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.
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How would you approach playing 4 bars of clip 1 and 4 bars of clip 2, for two 4 bar audio clips?
I've got two 4 bar audio clips in Loopy Pro and I'd like to use these existing audio clips in a play group to play alternating over 8 bars. So clip 1 plays for 4 bars while clip 2 is silent, then clip 2 plays for 4 bars while clip 1 is silent.
How would you approach this typically?
There doesn't seem to be a way to pad with 4 bars of silence at the start of an existing clip, though I can see how to pad silence at the end of the clip with "extend".
I guess follow action is an option, but is that the best way when both clips are grouped in a play group?
I just purchased Neon, thinking it'd be easy to grab the audio, pad it the way I wanted and after 20 mins of staring at the Auv3 version as recorder and futzing with the selection tool (and seeing no "cut/delete" option anywhere in site), I decided I'd start by seeing if there's a way to do this w/o an editor for now, then study up on Neon when I have time.
Thanks
Comments
Is this a situation where you ave a fixed structure?
@espiegel123, not sure what you're asking, can you rephrase the question, please
Is this a project where playback is always the sxns order/structure
If it is, you may want to use the sequencer.
You can control the sequencer timeline with actions, too.
Without the sequencer there area ton of ways to do what you want. You can have the clips play alternately rather than hack their lengths. You could multiply the clips to double their length and mute/unmute with folllow actions so that only half the clip plays.
I wonder if setting them both to to Play Once, each with an On Stop follow action to trigger the other would work.
Thanks @wim. That will work and I started to implement it, but noticed the same thing I always notice when trying to use follow actions and mute/unmute or large fade ins/outs...when you're switching play groups alot like I do (and stop'ing and starting the play clock a lot as you figure things out) these automations often linger on and can put things in a funky, unexpected state...also, given that there's no easy way to reset them all consistently, I just try to avoid these things and go with adding another play group and brute-forcing it, which is how I'm going to achieve this.
In terms of getting the audio clips that I had already recorded in Loopy Pro to work, I simply exported them to audio file, imported them into Logic Pro on the Mac and it was easy and clean to modify them the way I wanted in < 10 mins...so much easier than anything I've found on iPad to edit audio, but I'm sure that's just my lack of familiarity with the tools and also the smaller screen real estate and my worsening vision.
Any thoughts still welcome...Thanks again
@danm : you can set up a button to set your project back to the desired start state. You could add pressing it a stop clock follow action.
From what you describe, I think you should consider using the timeline (sequencer) as it might suit what you are trying to do better than creating complicated button and follow actions.
Thanks @espiegel123, that makes a lot of sense and will work sometimes (so I'll try it to make sure I understand how to do it to achieve this goal)...
The reason I say sometimes is I wasn't sure it would work well for cases where I'm playing live, will it? Perhaps I'm wrong...
A thought to tuck away: You can still launch clips while the sequencer is running. So, you can have a basic structure running, but sill record and experiment with loops running over it.
I've not used the sequencer much but do want to look further into controlling it with actions. That could be the missing ingredient.
I do often see people twisting themselves up into knots trying to make song structure out of the clip launcher. I often think they'd be better off not fighting to stay out of the sequencer, but don't have the experience under my belt to advise.
Excellent points, @wim.
I agree that conceptually it does make sense for the sequencer to be a main area of focus for those of us building songs with specific song structure/parts.
I just wonder when the time is right for that focus, given Loopy Pro's evolution. Perhaps it's now or maybe soon, guess the only way to know is to start using the sequencer more and answer that question for ourselves, which I may do sometime soon.
Certainly would be interested to hear other's thoughts on this too.
Thanks
In what way might it be too soon? Just my opinion -- with a very incomplete notion of what you are trying to do -- but the impression that I have is that you have set structures in mind that you are trying to implement with complex combinations of actions that sound like they would be straightforward to set up in the timeline.
It is pretty straightforward to record part and sections either on the looping page or timeline page and then organize the results on the timeline.
If you haven't watched any, you might want to take a look at some of the tutorials that people have posted about the timeline.
