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.
A couple of questions (advanced I guess) regarding Loopy Pro
Hi,
I just bought Loopy pro to have a mobile solution to practice bass guitar when not at home where I have a studio with treated room, hardware etc.
Now the app seems pretty awesome but I am having a couple of questions to it
Is there a way to generate midi clips and loop those?
If not, how would I use Drumfills? I have tons of sampled fills and rolls which obviously aren't all 1 bar or 2 bars etc so I would either need midi and a sampler with slicing option or the possibillity to add some silence before and after the file to make it loop correctly.
I just bought it yesterday and I get that there are ways to make a button do several things. If I for example have 2 synced loops running and want them to stop and play a fill instead but just while pressing the button and by release continueing to play the loops, would that be possible and if so would I use the button to just automate the volume or are there fine setting regarding control (e.g. quantisation of the button action etc)?
When I layer funkbreaks they obviously are not 100% matching as the drummers played slightly off the grid which obviously is responsible for the groove. When I layer 2 or more loops I am having the problem that snares etc are slightly delayed which resultes in smeared transients. Is there some transient detection or even better a way to manually set the transients and then quantize / groove quantize?
I am looking for a good rhodes emulation. Could anyone suggest something? I saw they sell eventide shimmer for 10 Euro which I am probably going to buy. Are there any recomendations on tremolo, chorus and a good delay. I like stuff like soundtoys, eventide, plugin alliance and also the arturia effects etc. Is there anything comparable on IOS (primarily the sound not the functionality)?
All in all it seems to be a great app.
Thanks for helping
Cheers,
Jens
Comments
No midi yet, supposed to be coming to Loopy. But you can use any midi sequencer. Midi options and routing in Loopy are great. I’d recommend imaginando’s LK which is a grid midi clip launcher. There’s also Atom2 with an amazing piano roll, 4pockets Helium…
Are the drum fills midi or audio?. I don’t get this… if everything’s audio samples you could use Loopy clips and trigger those via midi learn. Maybe have the loops as donut clips and the fills as one shots. You could trigger them live or record the drum performance to midi in LK. Or use a sampler to play the drums… it’d need to have time stretching if you want to be able to change the BPM. Koala sampler has time stretching…
There’s quantization for actions, you have ramps to do stuff like gradually change volume. Actions are very powerful. But maybe look at loop phase and loop groups. You set a group (drums) to only play a clip at a time, and you can keep the phase, meaning the loops will keep the sync even if they’re not being heard… in the case of drums you’ll only want a clip at a time (loop or fill) so groups save you having to stop one to play the other… if it’s a fill you can program an action so it automatically goes back to playing the loop once the one-shot fill finishes playing.
Wouldn’t you have that same problem in any daw?. Maybe try disabling time stretching. There is no transient editing in ooopy.
ToneStack Pro has a ton of effects in the form of pedals, amp sims…
MixBox by IK Multimedia has very good quality modules and just about everything you’d need.
If you’re looking for single effects there’s a ton of great iOS apps, if you search this forum you’ll find a ton of options. For example FAC chorus is widely considered and my personal fav for bass, you have very complex delays like the Fabfilter delay or Other Desert Cities, or more “peculiar” options like the GSI hardware emulations…
Hope it helps.
Thanks a lot for your detailed answer and the suggestion regarding midilooper (would have asked for that
)
The fills are audio sampled of mostly funk and jazz records. Most of them aren't 1 bar loops. Usually I slice them into a sampler and set the midinotes accordingly
Regarding layering drumloops Iused several techniques in the past (made jungle and breaks for ages). Either I put the whole loop on c1, loop with the kick cut off starting at the hat after on c#1, loop cut starting at the snare on d1 and so on and then pitched the program to match the tempo and by triggering via Midi I could rearrange the loop. Main drums always are on point with this. Used my s950 with that.
Alternatively you could slice and have each drumhit on a separate note, program your rhythms hard quantized and apply the same grove to all of them after.
Obviously you can do that with audio too but having the problem that variations of the loops are more difficult to do (I am used to working in midi a lot, others might be fast doing that) and having sliced drums in the sampler lets you group similar hits like snares, hats, kicks etc and apply pitch changes selectively if needed and process the whole loop differently than you would if you were processing the loop as one piece. Obviously loops with rides or other more or less sonstant sound in the background don't work for that but other loops can get super punchy or whatever it is that you want. I also tend to do frequency and sound specific sidechainng in between the layered breaks to prevent the transients to smear and keep focus on different bits of different breaks. Obviously I really don't need to do that within loopy pro but it would be great if there was a way to slice and quantize or groovequantize. If you never tried I hardly suggest doing so within Ableton in case you use it. The groovepool is an amazing tool once understood what can be done with it.
Back to loopy - from what I saw so far this seems to be a pretty amazing app. I never used Bluetooth midi but I suppose for switching quantized actions it should be fine. I suppose it is pretty simple to diy a set of footswitches using an esp32.
Thanks a lot for your suggestions I will check out those apps.
