motion tracking, and we can blend with the real sound outside, to make it more like you’re listening to a live band or live disco that is mixed in with the reality you’re in, wherever you move within this notional sphere.
I fully believe it’ll be the way of the future, in the future. I don’t have apple headphone pod type things (those useless white things just fall out and have to be held in with fingers) but I believe in the future most headphones (that stay in) will make use of positional tracking and binaural matrixing from a spherical soundstage.
In the future we’ll probably bypass the ear’s completely, go straight to the brains functioning area’s for sound, but then we’ll start to understand other area’s of brain functioning better too. Probably augment it with extended functionality, that would be hard to imagine at present. A clip often works for those in-ear thingies, ear wax and the bodies natural temperature wreak havoc, sometimes.
It's mainly, from my perspective anyway, a divergence in the future as tech allows it, away from static installations with which to experience music.
The first of those was the portable valve radio, then transistor radio, then boombox, then personal stereo (or Walkman™) and now we're here (I'm leaving out marching bands etc).
The big desire (well among tech makers) is to somehow blend or preserve the real environmental sound with your artificially-carried-with-you sound, which might be music, might be a film you're watching on the go, or might be game audio (real industrial serious games, as well as those waste-of-life fictional games people seem to invest in). The aim seems to be to make it seem like the carried-with-you audio isn't so separate from your real environment (eg, that it keeps pointing the same way as your head does when you turn your head, yet the environment stays where it is (of course) is a bit of cognitive dissonance drawing a demarcation between the environment and your carried sound).
It's all early days, but I predict that within our lifetimes we'll come to accept such artificially carried-with-us sound as seeming not to come from headphones or speakers, but just 'around us' in a natural way (rather than a big pompous blockbuster film way). After all, we've just come through a ridiculous phase where teenagers accept mono as a legit way of listening to music, so you'd be surprised how malleable the public are on this.
Recent video of Steve live with Gaz Williams :
OK, I admit it. I took a lazy old shot at Steve. He’s a dude!
Now maybe it turns out that Ian Shepherd makes grime music or something as well…
No Covid references please! This is a mastering discussion thread. 🙏
Yes please.
In other news, I think I’ve mastered mastering. Probably not to a pro level, just a good level. I’m now confident I know what needs to be achieved and that I know how to achieve it. It’s very much an integrated part of my creative process.
Total noob here in terms of mix and mastering but hey, here to learn.
My main interests in this complex process is first of all the db balancing of all tracks: kick, subs, bass, toms&percs and instruments. There are some rules but all are relative to style.
And why use limiters on separate tracks? As is done by many.
I would use a limiter on the master.
And how do we eq ms wise in terms of all non drum related tracks? From what freq makes this a difference as high sounds are placed rather side. Do we compensate when pushing sides while lowering mids in the same freq range?
Can we still pan effectively when using apps like wider?
Mono kicks and bass is the thing, I get the point. Truly.
But I have checked comercial hits that have insane amounts of lows in sides.
No rules I guess. Pure art ❤️
My day is now a surreal one having learned that Steve Davis is cool as f*ck. Cheers @kashi
Are we talking about Steve Davis the snooker player? He's a musician? Really?? I watched him playing snooker when I was young! Seriously? Wow!
You're welcome @AtticusL !. Yes, @Artj , the very same Steve Davis.
Funnily enough I played a live set and DJ'd at an experimental festival called Supernormal in Oxfordshire a couple of weeks ago. Steve was there, soaking it all in. I went over and had a little chat with him. Nice bloke.
Nice! He was so focused during the snooker championship matches, looked completely like the ice king who wouldn't get distracted at all. Very nice surprise to learn that he's into DJing. 👍
Not the most exciting, but the 3-4 episodes where he takes you through the mastering chain are so worth it. And his advice on loudness.
He’s also a great advocate for restraint, which is crucial.