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.
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I hear you - Studio One is my DAW and it can be a great feature, although I often have overlap between sections which makes chopping up into convenient sections difficult. My personal number one request would be for Cubasis to be able to save track templates, which again I would not think is too hard to implement.
What a good question and timing! I wanted to ask the same thing when someone already recommended a few things to me. I was using Cubasis 3 and thought it was too linear. BeatMaker 3 is pretty awesome and it has a similar recording thing to the pattern/scene recording of Ableton Live. I really like it even though I am still getting used to it.
The thing that blew my mind was Drambo. I didn’t know it was so multi/macOS universal and so useful. It first came out as a modular groove box, but at this point I see it more like a mini DAW more like BeatMaker 3. Invest in a midi controller, like a 25 key at least I think, to take advantage of midi and AUv3. Both are easy and quick to get ideas down, and transform them into just great jams or full songs.
I dont know how attached you are to Cubasis, but I recommend Drambo #1. I think it’s the most unique and revolutionary app I was able to glean in a few months of use age/research. BeatMaker 3 is cool as its somewhere in between Drambo and Cubasis. It has a focus on AU, sampling, and has capabilities for audio and midi, linear and pattern/scene. Someone told me beatmaker 3 does somethings really well, somethings other DAW can’t, and I am not versed enough to recount what those features are but they must be good for them to make it unique. So something that might help your workflow perhaps?
Cubasis is very much like studio one to me in terms of linearity. It’s a good transition, and even more so, probably Cubase. But Im not sure how attached you are to any one DAW. [One thing I know is Auria Pro is absolutely, definitely a waste and I can’t believe that it’s still up in the store at this point at $50] so Cubasis is the best choice for the most complete and powerful DAW as of yet from what I’ve seen. I really would think Cubasis can do almost anything the rest can do, but here’s one thing to think about. Drambo is also an AUv3 so you can use it as a host/midi song creator and mini sampler with a groove box, or you can use it within Cubasis if you are in need of any effects or synths. I sound like an ad for Drambo, but it totally made me change my outlook on iOS, my new iPad, and what I could do with this digital workflow.
Beat hawk was recommended to me by a very credible source, and I trust what he says implicitly as he guided me with Drambo very patiently. I dont have beathawk, but the sounds and songs he showed me on it were as interesting as anything I’ve heard on Kong Gadget. The last two things I would add is I dont know about nanostudio 2 but it used to be popular. I think Drambo or beatmaker would be better anyway.
I knew this would end up sounding like a rundown of apps, but that’s where/how I started. After I found a good DAW fit, I was able to worry about things like AUv3. I have only about 10 recommendations as my iPad is very sparse with those, but the ones I have, I love! They made working with midi/controllers in iOS very easy and interesting combined with Drambo and BM3.
Finally, there is a new or updated DAW that is a recent post that Im not familiar with but people look very excited about. (Audio evolution mobile studio).
Edit - BTW in regards to your acoustic/electronic drum quandary. Simple solution not many have heard of = EG PULSE. It is the best drum machine, sampler, and built in multi kit analog/synth/acoustic all in one AUv3 solution. If you need the best AUv3 for drums, please check out EG Pulse, I think you’ll love it. I do. After buying 5+ drum apps, that’s what I ended up with.
Hello Bill,
I am a linear traditional songwriter.
I do all my midi sequencing in Cubasis (drums, bass, keys), my recording of guitar is usually done in Cubasis but sometimes in Auria Pro. Thanks to @richardyot for steering my in that direction many years ago.
I then export the stems and do the mixing and mastering (or my impression of it) in Auria.
In Cubasis you can buy Waves Tune real-time. It is not quite Melodyne but still helpful.
All their amps are great and worth it to buy. They have regular massive sale.
I would advice you to look into cab IR , if you are serious about your guitar tone.
IK Sampletron, Korg module and Beathawk strings might be worth a look.
For drums I use Cubasis own, Allan Morgan midi drum beat to trigger Beathawk accoustic drums. Their is 128 midi pattern in the midi drum beats and fills. You can audition the too before using.
I am not sure why this option is not used or talked much about. One of the best alternative to Superior drummer on iOS.
I have not released much music but here is my only tune I released a couple year ago. All iOS. Traditional structure but I had no acces to a singer then.
Yes, that is true, I didn't realize this myself. I was busy making Lumbeat work in Cubasis, but there are lots of drum midi files in Cubasis already, sorted out in A/B versions, intro, fill, etc. Like Easydrummer on PC.
I too send the midi to Beathawk or Audiolayer for a proper drum sound.
With the Lumbeat apps you can export the midi data. What I do is exporting one basic drum rhythm midi file, and then the same but more exciting. That is easy to do with the slider on the front screen. So this way I have an A and B version of a groove.
@ecou interesting about the Allan Morgan drums in that I didn’t appreciate you could audition these in the browser with Beathawk. I wish this was the case for my own midi drum files, because whilst the AM ones are good, there aren’t many of them and what there is isn’t organised properly.
A great way to audition ANY General MIDI drum loop is to use 4Pockets DigiStix 2, with 4Pockets Helium inserted as a MIDI effect.
