FlyLoops Looping Studio

FlyLoops just got a brand new drumset (complete with its own drummer). No really, every drum can now be easily programmed to play very precise beats, with as much or little variation as you desire. Start out by dragging the mouse across the probability matrix on the drum – altering the chance that the drum plays at a given point within the measure. Not satisfied? How about adding a little swing, subdividing beats into triplets, or four or five subdivisions/beat. Maybe change the clustering (causing drum hits to clump together). Now drop the overall chance adjust and get a sparse rhythm that comes in as quick bursts.

It’s all possible with FlyLoops, and whats more, it’s all very easy! Take a look at the new video.

As a real time instrument, it is important to be able to customize FlyLoops control to allow you to set up midi control and keyboard shortcuts quickly and easily. Just completed for the new FlyLoops release is a versatile system for mapping virtually every command at the click of a button.

Just right click (or CTRL-click) on any FlyLoops button, knob or slider and you get a dropdown menu with a list of the currently mapped commands and the ability to change them.

All the parameters of the Beat Splicer are now midi learnable, so you can easily tweak your beats as you play.

The same is true of the visualization suite. All the parameters can be mapped quickly and easily to midi control surfaces so you can control the waveforms in real time. Or map the FlyLoops drums and turn any midi surface into a drumset.

In midi learn mode, you can see what items have been mapped, and what other items can be mapped.

Just a sneak peak at one of the newest features being developed for FlyLoops. The screenshot below shows the prototype for a type of equalizer that lets you draw your own filter envelope.


The filter variables are mappable to Midi commands, or controllable with the mouse, allowing users to change the way loops are EQ’ed in real time, using just one or multiple nodes so that you can choose to drop the middle tones but ramp up the high pitches and maybe just the lowest of the low notes – or grab a thin band of frequencies in the middle of the spectrum and let just those few notes bleed through each time the loop comes around. Special thanks to Gopal E for his help on this project.

FlyLoops can now load VST and AudioUnit plugin effects and instruments. What does that mean? Three things:

1) Guitar Amps/Effects. Live signals can be processed through audio plugins that act as guitar amps, or effects.  Thousands of guitar amps have already been modeled as plugin.  You can now add these to FlyLoops input channels just as if connecting a guitar amp at home.  Best of all, there are plenty of free amps and effects out there, see links below.

2) Turntable effects. You can now apply plugin effects, of which there are millions … free ….. to the FlyLoops turntables. This makes FlyLoops one of two programs to allow effects on turntables (Torq is the other), and the ONLY one that lets you record loops to turntables, freq shift to 64x normal speed, and quantize bpm and freq shifting.

3) FlyLoops now acts as a synth/sampler that loads plugin virtual instruments and will record them as loops along with the other inputs. There are a wide variety of free instruments available on the web (special thanks to 4Front technologies, for allowing me to repackage their piano and bass plugins to include with FlyLoops).

Some links to free VSTs:

www.kvraudio.com – Audio plugin news and links, a massive site with all sorts of new VST releases (free and commercial).

www.vstplanet.com – another great VST list, also very large and searchable for many types of VST effects and instruments.

FlyLoops v 3.0 is now available for Mac OSX.

The new Mac OSX Release (v3.0) is now available (free, with all live functionality and no time restriction, but no file saving capability).

FlyLoops is the simplest to use and most complete looper available, doing everything the classic hardware looper devices could (rec/stack/overdub/multiply/A->B side),  but allowing for greater live control of individual loops tracks (freq shift/tempo shift/effects/VST plugs/pan/vol), and giving the user new options (place loops on a virtual turntable console and start scratching, splice beats live using quantization to make electronica style beats, sync live to midi clocks).