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
Oh, and I love the heck out of this synth! I can’t think of a synth that has held my attention more and has grown on me so much the more I use it.
I should imagine that’s the case, that they really enjoy creating, so do content creators, also people who use that content, then people who listen to that creation, at it’s best it’s all cyclical and symbiotic.
It’s almost a claim on dev’s website :
And very fine for me as I mainly enjoy creating my own presets.
Same notes on other synths webpage.
I hope the slow-down from the initial excitement in this thread means that everyone is too busy to comment, and digging deep into Nambu to produce some soundbanks for it! 😆
Maybe if that were purely the case, the dev you describe might even give away their creation for free because the money doesn’t matter at all, only the joy of having made a cool thing for like-minded people. Seems like a naïve case to make that a dev who sets an intro price (to encourage sales) at $15 (a fair price no doubt) doesn’t hope to maximize sales, and it’s a legit criticism to say that more and better presets would have helped with that. As beautiful as it looks, I can’t justify dropping $15 for it when I have 100 other synths to explore and almost no time to sit and create patches. Guess I’m your stereotypical “preset surfer” for whom having to create sounds before using them presents a major obstacle to musical flow. I might consider it later at full price if there are more sounds available.
The point is that there's a balance: the effort of gathering presets form sound designers is certainly different from managing an intro price.
‘Maximizing sales’ may not improve the return on invested time [i.e. it might be a lot of work to increase sales by a small amount relative to the cost]. Relying on volunteer sound design may or may not result in enough great presets to move the bar. (What you get in situations like this is pretty variable … even paying great sound designers less than market rates is unpredictable).
It might be that preset surfers are a user base with different interests/demands than the dev is interested in catering to…given that the return on invested time is not large)
Who knows…but it probably isn’t a case of his simply overlooking an easy way to significantly increase the return on his invested time.
Life/work balance is a tricky thing to achieve.
Yeah.
If Satoshi had come to me asking for preset contributions for including with the synth on release, I would have had to decline because I just never know when I will have the time and cannot commit to deadlines. Especially seeing Nambu's specs, I would know it's gonna take some time to explore everything and do it any kind of justice. I suspect it's the same for many other preset contributers here, unless sound designing is already their full time job with no other committments.
Personally I like the fact that the factory presets don't reveal all of Nambu's secrets straight away. It's an interesting and inviting mystery to be explored, a journey. We can immediately see just from the specs that the possibilities are huge. With limited factory presets, it's presented more as something to be explored and discovered rather than ready to go straight out of the box. I believe Satoshi's description of it kinda says this too. Sort of encouraging people to dig into it and enjoy the surprises and discoveries for themselves.
The UI has been designed as clear and easy to follow as I have ever seen on an iOS synth. Satoshi has made sure there are no design obstacles in the way for newcomers as well as veterans. If I wasn't already interested in sound designing, this synth would definitely make me want to start learning and exploring. There's nothing frustrating or off-putting about Nambu's design.
I see this one as more of an adventure. The whole story is not given to you right from the beginning.
Maybe Satoshi does not like to impose on people asking them for contributions.
Maybe Satoshi does not need to push for sales by shipping with hundreds of presets provided by third parties.
Maybe Satoshi likes to tease us and provoke our curiosity with the staggering specs and minimal factory sounds.
Maybe Satoshi is trying to encourage more people to try sound design for themselves.
Maybe Satoshi is playing the slow game, knowing that eventually the sound designers here will create some magic soundbanks for it, everyone will get excited all over again and sales will go through the roof! 😄
None of my first synths had presets. I had to figure it out on my own. Invaluable experience.
👍
It's half the fun, right?
If you've got a synth and you're only using it for factory presets, it seems a bit of a waste buying something with all those tweakable parameters and not using them. Synths are made to be tweaked.
Indeed it’s why I have hardware synth’s that have no preset storing capability unless you take a photo, but that’s not the case for everyone’s liking.
I was happy to see my arp files that were previously saved in Lagrange, available in Nambu!
This is one of the few FM synths that’s really captured my imagination in terms of sound design. I could never wrap my head around FM synths like Aparillo, as far as what is doing what to what. What makes Aparillo awesome (to me) is it’s presets; made by people who knew what was what. I’ve never made any of my own presets for Aparillo, because it looked too complicated. The “Orbital” thing? Forget about it!
Nambu on the other hand, is laid out in a way where you can clearly see what is what, and I feel inspired to start creating some of my own sounds. I already have about 10 new presets I’ve saved from just playing around. I think it takes taking everything you know about subtractive, and throwing out the window. (Well, almost everything!)