I’ve been down every rabbit hole known to man with desktop amp sims and IRs and spent a small fortune, but in all honesty I was shocked how great the free Nembrini apps are.
The Waves Tune IAP is indeed worth having.
Hey @BillS maybe I didn’t show it well/clearly but EG pulse offers the most, and best drum kits I have tried. I know only Digistix 2offers both acoustic and electronic ($8.99 today) , so maybe look into Pulse?
@fearandloathing I’ve had EG Pulse for a few years. I never really got along with it to be honest, kind of gave up, but I know it’s got great features like multi-output. I’d be interested to hear how others use it, especially for acoustic drums. I struggle a bit with composing drum patterns from scratch.
I have said it a few times before on this forum, I don't want to nag about it, but for me a wonderful tool is Band in a Box (I have windows version 2022). You can program a whole song with intro, verse/chorus, outro with the chords you enter in a certain style, and it has a lot of styles. When the song is finished, you can export audio and midi. The audio is pretty good when you use the realtracks.
So what you could do, is program the structure of your song, or parts of a song, or just the skeleton, and export midi and/or audio drum (and maybe bass guitar) and use this element in Cubasis on the Ipad.
Off-course, in the ideal world, you want to do all this on the Ipad itself. Take a look at the session band apps, you can use this too to build drum tracks.
And to finish this, I have the Digitech Trio+ pedal, I teach the pedal my chord sequence, and the pedal generates a drum & bass track in audio. You can record this and use it in Cubasis. The thing is, the pedal uses Band in Box software, so for more control over the result, you get Band in Box.
Program an acoustic drum track myself, I am not good at that, I cannot drum myself, and think like a drummer. Program a 4 to the floor banger is completely something else.
And, I once read in an interview with the singer/guitar player of War on Drugs, for him the drum has to be simple, and steady, like Bruce Springsteen songs. Just a basic rhythm, nothing fancy, like a clock.
I like to create all my own beats from scratch, it gives the most control over the dynamics and feel of the song IMO. It's not really that hard.
Pretty much all of rock music is based on a backbeat (kick on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4), and there aren't that many variations of that basic beat. You can add a kick somewhere, an extra snare hit somewhere, but overall the permutations are limited.
Then you have hi-hat grooves, which are much more varied, and often rely on feel, but it's actually really good fun to create your own: tap them out on pads and try to create a groove. With MIDI it's very forgiving and you can easily quantize when necessary.
Fills can be played on pads as overdubs, again it's really easy and forgiving with MIDI. I use the pads in NS2 (with velocity mapped on the Y axis) and you can create really organic drums that way, while still being able to fix your timing mistakes.
The benefit of doing this yourself is the amount of control you have with the dynamics of the song. Drums provide a lot of the energy and excitement in a track, and it's really worthwhile being able to control every aspect of that.
Just to give a concrete example, this track is a good example of how I approach drums: shifting from the hi-hats in the intro, to the toms in the verse, and finally the ride cymbal in the chorus, in order to create dynamics with these contrasts between all the different sections of the song, and the fills that build up to the changes are an essential part of this:
Of course you can get similar results with canned beats, but it's really satisfying and fun to create the drums yourself.
@richardyot Awesome share dude. Great tips+example;
please remember I’m sort of a noob when I ask this, but I’m sort of familiar with Cubasis and Drambo , and only slightly Bm3, I don’t have the others , but where is the Y Axis in Drambo if you use that? Or is it on your MIDI controller ?
Also, how do you write fills ? Can you give a basic example, nothing fancy,IF you happen to have an example by chance
So the way I do is by using the Slate instrument in Nanostudio 2, but you could do exactly the same thing in BM3. I use the pads to perform the beat, in passes. So in the first pass I tap out the kick and snare rhythm, then in another pass I might do the hi-hats.
Originally I was doing this with an AKAI controller with MPC-style pads, but nowadays I just do it straight onto the screen. The Y axis control allows you to set the velocity depending on how high up the pad you hit, NS2 can do that, but so can BM3 and Xequence.
For the fills I just tap them out on top of the existing beat, that way you can create organic fills that have actually been performed, albeit on a touchscreen rather than a drumkit.
Thank you my friend
Have a look again. It is very well organized.
I used exclusively the “traditional linear” songwriting until I switched to the iPad (same reasons outlined by many, to get away from my “day job” tool). On the iPad I found Zenbeats and then Loopy Pro. Clip or loop composing is so much more fun and liberating.
While doing loops you free yourself from the “structure” mindset, you leave the arranging for later. What you thought was an intro might end up being a middle-eight, or whatever.
I’m not a “droner” I do like song structures, with changes and parts. So if doing the clip thing you need to have an eye on the goal which is a song with parts.
Some random preferences when working on loop mode, when the goal is a “traditional” song:
Now for some downsides of clip or loop composition:
Tools?.
Loopy Pro is a beatiful monster. It’s sexy, it’s inviting, makes you want to play.
As for the best tool to switch from clip to linear, my pick is Zenbeats. You have both work methods on the same DAW at a click of a button. No export/import, no loosing your effect chains…. It’s also got some features that I can’t do without. For example looping a part on the timeline. Surprisingly in Cubasis you can’t loop a part on the timeline, you have to copy and paste vs drag and extend… I find that terribly annoying.
