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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Good point, I got the same feeling. Straying a little ways afield here, but modern CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is something that can help with this. And you can try it on your own, no need for a therapist. I really like the work of Albert Ellis, one of the pioneers of CBT back in 1960's and onward. CBT has a lot of similarities with and was partly inspired by the ancient philosophy of Stoicism (which I know Wim also has an interest in).
Anyone interested could take a look at one of the classic books by Albert Ellis, e.g., "How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything-yes, Anything!" https://www.amazon.com/Stubbornly-Yourself-Miserable-Anything-yes-Anything-ebook/dp/B008FQJOG2/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1703995120&sr=8-4 David Burns well known "Feeling Good" book is a newer book with similar CBT thinking.
Ellis was an interesting guy, cantankerous and sometimes rude, but devoted to developing his psychology of how to help people think healthy thoughts. One of his primary points is that our thinking affects what emotions we feel, and that we have the ability to change our thoughts in a way that can make our lives happier. Lots of material out there, here's one old school video I find amusing:
@wim Thank you very much. I’m glad you’re doing well in the fight against learned guilt. I go through waves. Lately the guilt has been winning. But I have hope for myself.
I really appreciate what you wrote, thank you
Now you can move on to feeling guilty about whenever you feel guilty. 😂
(I've actually caught myself doing that!)
Oh believe me I am well familiar with options paralysis. Stuck me in a couple creative blocks. It's one of a billion reasons I bought the OP-1 Field, rofl!
When I got my 1TB iPhone 14 Pro Max, it was to be able to store the contents of the three romplers I use the most often as well as the sample packs I use the most often. The other apps I installed were the ones I use the most often. I still had options paralysis.
Then Koala got its buss mixer, and at first I was cool since Koala is a more limited workflow. Then options paralysis set in again. Vicious cycle. 🤣
But one way to break options paralysis is to either use a deck of cards (playing cards, tarot cards, whatevs), and/or dice (regular dice, DnD dice). Make a game of it as it were.
Most importantly, have fun! Try not to get too hung up on all the options mate. 🍻
Haha oh I definitely have a lot of experience with meta feelings 😆
Very well said Wim.
Funny. Last night for the first time in my life I was exposed to what all those dice do in Dungeons and Dragons. I never had a clue about that game, but my son asked me to take a look at a self-generating dungeon system he designed for a survival game. You roll the dice and then look up values in tables for things like how many trees or weapons, etc. are in a section of the map. It’s all a lot more clever than I had thought.
So now I’m thinking one could set up a song template starter. Roll for how many instruments, roll to choose each one, roll for song sections, time signature, scale …
Exactly! Or also you could have ChatGPT pick out those parameters.
Thank you for your solidarity and advice everyone! @animalelder a journal is a fantastic idea! That’s my New Year’s resolution, @Slam_Cut i think that’s also a good idea, maybe I should go with the flow and just do some sound design without thinking of a particular rack, NoInputMixer is great for that I just fiddle. @wim youve hit the nail on the head, I grew up in a family in which my very Victorian-valued grandmother was incredibly judgemental, add to that my mum is a very lapsed catholic but who still had that guilt in her, alongside the disapproval from my gran for her ‘alternative’ lifestyle, she was a 60s hippy from a very conservative Italian family,I guess it was inevitable it was passed down to me. Catholic guilt is very real, as part of my general anxiety, guilt plays a massive part in it and obviously is manifested in a tiny way in my hobbies etc. Don’t wanna get too heavy, but this is definitely something I have to work on.
@HotStrange I think offloading a few won’t do any harm at all!
@Simon very true!
How do I go about doing that? Never tried it. Do I give it a list and ask it to pick? Or does it already know the options? I will probably (maybe…probably won’t remember lol) look into it on my own another time. But it sounds like it could quickly and easily relieve some decision fatigue.
Or use this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
Let me join this wonderful and mindless self-indulgence thread!
Since I started with iOS music making, after extensive research, I’ve made a list of 120 apps. They were sorted into groups with priority coloring. (orange=need, yellow=want, white=like to have) Today I have three times that amount, mostly because I wanted to have everything from my favorite developers and every other reverb, delay, chorus, and phaser in existance. 😅
Sixty of them are essential choices, everything else is situational.
I knew from the start that probably two-thirds of them would be unused and abandoned. But there is no option to escape purchase and personal experience, that's the only way I can build my unique workflow and reduce every possible obstacle in the way of creativity.
Now, about the “worrying” part.
I don’t worry about having many apps, I don’t worry that two-thirds of them are rarely used. But I’m worried about many of the apps in my workflow that are not yet there with the features I need most. My workflow looks like Frankenstein Junior at the moment.
I like it very much, it’s the best I can get on the platform, but there are so many bumps and holes that still need to be smoothed and patched out.
