Looptical A ‘Complete Music Production System’ For iPhone, iPod touch

looptical

MooCowMusic has released Looptical – a new app that turns iOS devices into a looping-based music studio.

Here’s what they have to say about Looptical:

Record your musical ideas on the go and mix them into a finished track, or use them as the basis for a new project back at your studio. Create looped sections of music and combine them to form larger musical sections until you have a finished song. Going from an initial riff idea to full track is easy with Looptical. Then mix the track with comprehensive effects and fully automated mixer controls, or export the MIDI and component audio tracks to your DAW when back at the studio to take your song one step further.

Here’s the official intro video:

The next video looks at starting a song in Looptical:

Features:

PLAY INSTRUMENTS

  • Play keys with a single or dual 128 key keyboard layout, complete with pitch/mod wheel.
  • Use the Scale Keyboard to play scales effortlessly by sliding a finger up and down the screen.
  • Strum your way through your own palette of chords with the Chord Guitar.
  • Use the Latched Arpeggiator to turn simple chords into sequences of notes.
  • Use Quantize to tidy up your performance, and Undo any mistakes.

GO FROM RIFF TO FULL SONG

  • Songwriting in Looptical involves creating Loops: building blocks for a song that could be a one bar bassline, an 8 bar chorus, or a 100 bar indulgent guitar solo.
  • Use the Loop Bank to combine, merge, repeat, and insert these Loops to form larger riffs, and ultimately a complete song.
  • Use the Event List to perform mass edits of notes, such as tweaking velocity, quantize or transpose.

MIX THE TRACK

  • Add and mix up to 24 stereo tracks with Looptical’s Mixer.
  • Add up to 5 Insert effects (Overdrive, Bit Crusher, Compressor, EQ, Filter, Chorus/Flanger, Phaser, Trance Gate, Delay) to each track, and a single Reverb Send effect.
  • All mixer and effect parameters are automated and changes are recorded directly into the song.

ADD VOCALS AND GUITARS

  • Record vocals with the iPhone internal microphone or compatible audio interface and add your own effects with live monitoring.
  • Control input with an intuitive preamp-style gain and noise gate.

INTERACT WITH OTHER APPS

  • Record audio tracks directly from any Inter-App Audio (iOS7) Instrument app.
  • Use Audiobus (requires purchase from third party) to send and receive live audio to other Audiobus-enabled apps.

MAKE YOUR OWN INSTRUMENTS

  • Import samples via iTunes Shared Folder, from another iPhone music app via the clipboard, or resample the current song.
  • Create an entire new instrument from a single sample, or add further samples for a multi-sampled instrument.
  • Edit your sample to trim, chop, loop, amplify, fade or reverse sections.
  • Export your instrument to use again, or even share with others via the Looptical forum.

USE AN EXTERNAL KEYBOARD

  • Plug in an iPhone-compatible MIDI keyboard and you can break out of the iPhone screen and compose using a full hardware piano keyboard.
  • Play drum parts by assigning piano keys to each pad, or effortlessly noodle a solo by playing the Scale Piano from the major keys.
  • Assign spare MIDI controllers such as Pan or Modulation to directly control automation parameters in Looptical insert effects.

Looptical is available in the App Store.

If you’ve used Looptical, let us know what you think of it!

11 thoughts on “Looptical A ‘Complete Music Production System’ For iPhone, iPod touch”

  1. I have to say, the “official intro” video is well done. The song starter vid is also pretty impressive.

    I think this kind of music creation is well-suited for the small iPhone/iPod screen. I wouldn’t call it ground breaking. Seems similar to Caustic and Rhythm Studio, but with a bigger feature set and better UI.

    These demos that show someone getting around on it very quickly are useful.

    I know I sound like a broken record, but it sure would be nice if the developers who are making these mega powerful little apps would think a little forward and all the app to make more kinds of music than what is popular yesterday and today. Maybe there are more scales & meters under the hood. If anyone downloads this, what meters are available? Can it change meters during the song?

  3. Alright. I bought this pricey app (13.99 Euros) right away, to have something for my daily busride. I have an iPad, too, but I don’t wanna present it in the public busses all the time since there are some shady people around quite often 😛 btw: Yes, no native iPad support. After testing it, I can see why: This app is perfectly made for the small iphone screen and it handles like a charm. Never found making music and tracks so easy on this small device. Nice results in almost no time. The only thing that drags a bit is the small selection of different sounds, although the ones provided sound very good and can be modified heavily trough all the filters and so on. Really great app so far! 🙂

  5. Damn, from the initial description I thought someone had finally made my dream daw.

    The arp feature shown in the song making vid is pretty cool, very good videos.

    But I really am looking for something different.

    Imagine you hit record, you play something live – a guitar, a synth – for me it’d be all mic or line recordings, no soft synths for me – and every iteration, every loop you play is recorded and layered, each on becomes a new track in the loop.

    You can then chuck bad ones, pull out some to be in the next part of the song, drag and drop blocks of loops to make arrangement along a timeline in an unlimited number of layers (tracks)

    So really similar to pro tools loops recording except you can keep every iteration rather than just picking one.

    And really similar to loopy, except each time the loop goes round it’s recording to a separate layer, so you can keep doing different things, and jamming over yourself, and picking and keeping or chucking or moving parts to be later in the song on a timeline.

    If I knew anything about programming I’d make it myself…. For ios

    2. From what you describe and what I’ve seen, Auria gets pretty close but without that layered looping. MOTU’s Digital Performer (DP8) has a thing called POLAR which also has that kind of functionality.

      1. I don’t know about Motu, can you point me to the features you find similar? I’ve tried nearly everything. The looping aspect is the key element for me, the idea that you can just record and have the computer sort it out for you almost. Or… More like a loop pedal, where each layer can be grabbed and edited, discarded or rearranged.

        1. MOTU is “mark of the unicorn” they have been around a LONG time and make a DAW software called Digital Performer which is a very powerful audio & MIDI production studio. It’s not cheap, but it has many unique features that set it above the rest. POLAR is this tool inside the DAW that allows you to record audio in a looped mode and manage the resulting passes in a logical and effective way. If you want the computer to make lots of decisions for you, then this is probably not going to do what you want. Polar will allow you to repeat a section and layer stuff or keep recording takes of a solo until you get one you like or just work on ideas. I don’t think there is a MIDI version of Polar in DP, but that would just involve rolling takes which is pretty easy to set up. http://www.motu.com/products/software/dp/features.html

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