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.
Comments
I don't take it as malicious or trolling, and I very much like McD and feel like I generally understand what he is saying and why.
However, I just find it difficult to understand how, when someone has everything from Beethoven to the Beatles on which to conduct their "experiments," they would WANT to choose a new work that has barely been born. Nor why, when an artist has spent literally thousands of hours meticulously crafting something, someone would think that they would enjoy hearing advice on everything that is supposedly wrong with the piece, from someone who has spent like 5 minutes with it. (If it were a work in progress and someone is asking for that kind of feedback -- and I know a lot of that happens on this forum -- that is different.) And if it's "fair" to treat the artist's work as a toy to play with and tell the artist about it, shouldn't artists also be allowed to "honestly" express how they feel when hearing of such activity. It's a tough call, but yes, you are quite right jwm, it's best to ignore such comments and not engage. I've gone back and forth on whether I should send this reply, but hopefully we're all colleagues enough to not continue letting this drag on. And, as I said, once it's out there in the universe people are free to do with it what they will.
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking about video, but have you not seen my videos which include extensive footage of me performing the individual parts (like "We Won't Go Back" or "Freebetween")? All that is shot with iPhones/iPads.
Okay, I see where you're coming from. 🫶
I sometimes take a friend's freshly-released track and sample it. But I usually ask permission before toying with the music. If they say "no", then that's alright by me. No harm no foul.
(Then again...you gave me a brilliant idea for a Justice-styled track where I can flip Beethoven and the Beatles. 🤫 That's our little secret, lol.)
Yes we are definitely colleagues. And I agree, I said my piece already in the last reply, and you said yours. I think that's now squared away nice and neatly.
Again, marvellous job on the latest track. Since you're the Lady with the App-titude, I'm wondering which app was used for the FM bass. Was it Pure Synth Platinum's TGX IAP, Nambu? Loved your vocals too. Very smooth, and I can hear the Noir influence not just in the lyrics but the vocal performance as well. ☺️
The bass is a Juno 60.
Excellent. Thanks for letting me know.
Well done ladies, video and song goes very well together and one can see you put some real work into it.
My experiment was to change the tempo in a way that doesn’t change the music in any other way. It’s a magical transformation. Staffpad can also transpose pitch along with other parts of a score in sync.
I just wanted to see if the human vocal was converted to something robotic and I was pleased to hear that it was not.
Perhaps… independently of this track… someone would care to know this. For IOS it’s a unique capability. After going back in to try upping the zoom to 139 I noticed a section of audio was attenuated to almost zero so it’s still a bit fiddly.
I have another project in play that might require transposing a guitar audio track to match my vocal range.
After a lifetime being a thoughtless asshat it’s hard to change.
Carry on.
Never heard of Staffpad.. Quick google and skim-read... Looks like it is actually primarily a notation app?
Generally, if I needed to change the tempo of polyphonic audio (non-solo instrument) I would use Izotope RX or Melodyne (neither of which are available for iOS). Those are probably the best today. But sometimes you have to try multiple apps and methods and see which works best. (And each app has various algorithms within it that one can choose depending on the source audio.) There are many apps that can do such things, and the results can be impressive, but there are limits obviously, and extreme tempo changes are going to sound pretty weird. (That said, I once saw a demo of transposing the Star Wars Theme to extreme tempos using the IRCAM TS app that was surprisingly better than expected -- obviously cherry-picked example for promo purposes, but still.) I have only used such things in limited circumstances, when there was no other option, and only for minor tempo tweaks, usually 5 bpm or less, and only on material that has a constant bpm.
Generally, it helps if the material has a steady bpm to begin with (Into The Night does not; it fluctuates between tempos in several places), and if you tell the application the original tempo and target tempo.
Ha! I just picked those two as random examples of something that has been around enough to exist in the collective consciousness as something "classic", something everybody already knows so well that remixing or reimagining or whatever makes sense, and might even improve on the original, or parody it, or recontextualize it in some current way. As opposed to something that nobody has even heard yet in the original form.
But we live in crazy times. Nowadays I see that like Madonna seems to no longer release albums but releases like 7 different versions of a single song at once, each remixed by 7 different producers, so it's like that there IS no original definitive version. I just noticed today the same treatment for an Usher track:
Not sure what the aim is here for the artist or the label, but that's the world we are in today.
And speaking of Beethoven and the Beatles, this reminds me.. Little known fact, but... The Beatles song "Because" was actually John Lennon's attempt to rewrite Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Exactly. This is what Justice have done on their albums. They recontextualised preexisting music. One of the duo even claimed they used over 400 samples for their "Cross" album, some samples so short that they're no longer recognisable. Talk about a masterclass in microsampling.