So no deep philosophy, sorry if it’s disappointing. It’s just about tools, after all. 🫣
Tools. Yes. I think that's an important thing to remember when we're faced with guilt around stuff (instead of people). Stuff is made FOR US. The tools we use are serving us, not the other way around. If you want to use them, collect them, abandon them, delete them... It's all in service to what you need for your creativity.
You're worth having the right tools for what you want to do. We all are. And we're damn lucky that people want to create things we can use and offer them at such a low price.
I am intending to reduce my installed apps collection.
I don’t think i suffer “option paralysis” due to to many apps but more a lack of objectivity… which I can’t blame on apps, but having lots installed doesn’t help.
I think playing with too many means I will not get the “muscle memory” of the user interface on more complicated synths fx daws (etc). When I had a few hardware synths, analogue and digital - i knew them like the back of my hand - so Im going to use less synth apps.
But i will still buy new apps. As an example… Dagger is fantastic and suits a lot of things i like doing, it’s replaced some older synth apps for me.
It can be inspiring to fire up an app you haven’t used in a while.
There is the issue that i can’t make a back up of my apps individually (a legal entitlement i believe).
I have too many apps installed due to a kind of FOLO… fear of losing out.
I do accept they aren’t too expensive and will be superseded.
Maybe objectivity is wrong and discipline is the problem… i could just write a list… “ok… these 5 synths.. these drum machines and this ten fx… make an E.P”.
I think my biggest problem is i like quite a few apps that are DAWs, which makes for over complicating things.
Thats why Koala is great… its about making a good tune.
When a songwriter writes a song… they just write a song, they often don’t “go into and use a studio” whilst doing that.
The way it is - the more apps you try to use, the more complicated your studio and creating is.
theres nothing wrong with enjoying that either. I like tech, i like new stuff, i like hearing peoples opinions and takes etc.
I guess the answer is dont try and use all of it all the time, cos you cant, theres not enough time.
At the end of the day, what we spend on any iOS app can be written off as "miscellaneous entertainment" expense. Seriously! we talk about "investing" in apps and carry around this guilt at not re-using them as though they were automobiles or expensive kitchen appliances or something. They're not. They cost no more than a coffee in most cases, or a pizza, movie, or cheap night out at worst. They don't clutter up our house, collect dust, cost anything to maintain, pollute, or end up in landfills.
If we buy an app, spend an evening or two playing with it, then never use it again, we got our "investment" out of it in entertainment and learning value a dozen times over compared to other expenses we don't give a second thought all the time.
Apps are consumables. Sometimes they end up becoming treasures. Most times they end up less so. But like that old CD you tossed in a bin somewhere and forgot about, you might just pull it out again some day and have another great few hours with it.
(I'm tryin' to help here! Pls don't be offended. 😂)
Now. I'm off to Starbucks to decide if I should invest in a Venti Mocha or if I'll feel guilty for not just getting a plain old medium roast. Or maybe I should wait for a sale. Does Starbucks have sales? Maybe I should rent a movie instead.
@wim not to be weird but I could listen to you all day long, man. Heavily agree lol
And my wife loves Starbucks, they do have sales…and also usually have a “buy one get one” happy hour every day in the late afternoon (at least in my city? I assume they operate the same all around the world)
Earlier this year I did a lot of composing with a dice as starting base of my songs.
I think this deserve it's own thread.
My solution for this is to just be really picky and specific about what my needs are, right now I am focused on about 9-10 apps that each provide me bountiful sounds that I want to use and explore, 6 on my Surface Pro. And 6 hardware instruments.
I find option paralysis significantly less of an issue on iPad than desktop, due to the production environments being far more simple and straightforward. It’s kind of a pain scrolling through dozens upon dozens of effect and generator AUV3s in Drambo, but I don’t spend much time trying to decide which to go with. I either pick one of my top 10 most used plugins, or often just pick something at random that I haven’t used in a while, just to keep it fresh and interesting.
For me the option might be to go with CB3 and produce a set of tracks using only what's available there, or NS2, or whatever. Or pick a handful of apps, put them in a folder, and just use that group for the project. Learn as much as possible about this small group of apps and see what the finished project is like.
Now that I've got myself settled in my new home, I'm going to do the above, and just use my Arturia Minilab MK III, headphones, and of course my iPad, and see how far I get.
One thing that really helped me was simply creating an apple note called “iOS music Stack“. My folder structure reflects the note. But, the main idea is to just create categories and list each of my apps in order of preference for each category.
This is especially handy with regards to the iPhone as some apps are iPad only. It just helps me commit to my favorite apps so I don’t have to think and choose every time. Also, set up AUM templates
I must admit that I’m a serial app purchaser and do feel guilty because many of the apps I buy are tried once or twice and then left in favour of my new purchase!