I understand there's a balance and am not criticizing the developer's strategy or choices as I don't know much about their reasoning or intention. However, this is a known and respected dev with a lot of other cool offerings and I think it suggests that they are interested in both providing unique, high-quality instruments and generating sales. Some of their other instruments didn't have a lot of presets either, but were highly focused on a specific use case (and less expensive overall) so didn't matter as much. In this case, I'm saying more and better presets would probably have helped sell me and others on it. Presets exist as a standard part of synth presentation to demonstrate capabilities and to cater to those who aren't interested or capable of investing lots of time and effort into sound design from the ground up, and they do have a direct impact on sales. It's perfectly okay with me if that's not a priority for this dev at the moment, but it also means I (and inevitably others) can't justify this purchase right now.
Also, I'm not necessarily advocating for soliciting presets from other sound designers, and certainly not for free to be included in a paid product in any case. I recognize there's a fair amount of work in both creating them and in coordinating with others.
Maybe there will be a later update to include more sounds like they did with Kroenecker iirc, but until then (or until I cannot resist the ones that are already being teased out there by heroes like @Spidericemidas ) it won't be joining my armada of synths, and that's okay.
A huge, resounding YES to tweaking of synth sounds. However, if you hand me a sine wave and some random bits to bend it around, I'm gonna nope right out of there...not because it wouldn't be any fun at all, but because it's not as much fun as putting a bunch of already made sounds together and making a melody out of it.
I'm grateful for you and others with your slightly different preferences....
For the record, I meant no disrespect with the term "preset surfers". There is absolutely nothing wrong with leveraging presets, and it's perfectly natural that some people don't enjoy making them.
In fact, I do my best to never get involved in sound design when I'm actually making music. I'm reaching for presets then, and yes, I'll often grab a particular synth because it has a ton of them.
…… I think it suggests that they are interested in both providing unique, high-quality instruments and generating sales. …., I'm saying more and better presets would probably have helped sell me and others on it. Presets exist as a standard part of synth presentation to demonstrate capabilities and to cater to those who aren't interested or capable of investing lots of time and effort into sound design from the ground up, and they do have a direct impact on sales.
A couple of things, providing more presets might produce some more sales…but the number of additional sales might not justify the additional time/expense.
Not all synths need to cater to people uninterested in designing their own sounds. Just like not all musicians are interested in appealing to everyone.
There’s nothing wrong with wishing there were more presets, either.
That's great! Don't be too hasty to dismiss subtractive on it though. You can also forget about the FM and use it like a subtractive synth too. It's quite a modular environment in there. You could route 2 OSC on A & B through a filter on C, and another 2 OSC on D & E through another filter on F! Or any other way you like. More like building a subtractive synth.
Or make something hybrid with a mix of subtractive and FM and a texture. There are 6 Ops to build and mix n match stuff with. 😃 So cool!
The only thing that trips me up about this is the "half" matrix ... the limitation that you can only go top-down with the signal flow. It means that you really have to pre-think operator order when you're setting up your oscillators. If you decide you'd like to to try modulating operator A using operator C halfway into a patch, you really have to jump through some hoops. Sure there are some tools for swapping operators and copying envelopes, etc. but there can be just way too much to do if you want to re-arrange an algorithm.
Oh well, doesn't have to be perfect!
It would be cool to have the FX implemented as operators for free and flexible routing into them rather than just at the end of the chain.
...And a wave table operator!
But there's always Drambo for stuff like that.
A quick feedback…
Unless I have missed this, for me are lacking :
+1 I always look for this in synths, and rarely find it.
Just to be clear : the tone possibilities are fantastic. But given the crazy amount of controls in this synth, I am surprised not to find any little knob allowing to separate left and right in some way.
I bought Nambu because of this message. Now it’s time to learn. Do you have quick guidelines to makes let’s say a Koto? Don’t waste your time with the complete receipe but just a quick guideline. Thank you.
Basically. yes they are quite different.
Huh, fair point.
Isn't NFM a somewhat underrated synth? I'm still using it because of its super straightforward UI. Free routing and panning for each OP.
Agreed
Agreed about FX
Would love pan per operator ability
Agreed. Am I right that many feedback paths possible in FM8 and the aforementioned NFM are not possible with Nambu? Or is there always a way to restructure the graph/algorithm to get any selection of feed back paths?
The synth is just its own thing.
I dunno. I would think you could do any algorithm, but I’d have to think that through. It’s more about the inconvenience if you want to re-jigger things. I just wanted to throw the thought out there in case it came to the developer’s attention. I’m just going to enjoy it for what it is from here.