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
Very relaxing. Thanks for posting it, Yvonne
This is so beautiful, my friend. ❤️🌈 I love that both of us are making Ambient in Koala and looping things like Brian Eno does. It's fun to make and relaxing to listen to. Well done!
My pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you @jwmmakerofmusic!
gorgeous. Would love to see a video tutorial or performance screen capture from you on your ambient techniques for Koala. I know @sevenape did a great one a while back. Anyway! I know it is like a zero priority thing but enquiring eyes and ears want to know (mine do!) and would greatly appreciate any insight! Thanks for all of your great explorations in various apps! Love them all
Thank you very much for your kind comment.
You’re not the first to ask me for a video. I believe I’ll give it a whack.
In the meantime, I will recommend a (free!) book to you. It’s specifically for the Teenage Engineering synths but there’s lots of useful information here that applies to ambient music in general.
It’s here: https://cololrsinspace.gumroad.com/l/tcfecn?layout=profile
I think I can share my techniques if Yvonne's cool with it. I use Koala inside of AUM to sample from various apps. Sometimes I'll sample a oneshot and use Koala's sequencer to lay out a repeating sequence, usually when I want to do a "chance based" sequence. Othertimes, I'll just use AUM's on-screen keyboard to play in a sequence into one of Koala's pads and loop that. Then of course there are drones as well.
Let me break this all down for you mate. It may be a bit jumbled and out of order, but my brain is currently running on "empty" at the moment.
The basics of me using Koala in AUM. I start a new AUM project, load in more effects slots (usually six slots total), and load Koala in the final slot, preceded by AUM's limiter so any recordings don't exceed zero DB and clip horribly (unless that's the desired effect I'm going for).
Oh, I also like to set the BPM no faster than 60bpm, but usually hovering around the 35-45bpm range.
Then, the other four effects slots (the first four before the limiter and Koala) are reserved for altering an incoming signal from an instrument AUv3, usually with phasers and shit if it's a pad or drone, or tasteful distortion like with FabFilter Saturn for a oneshot or a melodic passage, etc.
I use AUM's on-screen keyboard to play in the sound I want.
Now for each recording type...
Drones and pads are dead simple. Find an AUv3 you like with lots of LFO routing like, say, Megalit, or Twin 3, or Flowtones, and record it into Koala using AUM's keyboard. In order to keep your finger from falling asleep, press the "infinity" symbol towards the upper-left of the keyboard itself (not upper-left of AUM itself). That way you can tap a key, and it'll stay held down until you press the same key again.
In the four effects slots preceding the limiter and Koala, you can add anything you want to add movement and intrigue to the drone/pad.
After recording the pad/drone, turn on the looping mode for the recording in Koala and turn on crossfade mode so the loop doesn't have any clicks or pops and the drone/pad sounds seamless. Also, ramp up the attack and release sliders to the max. And don't forget to activate the "hold" mode.
Oneshots are easy. Find an AUv3 you want - say a piano sound, and record yourself playing a note on the "C" key in any octave. You needn't use the "infinity" symbol on the keyboard for this.
Again, you can add effects before the limiter and Koala. Then you can use Koala's sequencer to sequence a melodic motif or whatever you wish. And as I previously mentioned, you can reduce the chance of each note playing back to whatever percentage you wish. 100% means the note will always play. 0% means the note will never play.
My favorite method is Frippertronics. Basically, you load an AUv3 and use AUM's on-screen keyboard to record a melodic motif or rhythmic motif or whatever musical passage you wish into Koala. And make sure to leave silence after you record said passage for as long or as short as you want it. I try to vary the lengths of the silence of each recording (so one recording is 20 seconds long, another is 23 seconds long, etc) so that when you play back these loops, they drift in and out of sync with one another.
Anyways, activate loop mode and make sure "hold" is on. The start marker will be automatically adjusted to the first transient in the recording. You can adjust the starting and ending markers to whatever lengths you wish.
Anyways, once my loops are ready (no matter if drone/pad, oneshot, or musical passages), I get rid of any instrument AUv3 and effects except for the limiter and Koala. Then I move Koala to the top of the effects chain and keep the limiter as the last thing. This means there are four empty effects slots between Koala and AUM's limiter.
Anyways, my new effects chain before recording a live jam is like this...
-Koala Sampler
-One lush reverb AUv3 (usually Stratosphere Cloud Reverb, FAC Alteza, Baby Audio Crystalline, or hell, even Bleass Reverb, etc)
-Some sort of tape plugin (for me, I love either Klevgrand DAW Cassette or Baby Audio Taip)
-AUM's limiter only to catch possible stray peaks (although I usually set my levels super low so no stray peaks are possible)
Then I record the live performance within AUM, the recording of which ends up in AudioShare. From there, I share the recording to a folder in Cubasis 3 so I can master it further from there and then post to SoundCloud.
As I said, my brain is currently running on "empty" right now, so I'm not sure if any of this babble above is making any lick of sense. 😂 To help supplement your knowledge, I'll provide you this video.
My dear bestie Yvonne already shared the link for the eBook by @colorsinspace above. That's also chock full of information and inspo.
Hi and thank you both @rottencat and @jwmmakerofmusic! Yeah I bought the book immediately when I first saw it mentioned in a different thread the other day.
Looking forward to reading it! Thanks for the intense workflow write-up @jwmmakerofmusic ! The tips are great... I definitely need to start placing limiters throughout or being very mindful to set stuff lower at the very least. I think my favorite part was just seeing you mention the crossfade mode. That is something I always want with loops for ambient and I only learned very recently that Koala had added that feature like over a year ago! 
I totally hear you on the fx chains. Although I had been thinking that I would do the fx chains post-koala and use the multi-outs.... but I can see how they would be useful on the way in! Also, I am personally a huge fan of tweaking multi-band fx (like Saturn 2) before a big delay.
Excited to take a stab at Koala and outgrowth and all the other great ambient tools... just need to finish another project first before I start exploring new tools and methodologies
Limiters are great for mixing into on the master, but I would advise against using limiters on individual tracks. ❤️ Gotta let them breath afterall.
And for me, I sometimes put effects before recording into Koala, but I usually put a reverb and a tape effect and such after Koala while recording in AUM. I think for my next Ambient drone, I'm going to use Bleass Granulizer on the post-Koala chain and just go ham with the Ambient. In fact, I don't want to wait for tomorrow, and I don't care if I lose sleep. I'm going for it now.
Really nice @rottencat well done
If you use Drambo, there is this nice template using the multi outs with post fxs. I finally made my own, a bit simpler, but this was a nice starting point.
https://forum.beepstreet.com/discussion/3423/dire-koala-a-useful-sampler-rack#latest
Nice track @rottencat . Great atmosphere.
That's lovely @rottencat! Your visuals are cool, too. However, I would also like to see a screen capture of your workflow or tutorial using Koala. (You inspired me previously to purchase Koala, but I still haven't got around to using it.)
Nice workflow Jim, thanks for the detailed write up. Are you doing all this on an iPad or iPhone?
On my iPad Mini 7. I probably could also do this on my iPhone, but I feel the screen would be a little too small for live performing in AUM. More cumbersome. When I create on my iPhone, it's usually in Auxy Studio, the UI of which is geared for smaller screen sizes.