Sometimes singles have been released in such a format since the 90s. Especially in Europe where Electronic Dance Music is far more prominent. I'm guessing the reason for this is to give DJs a variety of sonic flavours and genres to choose from for their sets. At least this is as far as I've understood it.
(I used to produce various versions of my own works, from radio edits and extended versions, to remixes.)
I'm guessing the instrumental is so people can do karaoke. What I don't understand is the latest trend to release a "faster version" and "slower version" of songs. If they'd vary the instrumentation and arrangement between both versions in a way that made musical sense, that'd be fine by me. However, they're basically the same recording with one pitched up and the other pitched normal, no stretching involved. Something anyone can do in any DAW/audio editor with a recording. I guess it's all about having TikTok ready recordings for others to record themselves dancing poorly to. 😂
I kept trying to figure out which Beatle's song was a cover of a Beethoven piece. Now you have practically given me a gift here - a solid direction. 😉 Cheers Mx. Apptitude. 🥂
Well done as always! … “Gentle rabid calf Nibbling at the heart” say what?
Ha! My collaborator wrote that line!
I don’t recall seeing those… perhaps you didn’t share them on the ABF? I’ll look for them.
I mention this because I could see you doing music video directing with your excellent art direction skills combined with your one-stop shop producing tracks.
I’ll take the Staffpad experiments to another thread with material from another artist. I hope we get some of those desktop tools for time shifting this year. I think those desktop developers will see a return if they price it well. I’m imagining SWAM, Modartt (PianoTeq 8) and Fabfilter can show a solid return for their ports to IOS.
Love the combination of Neo noir 50s vibes with the dancier music. It shouldn’t work but you made it happen! Great stuff 🎊🥳
Thanks so much! Ha! Yeah, some sort of alternate universe where the 80s coexists with film noir era in 2024.
It's all on my Youtube channel, modest and slow-growing though it may be.
https://www.youtube.com/@ladyapp-titude/videos
For sure it's a tremendous amount of extra work to create a video on top of the hundreds of hours that go into the audio, but you need to do it to reach more people, and I'm more committed than ever to trying to commit as much time and resources as possible to the area of video. In this case, it took weeks of combing through classic film noir to find just the right clips for each line of the lyrics. As exhausting as that was, still probably easier than all the lights, cameras, backgrounds, etc. -- in addition to the editing -- that goes into trying to film yourself and perform at the same time!
Then there's the struggle to build a subscriber base on Youtube. The worst part is that you can't stop them from running THEIR ADS on YOUR original content, until you get to a certain number of subscribers. I've still got at least 800 more to go! Every little bit helps. Please subscribe. Help stop the Evilcorp Adware Industrial Complex! Help return control to the artist.
I’m subscribed. I’ve watched a lot of videos that detail the financial metrics of YouTube and it seems like a huge lift for anyone that really labors over their work… it looks like you need to put out hundreds of videos or get lucky to have some famous person point at your work like Jimmy Fallon did when “Loopy” first came out and @michael rode that whirlwind of TV fame for his app.
I would totally live in that alternate universe. That’s 2 of my favorite things 😂
@Lady_App_titude I have to say that your sheer breadth of genre engagement is pretty astounding. And everything in your material is so highly intentional. What clinched it for me was the contrast between your recent output and that experimental Kavanaugh liar track from a while back.
For some reason it reminds me of when I found out that Springsteen was a huge Suicide fan. We sometimes assume that people belong in a genre because it’s all they know. (And this is no knock against people who play to their own limits in this regard.) He knows his stuff, he knows their stuff. He knows stuff. You also know stuff.
One of my oldest friends is a graphic designer who has this kind of facility in the visual world: she knows the conventions of different “subcultural scenes” really well, and when she deploys them, they’re entirely appropriate without being cheesy cliches. This last point is the hardest thing of all, I think. I just have no idea how you manage to do this.
I’m not putting myself down when I say that everything I do well as a designer and as a pseudo-musician is a series of happy accidents that I then try to cultivate and parlay into something greater, because that’s simply my thing, and it’s simply a different approach. But I would also kill to be as intentional as you.
Ha! Thanks! I suppose if one were pressed to describe my genre or category it would be that I don't have any single, static genre or style. I've always had a short attention span and wandering eclectic tastes/influences. On top of that, I've been doing this a LONG time and have explored the whole gamut of genres and changes over the decades along the way. I started back in the 70s with classic rock/prog rock, and a bit of folk influences, but quickly became interested in everything -- funk and soul music, classical, acoustic jazz, world music, etc., and wanted to understand and compose in all those styles. I went from playing drums, to guitar and keyboards in hard rock bands, to by the end of the 70s actually trying to play saxophone and be bop in acoustic jazz combos. Then I quit music entirely and studied Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthropology for about 6-7 years at university. Then I would wander into the practice rooms in the music department and start playing the pianos...Eventually got back into various musical projects in the 80s.. R&B/urban contemporary, or what would eventually be called "sophisti-pop"... By this point there were things like digital, MIDI, patch memory, drum machines.. Also got heavily into latin music, collaborated creating electronic music to accompany poets and spoken word artists... Even ended up playing mandolin and bluegrass music at one point.. Then in the 90s I did everything from heavy metal music to working on Broadway musicals, film and TV.. None of these projects were very successful, but if something didn't spark immediately, it meant moving on and trying something new. Thus, I absorbed a lot of influences along the way. At the same time I worked in the visual arts and writing. All of that history ends up in anything I do today.
