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.
What size is live?
Imagine you’re playing live, in front of an audience, and nobody’s throwing stuff at you yet
My question, well, it’s more of a question really, is what do you think for you is the most appropriate chunk size of stored or prepared material for you to unleash?
On one hand it might be none – zero, if you’re the sort that plays live but it’s all generative or noodling or jamming or jazz
But imagine for a moment that you were doing actual music – eg a song
How much of that song would you want already prepared before you get the gig and trundle out on stage in front of your own devices
Do you want the entire song as a sequence? eg a midi sequencer with all the song on it as a song, intro verse chorus verse middle eight chorus chorus outdo then the sequence stops? All you do is press the play button and then fool around (or sing, or play guitar)? Like some kind of musician in a wine bar or restaurant on board a cruise?
Or do you want the song as small chunks like an intro sequence, then a verse sequence, then a chorus sequence, and it’s up to you to trigger them in time but it gives you the option of tormenting the audience by lengthening the song at will contrary to popular demand
Or do you want the song as separate sequences but for each part, like a bass seq, a lead seq, a fwipfwipfwipfwipfzaaaah seq, that sort of thing, so you can just trigger them at will and call that a song
Or do you want even more atomic sequences as snippets like riffs, motifs, one-or-two bar designs which can be transposed up and down at will
Or do you want it so atomic that you want to play a sequence that is basically one note long, and discrete per instrument, manually triggered by storing all those sequences in your head (I think that’s called knowing how to play an instrument, legend has it)
Or what?
Comments
I would say it’s probably at least in part based on your audience - how would they react to a performance where you seemingly only press an on and an off switch vs. crazy arms (and maybe legs).
To me it’s also a personal thing. I would prefer to be able to improvise, so would like to be able to change things up on the fly.
@u0421793 why are you asking?
I don't understand the assumption that playing structured music requires some parts to be pre-sequenced/recorded.
For a solo artist who wants to go beyond playing one instrument live, all the listed options can make sense.
I would try everything and start with whatever method feels the most fun.
If the artist has no fun then his audience might not, either.
I used to have this question / problem. I had a variable set of live band members and the need to be flexible with playback structure of the songs. I might have no bass player, or drummer, or keyboards, or any combination of those on any given Sunday. And I had a pastor who would signal things like "repeat that chorus", or jump up on stage and start "leading" things ad-hoc, or say things like "just the vocals and guitar now", or even "OK, slow it down for a bit now" ...
I could manage all that now with Loopy Pro but back then it was ... er ... challenging.
If I were setting up for that kind of situation now, I'd have each song set up as a grid of clips with each row a "scene" representing intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro, etc., and each column a "part" representing guitar, keyboard, bass, drums, etc.. Song parts could be launched as needed and individual parts muted as a whole when needed, or individually at any time. Tempo could be changed in increments or tapped in.
I have a basic Loopy Pro template that works just this way. Now that I don't need that anymore since several years. 😂
But if I was ever to perform again, that's just the way I'd do it.
That sounds like coming back to Gadget, where everything was originally composed in my case!
If Gadget were able to enable/disable just by pressing with a single tap on those oblongs containing the individual sequences, that’d make Gadget a much better live performance happener
Although you mention loopy pro I did buy that when it came out only to immediately find that it’s midi capabilities are basically input only to control it, and not emit midi passages, so I’m not really sure how I can fit that into a potential live performance
I’d have to treat it as a big bag of tape recorders which record the output of each synth line once only yo then repeat it forever with no change, which means I can’t twiddle with anything! But, for some parts that might not change, that’d be useful
But, I’d still have to have the essential midi driving thing to cause the synth to make a sound in the first place, Loopy Pro can’t do that as far as I can see
Looks like Gadget is 98% there, it’d need to be redesigned with a performing mode, so that the grid of sequences can be mute/unmuted at will by tapping on them (instead of having the sequence spring into an editing view) and have queuing for scenes so you can freely rearrange what’s going to happen next at any point and easily
I took a look at Sonic Pi for this reason, and it might have potential for breaking down songs into live performance formats, but I really don’t like the idea of having to type arbitrary and meaningless words, there’s far more chance of typing something that the computer doesn’t understand and it’ll never be able to figure out what I really meant (because programming has about the worst UX you can find)
Apologies for the humorous aside, but when I read the title of this thread my brain immediately completed the song lyric:
"....baby don't hurt me"
…and I raise you one KLF
What Time is Love?
