Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Loopy Pro: I’m lost.
I’m starting to think I don’t understand the looping mentality because I’ve read this is a solid app without a lot of bugs. I’ve read the manual and watched quite a few tutorial videos. While it all seemed pretty straightforward, I’ve ended up with a mess that I don’t understand at all. I’ve gone down this road because I wanted something where I could improvise over a backing track, capture clips and rearrange them easily.
1). In the looper screen, I created a loop and imported an 8-bar backing track.
2) In the looper screen, I created a bunch of 12-bar one-shots figuring that I would not need a full 12-bars but with improvisation, you never know. I figured I would just trim them later.
3) in the sequencer screen, I recorded clips and trimmed them.
————-Everything working as I expected, at this point————-
I thought I would then use the looper screen to start the backing track loop and just tap the one-shots so they would start up on the next 8 bars of the loop. I played around with Ableton Live almost 20 years ago and that was my expectation for Loopy’s loop screen.
I have all of the one-shots set up the same way, but they don’t fire up one after another. In the video, the first one-shot (yellow) does exactly what I expect. I tap it and it wait for the right time to roll around and starts playing. Then I tap another one-shot (green) expecting it to wait until the first one-shot is done and play, but it starts playing immediately. Then, when they are both done, they look like they are waiting for the next round of the backing track loop to start up again and they just stop and wait for another round endlessly without playing again. You can also see it stutters, mid-loop.
Next problem. Trimming is not working as expected. I can trim a 12-bar one-shot down to a shorter clip in the sequencer view and it works as expected. But when I go to the looper view, it’s not trimmed. When I edit the clip to trim it, it doesn’t have the full audio present. See the second pic where the waveform is clearly clipped off at around the 8th bar thought it clearly reads that it’s a 12-bar clip.
Comments
@Sabicas : I can’t watch the wider right now. What is the play quantization setting for your one shots?
editing events in the sequencer does not change the loop. If you want to trim the underlying loop, you do that on the loop page by editing the begin/end points in the loop edit panel. Trimming a sequence event just trims that event. This allows you to have different parts of a clip play in a sequence.
There are probably just a few things about play and record quantization and the master cycle length to learn that will straighten things out.
Master
Ok, I can understand why that would be. But why is the tail end of the waveform cut off? It clearly isn’t displaying all 12 bars of audio. Listening to it reveals it abruptly stops so it’s not just a display issue.
When a one shot-plays is independent of when other one shots play. Tapping A then B doesn’t queue B the play when A is done. When you tap B, when it starts to play back is determined by its own play quantization settings and the master clock.
Do you want one shots to be mutually exclusive? If so you have to group them and set « one loop at a time ».
@Sabicas : some of the confusion might be because you are using one shots rather than “loops” (which can be set to play once if you don’t want them to repeat).
One-shots don’t use the same play and record quantization rules as loops. They exist to have elements you can trigger outside of that musical system
For musical elements, generally use loops.
If you use loops, you can do what I think you want a few different ways. One is to put the loops in groups set to “one at a time” and play quantization to loop. If a loop in the group is playing, tapping another loop in the group will queue it to play when the current loop finishes.
I typically use a different method. I usually have songs whose sections are different length. So I use free loops (not phase locked). I set up a group for each sing section. The group is set to play all loops in a group so that triggering the group plays all the section’s parts. The groups are set to be exclusive. So, tapping a loop in group b, will cause it to play when the current group is done.
I’ll try to find some time to make a quick demo but it might be a few days. I think once you are oriented it will seem
Straightforward.
Ok, I think I’m next going to start over from scratch and record all clips again as loops. I’m also going to record my loops on the looper screen instead of the sequencer to hopefully getter a better understanding of how it all works.
I’ll try the “free” loops setting, as well.
I’m determined to make this work and am hopeful.
@Sabicas
Stick with it
You won’t regret it
I keep jumping in and out, but it’s great and with @wim and @espiegel123 , they always have the answers
I have 4 days left on my 7-day trial so I gotta get my head wrapped around it. I won’t be able to dig in deep again till tomorrow.
Last night, I came to the realization that the mixer is powerful and pretty much can replace me having to use AUM with a DAW. At least that’s the way I imagine it.
Tip: rather than pre-set your loop lengths, use record count-in/out settings. If you want a fixed length, have “auto count-out” on. When you record, it will automatically record for however long the master cycle length is (or a custom setting). If you want multiples of a length, set master to that length and tap to stop recording at any time during the cycle you want to be the last.
There are options to allow even more flexibility. You can also end recording early by tapping again once the count-out has started. If length quantization is on, the loop recording will end on a measure boundary even if you terminate early.
@Sabicas : here is one method of setting things up so that tapping a loop will queue it up to play when the current loop finishes. The method I show will work even if the loops have different lengths:
Yeah, Loopy is a bit too convoluted for me. Just when I’d learn one thing, some other small setting would throw everything off and I’d be all at sea again. Unfortunately I never made it past that barrier to entry; in my experiments with it, I just didn’t jive with it. It is definitely for a newer generation of musicians who think about things in a completely different way.
Interesting.
In my experiments, it just did work.
Flawlessly.
And if I needed something else, it did offer all the options.
What would you expect for a default settings that works for you, or what is not right for you with the defaults?
Did you ever ask for help with what confused you? A few people said some like what you have said and after asking a few clarifying questions have found it straightforward.
Thanks for this! Some things have come up and I have not been able to find time to get back to LP. Maybe tonight.
Let me know if you have more questions. Loopy is quite flexible. There are other ways to set up this sort of thing.
@Sabicas : I got one thing wrong earlier in the discussion. One shots can have play quantization— it is a separate setting from the main play quantization. It can be none, master or custom (a fixed length of your choosing). So, if you are using fixed length one-shots, you could use them.
But I think loops will give you more flexibility.
@espiegel123 I didn’t have time to record anything new but i just moved my one-shot clips into loops and started experimenting with having 8-bars run against 12-bars in groups, play once, etc. It’s making more sense now and you are correct, loops are what I should have started with (as opposed to one-shots) as they are easier to understand for a novice.
One setting I had misunderstood was the “fade out”. I meant for it to fade out the audio at the end of the loop. For example, if I had a long sustain tail at the end of an 8-bar loop, I just want it to fade out before stopping. This is what I was asking about a few days ago. Instead, that setting plays the start of the loop again before stopping. So, I was getting the beginning of the phrase again and then an abrupt stop. That’s not a “fade out” that’s a “fade further into the next bar”. This is confusing and I heard it as glitching. I can’t quite comprehend the usefulness of this feature as opposed to fading out the end of a loop.
So, there doesn’t seem to be a way to fade out a clip at the end of the final bar unless I’m missing something.
A couple of things. You can set loopy to 'record tail' which will record the long sustain tail as an outro after the official loop 'end'. If you have an 8 bar loop but the reverb tail takes longer to die out then that will be capture and the part after 8 bars is part of the loop's outro.
If you want a fade out to start before the loop is done, use a play quantization such as none or custom (with the length of time before the loop end that you want to initiate the fade out. You can set up gestures or widgets that use a different play quantization and fade setting. So, you could set up a gesture that immediately starts fading out rather than wait to the end of the loop.
And of course, you could create special midi actions to do the same.
@Sabicas : here is a quick (sorry it is sloppy) demo of one way of setting up a fade out to to happen before the loop ends.