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.
Share ideas, techniques for Loopy Pro with guitar
Here are four things that have inspired me recently:
The cheap, wireless M-Vave Chocolate foot controller, set up with instructions from @wim.
The Boss IR-200 amp and cab simulator. I've reported on this pedal at several points in the IR-2 thread that I started before Christmas.
Impulse Responses (IRs) for acoustic guitar. I really like how my acoustic sounds through this free IR from Worship Tutorials.
Comments
I like having a guitar chain and then a bass chain with a pitch shifter. Then I can play bass lines on my guitar and loop them for a relatively convincing bass. Also the Launchpad has made looping a lifesaver. It’s still not as fluid as a foot controller but it helps a lot
What do you use for pitch shifting? Someone just asked for recommendations in another thread.
I’ve been using the tonebooster voice pitcher one. It works pretty good with pretty low latency. I have to finesse it a bit with some eq, compression, and a bass amp/cab ir but the results usually come out good enough that I haven’t bought a bass yet.
I found a Roland Handypad makes a decent foot controller for LP:
The fact it’s a fun hand percussion controller is just a bonus.
okay, that is a good tip. I use a T-Rex Quint guitar pedal for that, tracking and latency is good. But if I can do this in the box, that would be much better.
I posted this in another thread, but it seems relevant here, too.
Something that is easy to do in Loopy Pro is put together composite "presets" where a press of a button can change the preset and parameters of any number of loaded effects and synths ... and you can set them up to easily step through them. Say you have a series of complicated effect changes in a song, you could set it up to advance through them with a single button if you wanted.
FWIW, this is my current "pedalboard" page. It gives me quick access (all of which is MIDI learnable) to the things that I most frequently access while playing. The green buttons on the right are "super presets" that change a number of effect presets at once. The dial at the left is set to toggle between my clean and dirty guitar tones with a foot pedal. Holding the pedal switches the behavior so that tapping cycles between the "super presets".
Here is the project in case it isn’t obviously how to implement it.
https://forum.audiob.us/uploads/editor/kf/f3d9483jv83y.zip
The pitch shifter in Space Guitar is the best I’ve tried, to my ears at least. My second favorite is Drambo—it makes my acoustic guitar sound like an acoustic bass quite convincingly and with minimal latency.
Here is a Loopy Pro project with Loopy running inside as a MIDI AU to control Lumbeats drummers.
+1 for Max Yar's videos, I've been using a couple of his freely available templates (Ditto emulation & Markus K) and got so much out of them that I signed up for his Loopy Pro course. I thought I knew quite a lot about Loopy Pro, but he's really helped me focus on what I really need to know and repeat it in practise until it gets properly baked in (as opposed to spending all my time endlessly making new templates... although of course I can still do that as a sideline).
Max is a fantastic teacher and an inspiring looper and guitar player. For pitch shifting I've been using his Tonestack Pro presets from his 'Markus K' template, it sounds good and his patch shifting widget (from guitar to bass) is very satisfying under foot control - for acoustic I stripped down his Tonestack patch to be just the pitch shifter. I also use Nembrini Quinta (if I'm using 20th Anniversary as my amp) and the THu Octaver (if I'm using THu) - but I'm admittedly not that fussy, so long as it sounds more like a bass than a guitar I'm generally happy. Important to turn off the 'high quality' setting in Quinta for low latency though.
Anyway, great thread, @espiegel123 I really appreciate what you're posting, will delve into that, and thanks to everyone else for all the creative thinking.
Just want to write the same here, thank you very much @espiegel123!
Do you have any plans to post your examples to PatchStorage? Would be nice to have them in one place without "hunting" across forum threads.
Things that seem generally robust and useful on their own I post at patchstorage (I've posted a couple of templates there). What i've just posted have been thoroughly tested or designed with other people using them in mind. These sort of examples relevant to a particular discussion will probably not make their way over there as they might not be generally useful.
Any tips for boosting acoustic guitar signal?
I'm running the output from my Taylor ES-2 pickup into a cab sim on my Boss IR-200. Initially, I was running the Boss unit's output into my mixer, where I could just turn up the fader before its signal went to my interface. But this evening I tried using the IR-200's built-in interface. (I was put off before by something that turned out to be the fault of an effect, not the interface.) It sounds gorgeous, but with the IR-200's preamp disabled, the guitar output is low. I dealt with this by lowering the volume of my drums (a lot), so that everything balanced out. I also could have added a physical pedal in front of the IR-200, but that would have added some noise; I'm assuming a digital solution would be cleaner.
How do you get a decent volume for the initial tracking? Or is that even something to worry about, when you're recording at 96 / 24? (I didn't choose 96 kHz: that's just what the IR-200 runs at.)
@dokwok2 : I must have missed it. Why do you need the preamp off?
My acoustic guitar’s internal preamp is on. The preamp I’ve turned off is the one in my Boss IR-200 amp and cab sim pedal, since all of its preamp models are for electric guitar and bass. I’m sure they would work, but I don’t want them coloring my acoustic sound, which even the Natural Clean model would do.
I have a Tech21 SansAmp Para Driver that is great for acoustic. It’s been especially good for mandolin, and is the best pedal I have for providing a clean boost and some tone shaping.
