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 good old fashioned dark ambient drone: Witchcraft In A Nearby Town
‘No one thinks witchcraft - the real heavy stuff - happens in places like council estates. They’re wrong.” - the Witness.
As a cop, you have occasional encounters with the weird. Working in a rough inner city area of London in the 1990s I had several personal proofs of this.
I will never forget the ghost-white naked girl with long black hair, straight out of a Japanese horror movie, sitting in the dark, alone on a junkies mattress in an abandoned, burned out flat, surrounded by a semi circle of smashed, foot long dagger shards of mirror, rocking, and cutting herself, screaming about blood and demons in the wavering beam of my Maglite. The old lady who showed us the bedroom where “the monster was”. The kids who told us about a secret room in their perfectly ordinary house where they were taken to be abused by people dressed as animals. I thought it was nonsense. Until we found the room, hidden behind a wardrobe. And the costumes. And the sex toys.
A friend of mine, attached to the Area Major Investigation Team looking into the human-sacrifice ‘muti’ murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_for_body_parts of a young boy, whose torso - only his torso - was found floating in the Thames (the magic is stronger the more the victim suffers before death, you see), told me about the interview he conducted in a prison cell with an informant in the case, a man who said he could transform into a crow and fly through the bars at his window any time he wanted to…
…And so on.
In at least some, very dark senses, witchcraft, and what it makes people do, is definitely real. And yes, it happens even on inner city council estates. Maybe, when it comes to the deepest, darkest magic, particularly there, feeding on vulnerability, poverty, an abundance of forgotten places. Bad things can happen in the darkness of an undercroft, in trashed garages, graffitied machinery rooms, on rooftops, in enclosed, windowless stairwells, remote high walkways, piss-stinking, coffin-like steel lifts… One estate I patrolled had a yellow line painted on the ground, from the North entrance to the South, over a kilometre away. Its purpose? This was the designated ‘safe route’ through the estate. Which meant that when, not if, you were attacked, the Council CCTV control room would at least have recorded for posterity the pointless, evidentially worthless images of the identically masked and hoodied kids that did it to you.
Probably just as well that most of the estates I policed back then are gone now, demolished, as if the weight of the sins they - enabled - eventually became too much to bear, bore them to earth. I’m under no illusion that the crimes they harboured went with them. But at least they aren’t my problems, my nightmares, any more.
…So anyway, I felt like I needed a palette cleanser after putting together an album of my recent Norse experiments (watch this space for further details of that one, pop pickers). And made a piece of good old relaxing dark ambient drone. A darkness I can control.
The Kings of Digital, FM and Bass all get a look in, as does Lines, cUsnP, Band Delay, and the usual reverbs. Multiple AUM File Player loops of same, live mixed as per usual.
Enjoy! 
Comments
Yes, that’s definitely the darkness of an estate with broken lighting and fear behind every curtain. It really does remind me of the feeling of being there at night, especially on my own.
I never lived on one but I visited enough of them. The worst ones were the low-rise ‘rabbit warren’ ones rather than the high-rise, as every few steps meant turning a corner and not knowing what was behind it.
Friends and acquaintances grew up on them, and for the most part either became inured to any kind of violent behavior or lived in fear of the dark (actual and metaphorical) for all their lives.
Outside was dark, broken and uncaring. Inside wasn’t much better, and in some cases worse because it was out of sight of prying eyes. I did have some great times with friends in some of these places, but it always felt like it was ephemeral, and the curtain could be drawn back at any moment and there was no knowing what would be revealed.
I envy how productive you and some others on the forum are. I’m still toiling away at a big project that I hope to release this month so that I can properly move on and start releasing more often. I get stuck in the “should I upload or not? Is it good enough or not” loop.
Great track btw!
@HotStrange : Thank you! I enjoy the whole thing, from the noodling, to the completion, to thinking up evocative titles and then messing with AI and art programs to create an image for the thing. Hey - I’m retired. What else am I gonna do - golf?
I do feel your pain though - and am excited to hear your thing when it drops. I too spent years - decades, actually - in ‘analysis paralysis’ mode (along with ‘all the gear, no idea’.), making precisely nothing but the dreaded four bar loop with all the expensively acquired hardware I owned at various times.
As I’ve mentioned before, discovering Dark Ambient as a genre liberated me, as I realised I could enjoy listening to and even making, noises that definitely weren’t ’a well made song’, with verse, chorus, middle 8 and all that. Or even, by some definitions, music at all!
From that realisation it was a short step to another, that I could noodle with a piece until it sounded right enough to me … and then stop, upload it, and move on. The world would not fall if it was crap, and as Stalin observed ‘quantity has a quality of its own’ - at least in the sense that after a period of time, ah, ‘maturing’ on SoundCloud, the number of plays each track racked up would give me some objective idea of what was working and what wasn’t. Though since in truth I make only for myself, this is interesting data rather than a plan for action. External validation means a lot to me, of course - especially from this forum of peers - but I’d probably do this regardless. Scratch that. I definitely would.
I could also definitely make some of my pieces better than they are if I took the time to port over all the individual stems to Ableton or Bitwig, and toil over mixes and eqs like a proper producer. I even did this a few times. But every time I did, I found that process a total buzz kill, and, to be honest, the finished pieces didn’t sound significantly better to me than the ones I dashed off ‘live’, so to speak.
There was an interim period when I tried marshalling everything into iPad DAWs, but again, buzzkill for low returns.
