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.
Fiddlewax Pro by Fiddlewax (AB supported music creation/looper thaang)
No idea about this one...Looks like a sketch pad, idea generator kinda thing ?
Video and more info in the AppStore link: https://appsto.re/us/b2P_1.i
Or the official site: https://fiddlewax.com/pro/
http://forum.audiob.us/uploads/FileUpload/ff/afbe40a1525989e430ad9cad9c9aea.jpg
Comments
Looks very Interesting.
midi files export, Audiobus...
Video in the appstore link?I'm getting old i see.That must be some hip new iOS8 stuff
Apart from MIDI, it only seems to output m4A not wav's as far as I can tell.
Use Audiobus to record wav, Audioshare.
Video
No video? Not at that link.
20 bucks?.. Hmm. I hope it is good but I just can't see it yet.
Aw man, 19.99 U.S. That's a pretty steep price to be a guinea pig. Looks pretty damn neat too, but I'd have to hear all the sounds to know if any of it is useable.
Hmmm. My spidey sense isn't insta-tingling...
Fiddlewax Pro developer here --
Yeah, iOS8 lets you include videos now, but you have to upload with OSX 10.10 (which is still in beta).
Some links if it's still not clear where to find things...
Main Overview Page: https://fiddlewax.com/pro
App Video:
Sample Audio:
Let me know if you have any more questions, suggestions, thoughts, etc.
Hi Adam,
Thanks for coming on.
Looks like an interesting and ambitious app to me. Lots of respect and thanks for pushing things forward. The interface looks beautiful.
I have a couple of questions:
When's it out (sorry if this is answered somewhere else)? EDIT: Oh sorry - doh - it's out now... great.
I would most likely use it as a composition tool at the start of making a track to try out different combinations of chords, melodies, phrases etc. quickly. The idea of 5 separate looping tracks to play with is nice. Can you overdub or do you have to clear the track and start again each time? Can you double or halve the bars of each track easily like in Figure?
"Intuitively learn relationships between notes and chords as you play". This sounds really interesting to me. Could you give me specific detail? Lots of apps let you set a scale, play chords from that scale and key you a keyboard of all the single notes from that scale - but what i'm interested in is having the keyboard of single notes change depending on the chord being played in a pretty dynamic way / more useful way. (The keyboard in Thor kind of does this with it's 'strum' feature but it's not dynamic enough while you'll playing). It would be great if you change chord in a progression and it serves up just the notes in that chord? Or maybe rearranges the notes of the scale to be the appropriate mode for that chord. Basically help for someone like me to jam melodies over chords more easily. Fingertip Maestro gets the closest to this so far - so i'm waiting for this to get Midi Out.
I love the fact that you can get Midi out. Is it a case of exporting the 5 midi tracks... or can you also send live Midi out to 5 tracks as you play/playback. That would be pretty awesome.
Personally I don't have a problem at all with $19,99 if it's going to be a useful tool. I know how long these things take to develop for mobile.
Matt
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the feedback and questions.
The app was just accepted late last night. I'm not entirely sure if all the App Stores have updated, but all the regions I've checked are now showing it. If you can't find it, jump to the listing directly here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fiddlewax-pro/id905878913?mt=8
All 5 channels of the looper allow for overdub so you can get a lot of milage out of them. Using just a single channel is enough for simple things, but having multiples lets you stage sections of a song and bring various parts in and out. Each of the channels auto-expands by a multiple of the largest sized playing channel. So if you recorded 8 beats on the first one, you could easily record 8, 16, 24, 32, etc. on the others. As for doubling/halving sounds already recorded, you can get similar effects by doubling/halving the tempo or changing the time signature. EDIT: This will change from v1.1 onward. It is assumed that you are recording beats and therefor will not double/halve when you change time signature; use tempo control instead.
Learning is a big part of Fiddlewax Pro, but it all happens subtly in the background. First, you'll notice that the main chords you can select are those from the diatonic scale in the key you've selected. When you change the key/mode, you immediately see how those chords shift. When you press a chord, you also see the corresponding notes that make up that chord illuminate in the keyboard below. Within the keyboard, there are 4 rows of keys (a piano-esque 2 rows for chromaitc and diatonic, a scale row such as blue or pentatonic, and a autoharp/zither row that includes only notes from the last chord you played). As you play notes in one row, you can see patterns among the notes in the other rows. Everything is color coded to help you see what's in and out of key, as well as what's the root and the intervals of the chord.
Yes, pipe some MIDI out to whatever other synths and audio setups you have. The sounds included in Fiddlewax Pro are designed to be rich and fun and expressive, but you're welcome to use whatever sounds you like. When you're using the looper and MIDI out, all of the looped notes play as if you were playing them right along in realtime. Each instrument gets its own track, so you can keep track of them.