In some ways I blame the content creators on YouTube, demonstrating all the new sparkly apps and tempting me to spend my cash 😂 One of the YouTubers, Jade Starr, does regularly make a point that is well worth remembering and that is “apps aren’t like Pokémon……. You don’t need to collect them all” Very true. 🤣😂
I definitely have more apps than I can use, barely check out some before moving on to another. I don't generally feel guilty about it. If I compare the actual dollar amounts involved to other things I buy in my life, or to possible other hobbies, the dollar amounts don't seem high. For example, I've spent about $2k in the last year on music lessons. The amount I spent on music apps is a small fraction of that.
Also, most of the apps I buy are made by solo developers or small teams, who are devoted to what they do and who do their best to design and create apps that are innovative, cosmetically attractive, and easy and fun to use. I like that these guys do what they do; if they weren't selling apps I wouldn't be averse to throwing them a few bucks on Patreon. So I like to think of it more like that. Even if I don't end up using their apps much, I'm happy they're doing what they're doing and like to think of myself as one of their patrons.
I would also add a partially unrelated point about working with large, all-encompassing apps on iOS, like Logic Pro, versus working with a self-constructed assemblage of finely tuned special purpose plugin apps, like AUM with plugins from various small developers. If I were doing professional work I can see how Logic Pro might help me be more efficient at creating a polished musical production. But I'm not a professional. I just like fiddling around with various apps on iOS. It's fun. I like to support developers who fit with that mindset.
Logic has ‘fixed’ this issue for me. I've used Logic on the Mac for decades so am obviously already very invested so I felt instantly at home. ‘Home’ is what I struggled to build on iPad for years, spending a fortune on apps and plugins and never getting close to what I wanted. I disliked all the DAWs I bought, some vehemently!
But it’s all good now. No mental gymnastics, no mucking about building modular frickin DAWs when all I wanted was a proper DAW.
Now when I want to make music in the iPad I just launch logic. Done. Easy.
I’ll still use apps like iElectribe standalone and just muck about with them for fun/jamming and anything cool will get exported as a loop into a folder in iCloud Drive and then I’ll probably import it into BlocsWave on my phone which ill continue to use as a scratchpad for my own loops/song snippets. I'll still probably play with AUM and muck about from time to time to make little snippets.
But when I’m making a song, it's Logic all the way baby.
And as logic is so stacked with stock plugins, I have no more need for third party EQs, compressors etc. And third party instruments now get used because I want to use them, not because I need them.
I realise this won't jibe with some around here, as how can I possibly use an app with that UI for Sculpture (As if the UI for the physically modelled synth in NS2/Cubasis/Auria/AUM is that much better. And when I say Sculpture that obviously goes for any plugin -- Logic is still great if you use none of the stock plugins) but I'm fine with the fact that 90% of the app, the core bits I use, work great for me. And I finally have the inspector that I've grown to rely on so much in Logic on the Mac. Most of my 'editing' is done non-destructively directly in the arrange window, so having that available to me on the iPad makes things far more comfortable.
It might not be perfect but for me it is a huge improvement to iPad music making. I can be waaaay more productive with Logic and nothing else on the iPad than I am with all the other apps on iPad combined.
If you hate Logic, I don't care. And at the very least it has put to bed the argument that "how can an iPad be 'Pro' when Apple don't even make their 'Pro' apps for it" for good. Maybe it will encourage one or two of the other 'big' DAW developers to take more notice of the iPad. Or maybe not.
"But Sculpture's UI!"
TLDR: I bought 100s of plug-ins and apps trying to make the iPad into an audio workstation that worked for me. Turns out I only need one app. But Apple took their bloody time! Finally!
I've found that the easiest way to stop thinking about apps is to start making music with whatever you have.
The more you care about music, the less the tools matter.
The most antiABF post ever written! 100% accurate though 🤣😂
Oh I'm so sorry 😄
Haha don’t be. Perhaps this is a turning point! 😆
Very true. The tools and coming here to post are things to do when one isn’t making music.
When I’m in the groove I’m very focussed. When I’m not making music I quite like finding out about new stuff, checking for sales and all that malarkey. (In all honesty though, most of my ‘bargains’ on iOS sit unused!).
I seem to have a few modes like that and have different priorities and preferences for each one. Kind of like iPhone focus mode ;-)
I quite like the mode where I want to make music but don’t have a specific thing to work on and that’s when I may just go through some apps and have a play for playing’s sake. Or pull out the Novation circuit or pick up a guitar. Or just load up a nice piano and just play. Without any ulterior motive. If an idea is generated that’s just a bonus.
I may be old but I still like to play :-) I’d rather spend some time messing about with a drum machine than playing a game or doom scrolling social media.
Having found my ‘End game, Home’ app on iPad that is now much easier. All the other stuff is just to feed my main DAW. It doesn’t matter what that ‘Home’ app is IMO, it could be Loopy Pro, Drambo or an OP-1. It helps hugely to have something that is your consistent creative hub that doesn’t need further thought.
Treat apps like hardware, get one plugin or instrument per type of the kinds you need and really learn them. Nobody truly needs two good reverbs. Collecting apps and maaybe using them once a year I think is detrimental to both your economy and creativity.