Sorry for a terribly long post, wasn’t my intention… I’ll fix it at mastering 😂
Wooooowwwww!. Absolutely love this! 🤟🤟🤟🤟❤️❤️❤️❤️🤟🤟🤟
I like everything about it. At some point I’ll beg for a duet. Blown away.
@tahiche one issue with loops and vocals is that vocals often start before the first beat of the bar, so you can’t really have that feel in a loop-based workflow because there’s no way to have anything before the one.
Wow thanks so much! People here on this forum are awfully kind. 😀 I’m always up for duets!
That’s why I’ve never been able to use a Song Arranger feature that some DAWs have - whereby you chop up songs into sections (intro, verses, chorus, break, outdo etc) and easily rearrange them.
Loopy Pro has that feature where you can record before the actual loop. But tbh that feature and the one where the loop keeps playing until the end can be confusing. Goes in line with one of the downsides of working with loops I mentioned. If it’s really about making a SONG, there’s probably nothing better than picking up an instrument and playing the whole thing while singing on top. But it’s not as fun, is it?.
It’s amazing how spoiled we are with all the possibilities today. I have a Tascam12 mixer which has a track recorder integrated. I would have given a kidney for something like this back then. I find I never use it to record, the iPad is so much easier. With the mixer you sort of have to play the whole song through and nowadays I don’t even know where the song is going to end up, it’s like putting together a puzzle.
Yes I always chop stuff up and move it around in the DAW, even in a linear timeline. You never know how long a section needs to be until you have the melody and lyrics anyway, and I'm always editing the arrangements to cut out the fat.
I have dabbled with both Loopy and GarageBand's clip launcher, but to be honest it's easy enough to move stuff around as needed in any DAW. Clip launchers let you experiment on the fly though, so they can be good for testing different arrangement ideas.
As @tahiche pointed out, loopy pro has a nice feature where it can capture audio before and after the loop. If you trigger such a loop ‘early’, loopy will play the lead-in before the first loop cycle and can play an outro when that loop finishes looping.
I’ll give a totally digital example
https://ufile.io/6jf6yr1e
Enjoy it
Just a thought, but in Cubasis or with a recorder, you can record parts of your song, with gaps between, until you have collected enough material to construct a whole song. There is a difference between song writing, and constructing or producing a whole track. On a recorder you can also make new recording files for verse, chorus, bridge, etc.
And about looping in Cubasis, there is a loop section, but as far as I know you have to slide the left and right markers from a previous position. That is annoying, when these markers are elsewhere in your track. Double tapping would be better for this. And maybe there is some kind of key command for this? I have not checked yet.
edit: I found this topic https://forums.steinberg.net/t/cubasis-3-marker-track/143403/21
and the advice is, create on an empty midi track, empty midi parts, and color them, for verse, chorus, etc.
And when you long press such a block, the loop markers are set for this section. I have to test this myself, it could be something useful.
That’s not what I meant. I was talking about looping a specific section. Here’s a screenshot of Zenbeats. You can just drag a loop to extend it on the timeline. Works like Logic Pro or other daws, you’re not creating a copy like in Cubasis… obvious advantages: a lot faster and easier to manage than copy/paste a bunch of times and if you make a change it does so for the whole duration. To me this is basic, I have trouble understanding why it wouldn’t be implemented in a daw.
Above screenshot is the same loop, copy/paste on first track and loop on the second.
Aha, now I see, I know from my old Logic 5.5 days on PC, there was an option for ghost copy a bar. That would be useful indeed. If you adjust something in the first bar, it is adjusted in all the cloned bars.
I started this thread last month when I was restricted to only using an iPad and ‘illustrated’ what I was able to do as a trad songwriter with my song Vivid Dimensions:
I have been back home for a week or so now and have rerecorded the song in my studio:
Overall, I think the new version is much better, but that’s not to say that with practice, I couldn’t get better at just using my iPad.
A few observations:
• The vocals – I didn’t have a treated room to record my voice and I really think you can hear the difference that a proper recording space can make. The same mic was used for both versions (Aston Origin). I also know this new song more now, and I felt able to give a more confident performance. I had access to Melodyne, but didn’t use it on either version – I think being away from Melodyne has actually been good for me!
• Drums – I basically used the same MIDI but replaced Digistix with EZ Drummer 3. Also took a lot more care in editing the drums to fine tune it. Big improvement I think.
• Replaced Cubasis’s internal Microsonic ‘Vintage Strings’ with a combination of a real string library and Synthmaster – to be honest, I wish I had more expertise in programming real string parts, and the difference between the two versions in this respect is quite small I think.
• Replaced Beathawk bass with Spectrasonics Trilian – I think there is an improvement, but Beathawk stood up pretty well none the less.
• Mixed in an acoustically treated room on iLoud Micro Monitor speakers as opposed to headphones – believe me, the room really helps.
• Used Izotope Ozone to master rather than Cubasis inhouse plugins. Again, it was much easier to make judgement calls in a treated room.