And for session recording, a .mid MIDI file is created of your entire session with all of the different instruments split into their own tracks. The only exception is that both analog and electronic drum tracks occupy the same channel so that they are correctly categorized when importing into other MIDI programs.
There's a lot more detail on all of these questions in the Fiddlewax Pro Guide Book if you're curious:
http://news.fiddlewax.com/post/94051722909/proguide
Cheers,
Adam
Thanks Adam. I must say it does sound really good (for what i'm after). And I love the fact it has a row of notes that are just from the last chord played... very useful.
I also particularly like: "When you're using the looper and MIDI out, all of the looped notes play as if you were playing them right along in realtime"...
So i'm gonna hit 'buy' now. Thanks a lot for your swift responses.
Ok. Trying it out now.
It's very well built. You can just tell. Lovely clean interface.
Haven't tried any midi out yet.
Concept is very nice IMO. It's like a mega keyboard on steroids. Bit like chordian or polychord - but more options/help on playing melody over the chords.
My immediate thought after about 4 mins was - this is going to be bloody useful.
I love the fact that as you change chord it highlights on the keyboard(s) the root of note of that chord really clearly. Encouraging you to think in terms of the 'mode' of that chord, rather than just the overall scale - as I understand it. This is great - really great and exactly what I've been looking for as I explained above.
One question:
In B minor (with the 'pentatonic' option). Why is D (as well as
shown up on all keys? What's special about D? It's the third note in the scale right?
And a big thing that's slightly bugging me / request:
When you record a chord progression in the looper, it's a real, real shame there isn't an option to have the chords, as you play the loop back, dynamically effect the keyboards. This is because it looks like to get all that amazing functionality of the keyboards changing depending on the chord you have to play the chords live - while also jamming your melody. My tiny brain finds this difficult. It would be great if you could lay your chords down to a loop and the work on your melody as step 2 with keyboard dynamically helping you out. Sorry - first feature request???
Lovely app so far though.
Next I'll try midi out.
Thank you Matt, I gave it a try and must say it is a lot of fun and intuitive. I was up and running in no time even without a video. The sounds inside are pretty damned good but being able to midi up or send midi files out is excellent also; I do not usually have much luck with this type of looping app but this came easily to me for some reason. I have a bit more to figure out but I was pretty much instantly able to through a nice little song together.
Speaking of Figure, you know that app by Reason. Ya that one. This is way more capable and a lot more fun to use also.
Thanks @adamkumpf. The sketchpad aspect of it with full MIDI export sounds very useful. I'm not too good with MIDI, but I can appreciate the value of that.
Ah... It could really do with a background mode. It seems to switch off whenever I go to another app which isn't great for getting it to drive other synths.
Really would like to be able to try out different patches in synths, on the fly, for my loops.
Also, could you explain about midi channels? Are the instruments channels 1 to 12 from left to right?
Thanks for all the feedback. It's great to get a sense for what initially makes sense and/or needs more tuning.
As for why the D shows up in addition to the B when you're in the key of B minor, there was feedback early on in testing that it would be helpful to know where the relative major is when you're playing in the other modes. So that's what you're seeing there.
And chord playback is on the feature request list for sure.
The reason it's not in yet is that it can make things really complicated depending on how you're using the chords. Playing a basic progression and then layering on top of it would work great. But playing multiple chorded zither / autoharp parts in different channels with playback gets crazy pretty fast.
I'm guessing the way forward is add some kind of toggle for recording "chord automation" or inferring zither vs. progression mode based on if the chords are 'muted'. Just need to nail down the interaction so it doesn't get confusing before rolling that into the release.
It's really great in a lot of ways. I've always struggled with melodies and I just spent the last 10 mins starting to really get to grips with tension and release type phrases based on returning or not returning to the root of the chord / playing any notes in that chord or not.
Midi out to iMini (bass chords and higher notes to the same patch) live - working pretty well straight away. Maybe the odd tiny slight stutter when lots of notes sent but I suspect that's iMini's fault.
So the penultimate keyboard as you move down is a reduced subset of the entire scale (ie 5 notes from it if you choose penatonic). I just got that. And then it shows you as you play a chord which of the chord notes are in that penatonic scale (and also which one is the root of the chord if it's there). Sometimes they are all in there, sometimes only some of them. That really is pretty clever.
I would so love it if the looper could feed the chord progression through to the keyboards though. At the moment I have to pause my melody slightly as I change chord (I'm slow like that) and it makes the melody that much less fluid.
Great fun though.
Yes, instruments are channels 1-12 (0-11 in MIDI cmd terms) from left to right. I've also add a feature request to show the channel number by each instrument when MIDI is on (so look for that in the next update).
The drums are in tracks 13/14 (12/13) for analog/electronic drumkits respectively. The click track is on 15 (14) in case that's helpful for syncing.
