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Since its debut in 2010, the iPad has been a divisive entrant in the music gear space. The 2011 iPadOS port of GarageBand, Apple’s popular entry-level digital audio workstation (DAW), triggered an avalanche of iPad apps marketed to musicians on the move, and an endless stream of digital gadgets like virtual synths and drum machines have flooded the App Store in the years since.
The tactile flourish of a touchscreen gave Luddites the tools to chop samples and program drum beats with an efficiency that would’ve made J Dilla blush, but the novelty of such pursuits became a substantial roadblock to ever being taken seriously by those with pro studio bona fides.
With the 2011 freebie Gorillaz record The Fall serving as a more famous exception, iPads were rarely the hub of creation for notable records in the 2010s. Half-cooked DAWs and underwhelming soft synths were the norm, and none of this added up to an experience that could replace a popular desktop DAW like Pro Tools, Ableton Live, or Logic. Pair that with the lack of a standout audio interface that played nice with Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector, and you were left with an oversize iPhone that was fine for chord charts, Wi-Fi-controlled mixers, corny backing tracks for airport lounge pianists, and very little else.
For years, we all knew iPads could offer more than these one-and-done musical experiences. As of last year, thanks to an app called Loopy Pro, I have finally found portable audio nirvana. Here's why it's my favorite iPad DAW, and why you should give it a shot.
Taking iPad Music Seriously
Everything changed for iPad recording in late 2022, when Apple ditched the Lightning port for USB-C, which finally allowed any class-compliant USB-C audio interface to join the party. In May 2023, it upped the ante with an iOS version of its pro-grade DAW, Logic. A day later, through sheer coincidence, an upstart developer from Australia called A Tasty Pixel released Loopy Pro. At that specific moment the iPad became a serious music-making device.
As the name connotes, Loopy Pro is a DAW that’s marketed primarily as an iPad-based alternative to a loop pedal. A generation of guitarists have utilized stomp boxes to record a phrase, play it back in a loop, then continue playing additional parts over it. It’s an essential songwriting tool that encourages musicians to workshop arrangements on their own, but it really shines in a live setting when a capable musician employs a looper to conjure a towering wall of sound with minimal assistance.
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Anyone who’s seen Ed Sheeran (who has his own signature looper) is familiar with the gimmick, and foppish coffee shop minstrels have beaten the format to a meme-ified death. Cooler musicians like Minus the Bear, Deerhunter, and Andrew Bird prefer the Line 6 DL-4 for their glitchy microsamples and intricately-layered tapestries of melody, and in 2018 the ubiquitous snot-green pedal was anointed by Pitchfork as “the most important guitar pedal of the past 20 years.” Sheeran’s pedal has done nothing to advance the artform, but Loopy Pro is an affordable and approachable piece of tech that is on pace to change the game entirely.
Getting Loopy
After plunking down $29.99 in the App Store (it’s iOS/iPad OS-only for now, with a 7-day free trial), you’re greeted with a black surface that houses a handful of color-coded rings, or “donuts,” as Loopy Pro loyalists call them. Press any donut, then release it to start recording. Press it again to stop recording and start an infinite loop, and a master BPM for the session is automatically computed by the length of that loop. All other loops are then quantized to this tempo. Press a donut with one finger while it’s playing to stop audio playback. Press it with two fingers during playback to start overdubbing.
These behaviors can be adjusted on the fly or in the program's default settings, and it’s incredibly easy to trim samples and mess with the playback speed and direction of loops with just a few buttons. For most casual users the fun will start and stop there, yielding a tactile and instantly gratifying music-making experience. Throw in a USB-C audio interface—try the PreSonus AudioBox GO ($80) if you’re on a budget, or the Universal Audio Volt 2 ($189) for a luxe option—and a Bluetooth MIDI pedal like the M-VAVE Chocolate ($42) and you’ll be ready in no time to spend 10 minutes reassembling “Wonderwall” piece by piece outside a nearby train station for change.
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For pros and power users who nerd out about things like MIDI mapping, sequencing, and automation, Loopy Pro is a wonderland of customization and inspiration that will serve as the central control hub of your studio after a bit of careful tinkering.
Click the pencil icon at the bottom of the page to view the array of widgets that can join (or replace) your donuts in the session view, which can be divided into a near-infinite number of pages that are accessible via tabs or custom mappings. One-shot loops are great for percussive sounds, while the clip slicer can point to an existing loop and automatically map each of its buttons to a specific “slice” of the loop, allowing easy glitched-out goodness that fans of IDM heroes like Aphex Twin and Autechre will immediately love.