@yentzee : loopy doesn’t currently have transient detection + requantization within a loop. It is in the long-term plans but I think that isn’t in the near future.
Currently, it has a sort of beatslicer with transient detection where you can trigger the slices via midi or hand.
Ohh sorry I forgot something. Is there any way to place folders within the media directory? I imported 500 or more loops and wanted to add some fills but it is quite messy already
In files app, create the folders you want. The media tab will show all folders that have playable media. You might need to relaunch loopy to have it scan the media.
BUT, you can drag/drop audio clips into loopy from anywhere using files app. There is a s no need to have them in Loopy’s folder.
Cool, thanks for helping. Just went back to iOS after years, just for being able to practice bass without having to start the computer.
The app from what I can tell so far is pretty amazing. Haven't figured out the different control elements but I saw you can jump to quarters, eights etc.
it probably will take me some time but I am stunned by the configuration possibilities. Still have to get to know all elements and then think about a setup that is good for me.
By far the most interesting music app I saw on iOS so far but I haven't been around for a while. Leaving the midilooper for now as they aren't that cheap. I haven't tried the Ableton app. Seems it just does midi, maybe this would be an alternative. Also having two macropads which I will try to utilize as well.
Ableton note does not do MIDI. It is a standalone app with no connectivity. It is intended as a sort of sketch pad for desktop Ableton Live users.
Thanks a lot, it wasnt that clear to me by looking at it in the appstore. I think I will go for one of the solutions mentioned above
I started trying actions but I don't understand a couple of things.
Is there a way to do several actions at the same time pushing a buttonwidget? It seems that the actions are worked of one after the other. I would love to do stuff like "mute certain tracks" "unmute certain tracks" while pressing and holding the button and when releasing unmuting and muting again as it was before pushing the widget, the same also being quantized.
I can manage to make it that way that it solos a certain track while i press and unsolos when I release but I also would like to have it that way that I can press and release and it solos when the bar starts and unsolos after the bar is finished
@yentzee : there are options for how multiple actions trigger when they are stacked together
Also note that many actions let you choose multiple targets.
Actions like play/stop and record use the clip settings for quantization unless you choose a different quantization in the action set up.
Great, thanks a lot for helping
Sorry for being a pain and asking again.
I am setting up a nice template with a matrix of funkgrooves. Is there any way to define a button that when it is pressed just switches on the next loop to the right and stops the playing one?
I want backing tracks for my bass practice and would love to use a footswitch to switch to the next loop without having to touch the device. I saw that there is such an option tapped track but this seems to need me touching the device. Sorry for asking all those questions, coming from Ableton live I am maybe a bit narrow minded when it comes to understanding new concepts on how to navigate through different loops.
Oh and also can I change the starting point? So I have a couple of loops the start with the roll of the last bar and I would have to set the starting point to the right but have the bit before played after it looped if that makes sense.
If you only want one loop playing at a time, make a group from the loops and set the group to one at a time. Set play quantization to “loop”. The select action can target the next clip. Selected clip can be the target of an action.
You can up a button so that it plays the selected clip and selects the next clip. Before you press it the first time, select a clip. I often have a button that selects the first clip or I define swipe right to select a clip.
You can edit clips to change their start and end points.
If you haven’t done so, recommend reading the manual. While it is incomplete, it covers most of what one needs to know.
Thanks a lot for helping. I now edited and bounced the loops in ableton to start at 1 and and at 2,4,8 etc. some of the breaks originally start with the roll of the last bar and then hit the 1 as they are sampled of records and sometimes that snippet is all you get. in live I can set the loop length to 2,4 or whatever and moe the starting point forward so it starts playback a bit after the file starts but loops to the very beginning so the roll is at the end
I will try what you recommended, that would be basically what I am looking for
Yeah, working. Thanks a lot.
You can set up loops to have a lead-in, btw.
Thanks for the answers, this helped a lot. At home I am still using ableton as I just know the program in and out and have very decent pluginpacks installed. I would however work on my loopy setup as well.
Just to get a rough idea - is recording / editing and plaing midi something that will come in the near future or something that might still take some time. I am asking as the sequencers mentioned above aren‘t that cheap and I dont know whether I might be better off just doing it in ableton and bouncing to audio for loopy instead. I am on an iphone 13 mini which has a great form factor but obviously sucks for detailled editing.
Thanks for the tip with the intro / outro. That was what I was looking for.
If you have a Mac one option might be to pipe the MIDI from Ableton to the iPad using iDAM. Bouncing to audio is probably the more direct option though. With AirDrop, it only takes seconds to transfer between Apple devices.
I expect it to be some time before MIDI looping comes to Loopy Pro, but I have no insider knowledge on that subject.
Ok I thought so. Hmm not sure. When linking in a sequencer with loopy I can still send start stop to the sequencer from within loopy right? I don't want to have to change the app. Also would the sequencer necessariliy need to be hooked into loopy or could I use loopy pro and a sequencer within aum and just have the loopy surface open?
Out of curiosity, why would you load the sequencer in AUM rather than directly.
I don’t think there is a specific timeframe for loopy having native midi recording and editing.