Background mode works when AudioBus or Inter-App Audio are connected -- so temporary work-around is to connect Fiddlewax Pro to AudioBus (without any other apps connected) so it doesn't sleep when backgrounded. I've added a feature request to keep background mode on when MIDI is active so stay tuned for an update there, too!
And actually, recorded chord loop being sent out to iMini. No problems. Then jamming over notes the top. All fine.
Hi Adam,
Thanks. Audiobus work around fine for now.
Please, please could you add a feature request for recorded looped chords to feed back as 'last chords played' to the keyboard? Maybe switch for this on or off, or just by default would suit me.
That's the one big bug bear I can see with the app so far. Everything else is very nice.
I've added "chord automation" to the feature request list, so keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks
Thank you x 3
Hi Adam,
Another suggestion... would be nice, for learning purposes, to have the option of having all the notes marked on the keys. Not essential though.
By the way, do you know why the third note in the key (as well as the root) is marked with the name of the note? So in B minor the letter B is displayed on it's key, but also the letter D is displayed on it's key. Not sure why...
Hi Adam
Good to see you here..
"Chord Automation" Great!!
Hi Matt,
D is the relative major of B minor so they both are highlighted. You can just ignore it if you want, but during user testing people thought it was helpful to always know the relationship between the key your in and the Ionian/Major mode. Sorry if that's confusing.
Labelling all the keys is another option, but the interface quickly feels cluttered and hard to read with so much text in the playing area. Perhaps that could be an advanced option for users that want all the notes to show up (especially when learning a part).
Ah, the trickiness of design trade-offs...
I am thinking that when recording drum tracks I could do say a four bar loop built up on track one and follow that with a 2 or 1 bar fill on track two ect. ?
I have never had such good luck with making my own drum loops but this is just fun and easy.
Looking forward to working on midi to other apps like animoog ect.
Thanks Adam... That makes sense about the relative Major...
And yes, notes written on all keys would certainly need to be an option not a default
.
Couple more questions:
How do you change the octave the chords are played in please?
Can you just explain the circle of 5ths buttons - I take it that's what they are. (Apologies - not asking for a theory lesson here - just how they work very briefly).
I'm going to try this out later today - watching Doug's video at the moment, which is 22 minutes long and shows a good example of workflow. The on-board instrument samples sound decent (actually I really like the acoustic drum kit), but I'm thinking the real potential here is with the MIDI out recording. If the MIDI from this app could be conveniently exported to a MIDI editor like in MTS (or Cubasis I think), then you have the makings of the ultimate sketchpad here. In fact, an app like MTS should let you further clean up mistakes or change note duration, etc..
@adamkumpf - How does MIDI export work - does it export like one track each for each loop/track you have in Fiddlewax? And if one loop is 4 beats in length, and another is 32 beats in length, would MIDI export repeat the 4-beat loop for the duration of the longer loops?
Really like the all-on-one-screen layout. A little concerned about the key size but it should work with CoreMIDI controllers, and it makes it pretty easy to re-do a punch if you mess up with loop recording. I expect the chords to be excellent because Fiddlewax Blue was very good (but needed AudioBus badly, and still does).
@matt_fletcher_2000
For now, the chords' octave range is fixed based on the key and mode you select. They're mainly there to help you build progressions and control the chorded zither / autoharp. Changing their range could be nice sometimes; I'll add it to the wish list.
The -5 and +5 buttons give you the same chord transposed by the circle of fifths down or up respectively. This is a common way to modulate between musical keys. Try playing the 7 main chords.. then transition to playing only the +5s of each chord. It can sound quite natural once you get the hang of it.
@stormjh1
There are two levels of MIDI happening in the app.
Anytime you record a session, all of the note and track information is processed and saved as a multi-channel MIDI file. This can be shared via email or download to your computer when you sync your device. The MIDI file splits each instrument into a track and ensures that all of the notes are aligned to how you played them. If you play a loop twice, you'll see those notes repeated as if you had extra hands and were playing them all yourself in realtime.
When you turn on MIDI output (in the top Parameters), you enable a realtime stream of MIDI note data to flow from Fiddlewax Pro to other apps as you play. These could be local iOS apps that support MIDI input, or a hefty DAW program on your computer controlled via WiFi / bluetooth. Tap on the "Need help with MIDI?" button in the same menu if you aren't sure how to get your iPad and your computer talking. Each instrument will output on its own MIDI channel and corresponds to the order the instruments are displayed (1-12). A feature request has been made to show the channel numbers when MIDI is on, so look for that in a future update.
Thanks. Very useful. Really interesting app.
Question... does it have midi in? I assumed not. Not a biggie for me personally.
Feature request on your point 12. Would it be possible to disable midi out on one or more of the instruments. This is because many app promiscuously listen for midi (I'm thinking Gadget here particularly, but also iMini etc I believe). That way at least you could manage this issue a bit better.