An X-Y pad mimics the functionality of a Korg Kaoss Pad, with each axis being freely assignable to any combination of knobs, buttons, or faders within the session, as well as external MIDI devices that are connected via the 5-pin MIDI ins and outs of your interface, or MIDI over Bluetooth (BLE) if you’re allergic to cables. The latter takes about a minute to set up, and Loopy Pro’s MIDI mapping mode uses a standard “learn” method that can be as simple or complicated as you’d like it to be. Map one incoming MIDI message to as many widgets as you’d like, or do the inverse to make a single button-press in the session view adjust an infinite number of parameters on your outboard gear on the fly.
Just Bring Sounds
Loopy Pro doesn’t come loaded with any sounds of its own, so you’ll need third-party plug-ins to supplement your audio recordings with things like drums, synths, and effects. The AUV3 format is the gold standard for plug-ins that work seamlessly within iOS DAWs, and the amount of high-quality options available for free or just a few dollars in the App Store is staggering.
To create a track, simply open the mixer section of LP, click the + icon in the lower right-hand corner, select “Add Audio Unit Input,” select your plug-in, and a new channel automatically populates with your selected plug-in as the audio source. A similar workflow is utilized for external audio sources from an interface, Bluetooth MIDI sources, and MIDI plug-ins, which are essential if you’re into sequencing or manipulating MIDI messages in weird and creative ways before they’re routed to internal or external devices.
The mixer uses color-coded groups in lieu of channels, which is the one facet of Loopy Pro that takes a bit of getting used to. Assigning different colors to things like drums, bass, vocals, and guitar helps keep things tidy, and the eye-catching contrast of the neon-color donuts and widgets against the black background makes LP easy to keep track of in any environment. Hardware inputs and color groups can be routed to the master bus or an infinite number of buses via discrete send knobs that are either pre- or post-fader, or other color groups that can resample separate audio sources that are merged into a single color group and loop.
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While it’s a breeze to cultivate a collection of loops in just a few minutes, one area in which the DAW lags behind is in the tools, or lack of, that are on hand to convert these loops into an actual song. A pancake-shaped icon toggles between the session view and the sequencer view, which opens what looks like a fairly standard arrangement window. The record button presents two options: “Record Audio” or “Record Sequence.” The former records whichever audio loops are playing to a master track, while the latter records actions such as button presses, knob turns, and loop activations to the track sequencer.
Fans of Ableton and Logic will miss an easy workflow for drawing in sequences and automations by hand; however, A Tasty Pixel is well aware of this limitation and has promised to add a more robust arrangement-focused sequencer, along with live MIDI looping and a handful of other tweaks, to the next major update of the program. For now it might be easiest to export your loops for external arrangement, either in bulk with the “Export” button located in the file menu, or one at a time within each loops clip editor screen.
No Limits
In practice, the utility of Loopy Pro is limited only by your imagination and the CPU power of your iPad. It’s remarkably stable, and the program's official Facebook group is constantly abuzz with posts from users across the globe who are giddy about gigging solo with Loopy Pro as their backing band, or flexing with screenshots and videos of their elaborate multipage setups that control a mountain of hardware with just a few buttons.
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After a week of tinkering with the program, I’ve mapped every last button and knob on all 10 MIDI-enabled guitar pedals on my board, all of which are controlled from across the room thanks to the software’s easy pairing with a CME WIDI jack, which receives MIDI messages from Loopy Pro via Bluetooth and converts them to standard 5-pin MIDI that’s routed to the pedals. A single X-Y pad in Loopy controls the mix and feedback on five different reverb and delay pedals, while another controls the clock and length settings on a Chase Bliss Mood MKII in real time for jittery, glitched-out bliss. Prior to this approach, the Mood was a baffling “happy accidents” generator. With the help of Loopy Pro I’ve turned this erratic piece of kit into a more predictable supplement to the conventional effects on my board.
If you’re a normie Apple user with plans to upgrade your iPhone in the near future, you’ll end up with a device that can capture audio via a USB-C interface without even going out of your way to add another iPad to your arsenal. The simplicity of a standard loop pedal like a Boss Loop Station ($120) or a TC Electronic Ditto ($139) might seem like a more affordable and immediate option, but you’ll hit a ceiling in no time once you move beyond the basic use case of stacking a few guitar tracks on top of one another. Loopy Pro, on the other hand, is fully customizable and nearly infinite in its recording time and customization. A few users even created and shared templates that replicate the Ed Sheeran Looper X, if milquetoast arena folk is your goal but $1,999 is too hefty a price tag.
