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.
THE RAT - The Walkmen (cover ) - live w LoopyPro
Hi!
I’ve been theorizing about a “live setup” for ages. I always admired the likes of FLEKSI (@supadom) and the “one man band” thingy. I finally jumped in and tried to put the pieces together.
Here’s some details, you can of course skip the nerdy details 🙃
Im using Loopy Pro as the brain of it all, it’s got excellent routing options and the midi control and widgets are super flexible.
I use a Line6 FBV midi foot controller triggering Loopy Widgets, 4 pedals for 4 widgets/scenes.
These widgets mute/unmute audio sources, and alter fx in Loopy. They also send midi CC and PC to the Digitakt (pattern change) and the Voicelive3 (vocal effects).
The “bass” sound is a guitar octaver through BLEASS motion fx for the 1/8th note feel. There’s also some JamSynth guitar-to-midi playing Lo-Fi synth.
The guitar (Telecaster) is recorded with Nembrini DC30.
I looove this song and always wanted to learn it. The results are not perfect but I see the potential, and it’s fun!. It was important to hook it all up and actually test it, hopefully it becomes a plug-and-play kind of thing.
BTW the vocoder part was totally unintentional, a random digital sinister. When I noticed it was too late. It’s not like I’m aiming at the Reggeaton crowd.
Comments
Wow @tahiche. Great job man. You killed those vocals.
Bebot even made an appearance. You know how to name drop.
Thanks Ben!.
Yeah, BeBot stole the show!
I was on the limit with the vocals at the end. I’ve smoked away an octave and all of the falsetto capability. I don’t care so much about loosing some high notes, but I loved doing falsettos and those are bye bye. With high notes I now have to shout my brain out so I tend to “croon” more. But falsetto, either it’s there or not and it’s not. It’s like when someone tries to play a saxophone and only air comes out.
Anyway, that was totally unsolicited, guess I’m in a chatty mood.
Thank you for the comment! 🙌
I uploaded the video again with remastered audio. The previous one sucked.
Lovely guitar, and the beat is so alive.
The video is so interesting, with the dark scenes.
Vocals are very nice, mixed very well, and paired perfectly with the video.
Rene
Enjoyed that! I like your voice/vocal style.
@tahiche I also really like the Supadom thing he does. You're right up there with him. I like your vocals better than the original. I don't think it's the cheap beer and antihistamines talking here. This is a really great version of a really great song. Very inspiring to watch you crank this out in your bedroom. I hope you do more videos like this.
Thank you!. About the video, it’s not really a video. Just a crappy recording of the live performance with my laptops camera. The quality was real shitty so I made it dark and tinted it. I then added the audio back in. The fact that you think it looks ok is just wonderful.
Thank u @Halftone !.
Supadom (aka Fleksi) was one of the first iPad performers I saw, it’s amazing what he does. It was through him that I got interested in all this iPad stuff.
The Walkmen’s frontman is an amazing singer, very emotional, don’t think it’s about technique, he just gives it all. This song is up there in my top 5.
About doing more, yes, I like this. I miss playing live and this sort of feels like it. If I do I’ll have to see how it’s done!. I wonder if any of the “good ones” like FLEKSI @supadom could talk about the kind of setup to do live video…. I had a laptop on a chair, hardly ideal and you can’t see any of the nuances or equipment which is part of the geeky fun. Plus then you have to sync the video to the audio.
But it’s definitely a good way to test a proper setup and gain some confidence and muscle memory.
BTW the Digitakt is rather shitty when it comes to changing patterns, not very reliable, next time I’ll probably record them to Loopy clips, although that might be cheating.
Ah guys, you’re making me blush….!! 😊
I loved your version of it although I don’t know the original. You definitely pulled it off. What are you using on your vocals, some kind of saturation?
For a multi-chorded tune such as this one I’d probably just get a band together! This is like, my major limitation of looping, that once you get a chord sequence in the first loop, it is hard to switch to a chorus without the need to re record the bass first to make it punchy right from the word go…perhaps it’s a blessing.
I have so many standard structured songs that I just cannot pull off looping without prearranging scenes etc and imo cannot be pulled gracefully off looping. In a similar way some FLEKSI stuff would bore to death being played by a four piece, just too repetitive.
I like the blurry camera work here but certainly not very useful for folks wanting to know what you’re doing. I normally just have couple of lights from different angles to be able to see the gear. Sometimes I just stick a cheap wide angle adapter on my iPhone and clamp it to a mic stand. Whatever works
.
Well done! Looking forward to the next one!
It’s interesting to hear you’re using Loopy Pro. I’ve had mixed experiences with it and still cannot quite recreate my Audiobus set up with it.
You da real shit! 🙌
It’s the VoiceLive3. I love that thing, it does so much. I had a Helix and sold the Helix but kept the VoiceLive. Don’t know why it wasn’t more successful.