Okay, another way to think about this premise
How do eg Kraftwerk perform live? Four old geezers (well Griff’s the young ’un, and he’s in charge of stereo visuals with a bunch of BMD panels)
Do Kraftwerk turn up and press play? Clearly no. How much is ‘stored’ and how much isn’t? It’s certainly not all played live in the musician sense (although Ralf does, but he’s weird)
When I played with my dream pop band, we had all of our drum machine tracks sequenced, and played live to that. A bassist, myself on guitar, a keyboardist, and a singer. I launched the parts on Ableton live and we played along. We’d have the entire set list in a project and play amorphous loops in between while tuning
that’s interesting, so the set was a defined length (well, the songs, not the bits in between) – that, I imagine, is quite handy
At one of the most enjoyable shows I’ve ever been to, the opener set his laptop on an ironing board and clicked around with his trackpad to trigger loops. Buddy didn’t even have a MIDI controller! After his set, Do Make Say Think took the stage; I believe they were touring as a ten-piece at the time and the stage was absolutely packed with gear; they obviously all had “main instruments” but every member switched instruments multiple times. They used loop pedals in some parts but as far as I can tell, nothing was prepared in advance; they also improvised heavily within their songs so even though I had heard the records a million times, the whole performance felt new.
I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed the opener as much as I enjoyed DMST — they’re easily my all-time favourite band whereas I can’t even remember the opener’s stage name — but I remember enjoying both performances immensely.
All of which to say, live is whatever size you want it to be!
I think, ultimately it’s important to be authentic and keep the nerves in check. The sole stress of worrying that people would leave en masse or don’t respond may affect your performance to the point of your music getting worse and people leaving because of that.
The relationship with the audience is a feedback loop.
On the subject of audience engagement. I think it is important to have stuff actually happening on stage vs a guy in front of a computer. I’m not saying dancers or flame throwers but perhaps a live drummer or People going nuts to your music, that we imagine when we daydream playing crowded and sweaty clubs, isn’t a reality for most of us.
Having said all that, in terms of unleashing material, the stage craft is a science in itself. If you have a charismatic person as a frontman you may not need a lot because, to a point, they will hold it if they’re skilled enough. > @u0421793 said:
If you like Gadget then Drambo’s clip arranger is very close at this point in time. It actually came up in beta discussion quite a few times.
Once you’ve built a few synth and drum patches you have a Gadget on steroids with all midi connectivity you like.
Loopy Pro is a completely different app from Gadget as it really only works with audio and if you want midi sequencing you’ll need to use other apps like errrr Drambo?? 😝
I hate to mention it because I never use GarageBand Ince I just can't get over my dislike of its UI. However, GarageBand's clip launcher is superb and includes both audio and MIDI.
Zenbeats is worth checking out. Its clip launcher does a lot of what I think you want it to do. It doesn't have the ability to, say, tell a clip to repeat three times and then do something else. You have to stay on top of things and launch and stop clips within some configurable range of bars / beats. I'd have to do a lot more testing with it before I'd trust it to be stable enough in a live environment. Not that it's not stable, I just haven't used it enough to know if it's stable enough.
LK has some of the "follow actions" that you need, but is midi only. You'd have to marry it with some kind of sample player for audio clips. Can get complicated. And complicated scares me in a live environment.
Loopy Pro should have midi looping in the not too distant future.
Drambo could work. After Loopy Pro and Zenbeats, that'd be the next one I'd look into.
I'm still of the feeling that relying on an iPad and a bunch of AUv3's being driven by midi is too risky for live. There's a lot to be said for sacrificing some flexibility for just having mostly audio loops to deal with.
I’ve never used audio loops or samples
I’m far more at home with midi, I just need to dice it up in ways I can use, like lots of little midi playout sequencers
I didn’t really like the experiments with my QY700, if that were the central conductor of synths live, it’d result in fairly rigid song structure that isn’t easy to change on the fly
I suspect what I’d need is defined verses, choruses, etc but the bits between the verses/choruses, or at least the endings of verses/choruses need to be extendable and variable (and of course the middle eight would be where the …oh wait, I’m not a 70s prog rock group)
A lot of my songs are very tightly packed into verse chorus, but a lot of them have spare gap sections, or have loose endings of verse/chorus, so I think I might get lucky with those ones by breaking the verse or chorus midi playout (whichever method is chosen in the end) into further (eg 4 bar) sections some of which could be repeated for a few years, I mean minutes.
I try to do a bit of everything> @u0421793 said:
Drambo. It’s really the first thing on iOS I have been able to rely on for live use that doesn’t ever have the wheels fall off. I still have PTSD from the days of IAA and blasting a crowd of people with the classic app crash brrrrrrrr.
I’d probably guess at 50% automated maybe more if robots and video graphics are included, this was around the time they used racks of Akai samplers.