I get the sense that there's not been as much focus on the sequencer, but perhaps I'm wrong. The coverage, both in the manual and elsewhere is also much more limited than the other areas of Loopy Pro, again perhaps my impression is wrong.
One of the reasons it may be harder for me to use the sequencer vs the audio clips/loops pages is that while I do have songs set up as parts in a relatively linear fashion, I am trying to set things up so I can play live, along with a bandmate or two and have LP playing sections with some of the instruments/background vocals. So, it's playing through the song, but perhaps bouncing around to different parts of the song as the mood strikes while playing live, which I can control via Morningstar MC6 Pro foot pedal or another controller (like a computer keyboard, which I've been experimenting with via midi-learn in LP).
Being able to see the whole (page) as well as each section (play group) all on one screen and to be able to trigger them via buttons that are visually positioned next to each section/play group, makes it much easier to play through the structured song, but also to bounce around a bit from section to section when playing live with bandmates and to be able to easily follow what's happening visually all on a single page.
That said, for just setting up pre-determined structured play-throughs, seems like the sequencer should work well and I definitely plan to explore. Certainly, the only way to really know if it'll work well for me is to put in some time and try it. Also, this will help the product team understand areas of interest to refine/improve as part of the product lifecycle, if it is indeed "too soon" to use in some ways.
Yup, I've watched several of these, will look for more
Thanks
I don't see any reason why it would be too soon to work with the sequencer. It has all the essential features you need as far as I can tell. I doubt any major functionality changes are in the works any time soon. There's not a lot of documentation, but it isn't particularly complicated either - at least not nearly as complicated as what you've been doing so far. The only reason I haven't dived in further is the clip launcher is a closer fit to how I work, which is very non structured.
As for your desire to have everything on one screen and to live jam, I think that could work even better than the clips view. Instead of having a ton of clips with complicated behaviors and follow actions that aren't apparent when looking at them, you could have one set of buttons such as "Start, Stop, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Repeat" etc. plus perhaps a small set of loops for recording and playing jams to play over the sequence.
I think you could explore everything you'd need to in order to see if the sequencer is a help or not in a few hours or days.
Ya, I'll explore.
I'm not confident that it'll work as well as the clip launcher, but I'm going to explore.
Can you provide a few more specifics about what you're talking about wrt the buttons and how to trigger things and how the sequencer would work along with that...and the workflow...a video would be awesome, but that might take too much of your time, I understand.
I'd like to experiment using your suggestion as a jumping off point, but can't visualize what you're suggesting in terms of how the LP page would be set up and what I'd be viewing/doing in the workflow...sorry, just want to make sure I focus my next steps a bit...Thanks
I'll see if I can do a simple mock-up of some sort. Not a video though. 😎
Or maybe Edward will beat me to it. He's pretty good at whipping up video examples.
@espiegel123 and @wim. I've been spending hours with the sequencer to better understand it and re-visit trying to use it (as I'd tried it out once or twice a number of months ago).
Today, I'm experiencing some of the same unexpected behavior that I remember from when I first tried to use it.
I decided to start with what I would think would be the most basic usage:
To do a sequencer recording of my audio clips in a specific order, so that I could then play this sequence back using the sequencer itself.
Check the clips page to make sure nothing additional is triggered there. It could be that you have actions triggering some loops or you have triggered them manually. Remember that the sequencer and clip view aren't completely independent. You can still trigger loops from the loop view while a sequence is playing.
Thanks. I've been looking and looking... and if I turn off the SEQ button and from the clips page, if I just trigger the first play group with only clip 4 in it, nothing else gets triggered (just clip 4 loops over and over), so not sure what/why anything would be triggering the next play group erroneously when playing back the sequence from the Sequencer itself (ie: with SEQ on).
So, can't identify anything that's causing the issue at this point.
If you have specific steps to try to figure it out, I'm happy to try them, but not sure how else to go about it.
Thanks
@danm : are there follow actions in any of your clips? any midi bindings that are being triggered? you can switch to the clips page and watch what is going on.
Also, my recommendation if you are just getting familiar with the sequencer is to start with a clean new project and get to know the basics.
@danm : if you are not able to identify the source of the behavior, make a zip of the project and send it to me at support with instructions for reproducing the problem.