I’ve had plenty of bands, it’s the best but also a nightmare!. You get the lazy guitarist, the guy who’s late, playing the same stuff over and over… My last band did ONE show!, after a lot of effort to get a decent thing going the drummer moved to Portugal and the guitarist went to live on a boat. Discouraging… Actually it was in that scenario where I started seeing you do your thing and thought “that guy doesn’t have to put up with all this mess”.
Totally. I’m using an octaver pedal so the “bass” is coming from the guitar. With a “stutter” kind of effect, like BLEASS Motion, you get a pretty solid bass effect. In the band I mention I played a CGB guitar into a guitar amp and a octaver->bass amp. Sounded huge (Btw I can’t find an octaver that I really like on iOS for this).
What I’m doing here is extremely simple compared to what you do!. You’re so agile and confident going back on forth. But I do like chord changes, guess it’s in my musical upbringing and nature. I’d feel very constrained in a “looping situation”. But to have pre-recorded bass or keys would feel like playback. So the idea is to drive everything with the guitar, switching presets or turning stuff on/off with the midi foot pedal. But in turn that’s limiting in regards to sounds. I’m gonna buy the midi-guitar thing and see how it works. I guess we have to embrace the limitations and work with them.
What can’t you do?. I can’t think of anything you can do in Audiobus that you can’t replicate with Loopy.
What I love about it for this “live” setup are the widgets. I have widgets setup as “scenes” so I do everything within Loopy. Then I just midi learn that widget to whatever control device. I “cascade” these widgets. For example I have a widget “VL” to control the Voicelive3 via a midi Cc, and another “scene3” widget that mutes the bass audio source, switches the drum pattern on the Digitakt (PC) and triggers a specific gesture on the VL widget. It’s very flexible and you only have to do the “ugly” stuff (like CC value matching) once.
@supadom question, if you don’t mind… When you record your videos with the iPhone or whatever. Do you then align the video to the audio track manually?. Do you have any kind of trick or cue to help in that?.
That's ballsy to cover such a beautiful song, but you made it alive and brilliantly ! I love your Jay Mascisesque rendition on this one, it fits perfectly the edginess of the lyrics.
The Walkmen is a very underrated band that deserved wider audience. Hamilton Leithauser always has this "on the edge" feel to his vocal performance, so moving.
I haven't listened to his 2020 solo album nor the one he made with Rostam, have you?
Anyway, very nice performance. I love your voice. Keep them coming. You take order? If so, please, Sparkelhorse "It's A wonderful Life". Your voice will fit perfectly to Mark Linkous!
100%. He’s so intense. But in a good way, you can tell the ones that “fake it”. Elliott Smith, is a totally different take but equally intense.
I might just accept the challenge!. I hadn’t actually listened to that song, beautiful. It’s calling “cigar box guitar” to me. 👍
Elliott Smith is one big favourite of mine. His intricate guitar parts and vocals are magical, not to mention his talent as a lyricist.
I recently wrote a few songs inspired by him. I'd be happy to have your valuable feedback if you're interested and have the time.
The whole Sparklehorse album including this song also includes a beautiful duo with PJ Harvey, the song is called "Piano Bird" and another nice duo with Tom Waits. Definitely worth the listen. I guess we share a lot of common influences!
It depends. I generally pull audio from screen rec and just match the peaks in the waveform in Final Cut on my iMac. I always try to start capture with all of the devices roughly at the same time so I don’t have to fuff about too much finding my way around them.
As with most things though, I never spend more than a couple of hours on performance + video. I like to work quickly and forget about it. In fact if you asked me to repeat any of the performances I wouldn’t even remember the key, let alone structure or sounds. Carpe diem. Perhaps that is why it may seem that I’m cleverly executing the piece when in fact I totally wing it most of the time. That’s the fun part for me though. Bass line plus some vague vocals and let’s go!
@tahiche : a handy technique for aligning video is to do a handclap once video and audio are rolling. A clap’s sharp transient is easy to line up.
Didn’t think of that, will do. Thanks!.
I also mostly do stuff that’s in the moment and is usually left as a sketch in a drawer forever, That’s a great thing about the video format, it’s “less demanding” in structure of the song, instrumentation or whatever. It’s the immediacy and actually watching someone perform. So there’s less overthinking, mixing, producing and less being fussy, demanding. If you listened to a “loop based” piece on Spotify you might miss a chord change (or proper instrumentation). Watching you perform I never ever think there’s something missing, quite the opposite it’s more like “how can he do all that?”.
Where I think you excel is at knowing your workflow and setup. You might not realize, but it’s quite baffling to see you go back and forth and make it look effortless.
@jankun we should definitely try and do something!. But let’s make it weird (the music I mean….😄). BTW Elliott is the best guitar player ever.