F> @dokwok2 said:
Have you confirmed that they color it unpleasantly? With the IR-200 preamp off you can apply clean gain in Loopy Pro by putting the Equalizer plug in first in your chain. If you don’t add eq, it is acts as a truly clean gain control (using hand input or output gain slider thingies).
Thanks for those suggestions. I may experiment with the IR-200's "Natural Clean" preamp at some point, but for now I want to minimize variables until I get to know the equipment better.* The built-in EQ seems like a good way to manage volume without introducing more elements in the physical signal chain.
Surprisingly there’s no great pitch shifters on iOS!.
When Nembrini Quinta was released I was stoked but it turned out to be quite buggy, with terrible latency.
I’ve tried a ton of apps. The octaves in guitar apps (Yonac, THU, etc) don’t sound great for polyphonic material. I’ve also resorted to Drambo, BLEASS Slow machine, TB Voice Shifter… I have a SubNUp pedal that I end up using a lot, it doesn’t sound great, a bit dull, but I don’t find any of the iOS options sound better.
I’d love a FAC pitch shifter / octaver with @FredAntonCorvest special sauce.
Latency is fine for me with Nembrini Quinta so long as 'High Q' is set to off.
I don’t understand what the issue might be, Quinta is very laggy for me. Just did a test comparing it to Yonac’s ToneStack and Quinta is clearly off. Noticeably and annoyingly behind.
I have the latest update and HQ doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Hmmm… sorry if I’ve sent you down a rabbit hole - I do use it quite a bit, but mostly for late night jams, so maybe I’m over tolerant of the latency? I do remember it being unusable for live playing until I turned the ‘High Q’ off, so it definitely should make an audible difference. I’ll give it some more applied scrutiny over the weekend.
@tahiche I didn’t find a decent on IOS for a convincing octave down sound. Qvox was still the best option for a stable bass sound but it needs quite a bit of EQ-ing, compressing, overdriving befor the signal enters Qvox - 18 Euros for one effect, sigh! I have been through many hardware pedals as well (EBS, TC electronics, MXR, some analog stuff), but none of them was good for acoustic guitar too - except one pedal: The Source Audio Spectrum! I have two of them since quite a few years, and no other pedal even came close when you want a fast tracking device with great sonic possibilities to tweak your bass sound. Dammit, I still need an IOS version that comes close to this. Still haven’t found what I am looking for…
That pedal looks good!. I have the TC Electronics Sub N’ Up pedal. It doesn’t good on its own, no definition or articulation. But good enough when layered with the guitar. For having that extra bass layer beneath the guitar I’d say many of the iOS options are good enough, those with low latency that is, even those that are not specifically designed for this… Drambo, Tonex, Tonebooster VoicePitcher, Mollox One, BYOD… I can also recommend for a little “extra” factor using BLEASS SlowMotion. It sounds pretty good and it can easily make “auto” bass lines in real time, it will do a pulsating repeat in the note you’re playing which is pretty cool.
@Heinrich, @tahiche - Are you using any bass amp in the chain or just octaver pedals? I'm trying to play directly into the "BigOct" of the ToneStack and TH-U FX pack, where I found acceptable "Pitch Shift" and "Wham-Me". The TH-U pedals sound slightly better than the BigOct and have less latency. But they're nowhere near what I'd like to hear for a bass tone.
Woo good timing to have this brought back to the front for me!
Just got my 5-string p bass back in my hands (like, today!) and I've been trying like hell to mimic bass play thru my strat (via iOS) for a few months with no luck (seems standard)
With that, are there any recommended bass IRs for slap/funk? I'll do my due diligence on the rest of the setup, but IRs are still just a little anomalous to me
I've already dipped into OwnHammer for guitar IRs, so I'm not above paying if it's quality... But I'm curious what reccs pop up
Also (but much less important), how's ToneStacks bass options hold up to other recommations? Got Pot O Gold during Black Friday but would love to hear if there's a must-have bass centric plugin
Cabinet IRs are really just supplements to amp sims. A lot of bass players record direct and just use eq and compression.
I haven’t found a bass amp sim on iOS that I’m 100% happy with, and I’ve tried a few. ToneStack is fine.
Actually I quite dig the Tonex bass captures, there’s a ton if you get the user models download thingy. Some really good stuff in there.
@tahiche I tried the TC El. sub n’ up pedal on my search of a decent octave down pedal that can cope with acoustic guitars as well. No contest, the SA Spectrum is by far better and the only one I tried (and I tried quiet a few) that provided a decent octave down also with my acoustics. I’m still on the hunt for a bass solution in Loopy pro. Tonestack for 69 Euros just for using one or two bass simulations - rather not. Had no luck with BYOD. Have to check out Drambo or Voicepitcher still. BLEASS Slow motion piqued my interest - but I guess that will sound, well, “different” because of its slow down approach? From some forum talk Bassalitious 2, Audio Layer, the Kork gadget Madrid or a sample player like Ximmatix max also be worth a look, I will have to investigate a bit further.
@filo01 I checked the apps only with EQ and Compressor before them, but without bass amp. But later I would mix it in to lessen the possible latency feeling by “glueing” the sounds of the octave down and the bass amp together.
I will also check the midi guitar 2 or A2M (another midi guitar app) route. With Thumbjam alone you will get decent sounds, but I experienced too much latency.
Imo, qvox is the best iOS solution for pitching a guitar down an octave to use for bass.
I have found Koala FX pitch shifter can do a reasonable job.