Once I figured out the AUM/AudioShare two step - just bussing everything to a final AUM channel , taking that out to AudioShare, and letting the recording run, across multiple takes if necessary, going back in via AudioShare or maybe Wavebox (which does great seamless edits) after the fact - things got fast.
I now feel virtually no friction between building and noodling a thing out, and capturing the result when it pleases me. I have a similar process via the Expert Sleepers ES8 direct into my IPad Pro for modular input into AUM. Just one USB C to C cable and I’m good to go. I have no idea if this actually makes the work ‘better’, whatever that means, but it sure as hell makes it faster.
Yeah - AUM automation would totally complete the picture, because then I could go back and ‘fix it in the mix’ for those tracks which would benefit from that without all the buzzkill of hooking up tracks to an external DAW yadda yadda yadda. Still, for now, we are where we are, so…
…Post and be damned would be my watchword.
@michael_m : Yes, exactly. The corners…! My patch in South London had both kinds of estate, high and low rise, each replete with many, many corners. And in both, the gangs purposely trashed the estate signage so as a rookie cop patrolling alone, I would frantically be paging through my little DIY handbook of estate maps, mindful of our sergeant’s advice ‘always be able to transmit where you are, lad. So we can get to you if it goes bad.’
And it did, sometimes. One of my estates was the one where an innocent young boy, Damilola Taylor, was stabbed to death, bleeding out on one of those dark, enclosed, stairwells. His youth, his innocence, meant his death made national news. The daily non-lethal knifings, shootings, drug-debt torture kidnaps, and yes, the other many, many murders? Not so much.
They used to film episodes of the UK cop show The Bill on one of the estates. We used to joke that you knew it was fiction because when they had a foot chase, they actually caught the suspect. In reality, the kid (it was usually a kid, more dangerous than adults, because they were just as armed, but lacked an adult sense of consequences) would spring into an alley, turn a corner, or on one particularly notorious estate, ascend or descend a single floor in a stairwell to be presented with up to 5 different escape routes on each landing - and be gone. A savage ghost absorbed again into the omnipresent darkness of those endless identikit hallways with their shattered lighting. An urban myth attached to that estate had it that once the architect who designed saw what they had done, they killed themselves. Nice story, but the estate already had ghosts enough.
“Chasing suspects” “Where are you?” - the static filling the long silence following as I realise: I have no idea where I am at all. And there’s not one suspect. There’s five. And they aren’t running now. They are closing. On me.
Absolutely love this and am fascinated by the Idea. I always wanted to write a story about black magic in a housing estate. I love folk horror and it feels like a modernisation of it.
I was really affected by The movies Candyman and Prince of Darkness and the recent Changeling series and think this is a vein that could be fruitful in the future!
Check out low budget Brit horror His House. It's not an all-time great but it's got the grimey, dilapidated social housing, horror in daylight thing going on. Creepy.
Nice track Svetlovska. Bleak!
@Svetlovska thanks for that. I’m working towards that myself. Just releasing things out into the ether and letting whatever happens…happen.
My music is much the same. The project I’m working on is split into halves. One is more dark ambient/drone/noise influenced and the other is influenced more by groups like the Residents and Throbbing Gristle. I’m excited to put it out there. I think things are mostly done. I just gotta make sure none of the levels are horribly off.
I would still say your pieces are well within the realm of “well written songs”. You’re inspiring, really!
This forum has been really inspiring for me as far as releasing things and being more active. I do it mostly for fun, so I just need to start getting my music out there and letting the pieces fall where they may.
You really should write a movie Svetlovska! Or a podcast or something
Yes That was something that really intrigued me, but in the end I felt it didn't live up to t's promise... Shame, but still very grimey
It was mostly kids on the ones that I got to know. I know exactly what stairwells you are talking about, and I got the advice to always talk going up or down them so that anyone knows you’re a younger adult male, and always take the corners wide.
Even when the lights had cages put around them after repeatedly being smashed, kids would use metal poles to slide into holes in the cage and smash the lights to keep it dark enough for their purposes. When they were replaced with bulkhead type lights with tough glass they would just take a screwdriver to the screws holding them so they could smash the bulb inside.
The funny thing about some of them was that the weed dealers self-policed kids on the estate to keep the drug squad there, as they would turn a blind eye to the weed in order to get help keeping heroin off the estate. Heroin on an estate always seemed to make it a hundred times worse than one without.
Smack heads were always some of the worst anywhere though. They wouldn’t even wait until dark, and would pull a weapon on anyone, anywhere to get money or steal something they could sell, even their immediate neighbors. Police would rarely be able to do anything as there were no witnesses and stolen goods had already been sold.
Suitably grim. Even just reading your back story gives me the heebeegeebees (and no, not the ones who did the Bee Gees parody!). Am looking forward to the Norse inspired album a lot!
@HotStrange I’m likewise looking forward to your album. I’ve been on the brink of “mastering” (really just level matching, TBH) a bunch of stuff from my backlog for months and putting it out somehow, so I relate on that one.
It can be really hard to sit down and do all the tedious stuff. Especially with my ADHD riddled brain. But I’m gonna try to force myself to finish it this weekend. It’s so close so I need to just do it. There’s gonna be 3 projects and im gonna release 1 every 2 weeks probably. I’m happy with it but more than anything im ready to let go of them so I can move on lol
I think your words got to me more than the music on this one.
I do totally agree with your philosophy on producing music… life’s too short to over produce things… if your happy go for it… Post and be dammed indeed !