The great thing about today's world is that we are no longer bound the categories of record labels or radio stations and the artist is free to explore any direction. (Of course, the downside is that it is harder than ever to generate income from music, alas!)
This particular project was my second or third attempt at the area of 80s synth pop. Of course, it's going to be informed by modern sensibilities and technology, and anything I do is going to reflect my diverse tastes, so you're going to get the Steely Dan jazz chords or whatever. Trying figure out which project to try to complete next, but you can bet it will be something completely different.
As regards, "intention"... The main thing has always been about trying to figure out what you want to say, how you feel, or what story you want to tell. Nowadays we have all these rich colors to draw upon, which only multiplies the possibilities. But they are only tools in service of the creative vision.
How did you find your collaborator for the lyrics? I know there are sites on-line to find people.
Ah, sophistipop, yes! This track fits in that category, I think. And the mention of that gives me a chance to plug one of the best songs generally classified under that genre label, and perhaps one of the best pop songs of the 80s. Cheesy as hell but brilliant regardless:
Nice. I had heard of this band but never heard anything by them before. I first encountered the term "sophistipop" in reference to Swing Out Sister. I would include acts like Sade and Basia, who were popular around the same time. The visual look of this video seems to remind me of Bowie and Bryan Ferry.. "New Romantic" was another term bandied about in the 80s. A lot of times these terms are invented after the fact.
A long time friend and collaborator stretching back decades. I've done collabs, and am open to various kinds of collabs, but there is almost nobody else I would consider collaborating with on something like lyrics.
I this case the "collaboration" actually took place way back in the 80s. We had written a song together called "Your Fire My Flame" -- a kind of Jim Steinman-esque male/female 80s power pop idea that was never finished. Then when I was working on this song, I had the intro verse and chorus, but needed a middle section. I remembered this old fragment of an idea from the 80s that existed only in mental notes -- not even a cassette -- but was able to repurpose and upcycle it into the perfect bridge. Those the 6-7 lines and a bit of melody ended up being the perfect thing needed to advance the story at the point and connect the opening chapter and the conclusion. I did it without even telling her, and she was quite surprised upon hearing the end result!
This song also recycled lyrics and bits from an earlier song I had written in the late 90s called "Into The Night." Completely different kind of song, heavy metal song in a different key and tempo, also never finished, but it included the title and a few of the same lines, such as "He walked her slowly through the Village to her station, before she disappeared into the night." The original tune was more like something by Metallica.
Lyrics are often the hardest part and can sometimes take half a lifetime to come together. My previous song, "You'll Never Know" included lines I originally wrote when I was 14.
Which brings me back to the point I neglected to make in my previous long-winded response. I would also say that the "happy accident" or "spontaneous invention" approach is at the heart of pretty much everything I do -- at least in terms of the initial spark of an idea. I just take a REALLY LONG time taking it from a sketch to a finished product -- often months, or even years or decades. The first minute or so of this song came together very quickly. Checking back in my project file, it looks like that was November of 2022 and it was originally titled "Arturia 9 Test". It was a promising beginning, inspiring enough that I knew I had to come up with something substantial in order to finish it. It took from then until now, and required digging back into decades of unfinished scraps of ideas, to bring it into an acceptable form worthy of release. Much of that time it just needed to lie dormant and germinate until the moment would allow itself to grow. I've got hundreds, if not thousands, of similar sketches of ideas but they can't move forward until the right title or concept or story or whatever comes along. Sometimes things may come to you fully formed, but generally speaking, for me at least, it's very easy to come up with beginnings of ideas, but very hard work to finish them.
Impressive!
It's funny you should say that — I am going through my usual Corinne Drewery crush cycle right now, which happens every few years or so. She's so elegant. I guess a lot of people find Swing Out Sister a bit cheesy, but as much as I love the moody soul influences in '90s trip hop, '80s British shiny jazzy soul pop (?) has a kind of defiance to it I find hard to ignore. I'm also currently immersed in cruisy late-80s Bryan Ferry and a bit of EBTG.
That's really good to know, and that effort is very much on display.
Would be interested to hear to what extent, and how (or even whether) iOS apps were involved in this, Barbara, if you have the time.
Cheers!
Gav
Thanks so much!