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.
Serum Synth like App for iPad
I recently discovered Xfer’s Serum wavetable synth on desktop and am quite struck by it. There is a reason why so many EDM producers use it.
Now that Logic is moving closer I’d like to have an alternative on my iPad that comes as close to Serum as possible.
Is there anyone familiar with Serum that uses wavetable synth on iPad?
What’s your recommendation? What comes closest?
Comments
I don’t personally own it but you’ll probably hear “BUTTERSYNTH!!!” a lot when asking this question. 😁
Thanks I see that @jakoB_haQ made a video about it recently:
Great stuff!
I don't own Serum and have only seen videos of it, but it seems like Logic's Alchemy covers some of the same ground? I think I even heard that Alchemy can import Serum wavetables.
Oops 😬
Yes Alchemy is cool. I know it from desktop. But I doubt that it will be very deep in Logic for iPad.
Yep Buttersynth looks amazing. Pretty much what I was looking for
Wrong, Alchemy in Logic Pro for iPad will be the same as on Mac…
Haha I like you 😄 keep your optimism up
I think @ErrkaPetti is probably right. Alchemy in GarageBand can play patches from full alchemy so I think the bit that’s missing is UI elements. It is their flagship synth, so providing the full interface will be an important way for Apple to demonstrate that Logic Pro on iPad is a serious tool.
Is this true in the iOS version of GarageBand?
You also might like Vital synth on desktop.
It all comes down to what is behind the dots.
For me personally the closest thing to Serum is either BLEASS Megalit or Terra Pro with the Module Waves iap. The only con with Megalit is that you can’t import your own wavetables. If you could do that and import wavetables from Serum that would be really be Megalit lol. Terra Pro isn’t exclusively a wavetable synth, it has other types of oscillators but once you buy the Module Waves iap you can use it as a wavetable synth and import your own wave files into it. But I REALLY wish Megalit would allow us to import wavetables and or wave files into it.
To be clear, I’ve never tried to export a patch from Logic and open it in GarageBand, but they have a common set of stock patches.
The iOS version has fewer options. In the desktop version patch management and the level of control over sounds gives the player much greater control.
Since I’ve been testing Logic Pro on macOS, I’ve been able to use a surprising number of Logic plugins and patches in GarageBand. I’m not going to list them all, but if anyone here has a Mac, I urge you to try both GB and LP and compare them.
Even more so than Buttersynth? How is Megalit? I love Bleass’s apps but I have all the other “big” synths so wasn’t sure if I needed it immediately. I definitely wanna pick it up some day soon though.
I haven't seen a wavetable editor that comes close to what Serum offers but for the synth part, Drambo has been an excellent WT synth for me. It does import Serum wavetables of course and a number of good factory wavetables are included.
If you plan to use presets from Serum, you might need the desktop version of Serum anyway, at least for presets with embedded wavetables which can only be exported with Serum natively.
I haven’t bought Buttersynth, I’m only speaking on the ones I have, I might grab it at some point but atm I have sooooooo many IPad synths it would be criminal to buy another one lol
I would say ButterSynth wave editor comes most close to it from all iOS synths .. Actually BS is worth to buy just for that wave editor on it's own ... Of course - it has a bit features - but crucial ones are there, you can create pretty powerful wavetables innit .. and also supports Serum wavetables ..
Thing is, thanks to Butter i deleted vast majority of synths and keeping on my iPad just very few of them (and even those mostly just becasue i like UI, not that i can't get sounds for what i use them from BS
)
Megalit has awful ugly digital aliasing noise on oscillators when played on higher octaves and much less modulation capabilities than BS .. like it is not completely bad synth, you can get some nice sounds from it, but why use something which is not clear winner in it's class ? :-)
I absolutely love Alpha and Omega. 2 of my favorite synths. But yes after Buttersynth (and Tera Pro, Twin3, etc) I just feel like I don’t NEED it. Maybe if/when it goes on sale…
I say that every time and then I buy it anyway lol
What sounds great and what sounds ugly is subjective though. I’m not really focused on “best in class” because different synths bring different things to the table
Forget what i said.. it’s weird.. wanted to record example but now everything sounds ok .. it’s really strange, i remember i was shocked how bad megalit and omega oscillators were sounding on higher octaves but now all sounds ok .. really strange
This is not inherently true. Most of the best-in-class analog emulations use wavetables (usually single-cycle) rather than calculate them. There are two reasons: analog oscillators don’t create mathematically precise wave shapes. The character of various hardware analog synths is partly due to particular wave shape. You can find demos of Buchla and Moog synths run through an oscilloscope with no filtering to see this.
It is also computationally more efficient to use pre-calculated single-cycle waveshaps rather than to generate the same wave shape on the fly. The latter is less of an issue now than it was when processors were slower,
True. Vas majoriry synths use internaly wavetables, even through they pretend to be “virtual analog”. They just differ in sample rate used for creating such wavetables (obviously higher is better, industry standard is using 192 khz waveforms). Also using oversampling helps a lot to solve biggest problem of wavetable based oscillators which is aliasing noise noticeable when too high notes are played
Example of synths which are not using wavetables but math are older models of Roland Boutique synths which are based on ACB technology (not thise based on Zend Core) - those are actually emulated down to analog components - so they even do not calculate direcly waves with math sin/cos/.. etc function but they rather emulare resistors, transistors, capcitors and other compinentd in original analog synths circuits :-)