In your DAW

Funk Drummer in Loopy Pro

Loopy Pro loads it like any other Audio Unit. The interesting part is the other direction: what Loopy Pro can tell the drummer to do, and how to make sure it never tells it the opposite by accident.

In every other host you set the drummer up and play. Here the looper is in charge, and a looper presses the same button over and over. That changes which MIDI messages you want to use.

Funk Drummer open as an Audio Unit inside Loopy Pro on iPad, next to the loop rings and the Loopy Pro mixer — Funk Drummer inside Loopy Pro on iPad. It takes a channel in the mixer like any other source, and its own window stays open over the loop grid while you work.

The one thing to set up first

A start that cannot become a stop

The obvious binding is Play/Stop, and it is the wrong one here. Play/Stop is a toggle: it starts if stopped and stops if playing. Put it on a widget that fires every time a loop comes round and sooner or later the drummer stops in the middle of your set, because the message arrived when it was already running.

Funk Drummer has four rows that exist for exactly this. Start does nothing if it is already playing. Stop does nothing if it is already stopped. Send either one twice, ten times, on every loop boundary, and the transport never flips back.

There are fill versions of both. Fill start comes in with a lead-in fill instead of a cold start, and Fill stop plays a closing fill and then stops. That last one has a detail worth knowing: tapping FILL ► on screen a second time during the closing fill cancels the stop, but Fill stop sent again does not. If your looper repeats the message, the drummer still stops.

The four rows and their default notes

What to bind to what

A widget that arms your first loop: Fill start. You get a count-in fill and the drummer is in time with the loop you are about to record.

A widget that ends the song: Fill stop. The kit plays itself out instead of disappearing.

Anything that fires repeatedly, a loop trigger or a scene you may hit twice: Start or Stop, never Play/Stop.

A footswitch you want to toggle by hand: Play/Stop is still there and still works the way it always has. Maps you saved before keep their assignments.

The Live Pads grid in Funk Drummer, with eight pads holding different grooves — Eight pads, each with its own groove, jam and intensity. From Loopy Pro they are one controller number away.

The eight pads

One controller number, all eight sections

Live Pads can be addressed by note, by control change or by program change, and which one is best depends entirely on what is sending. With hardware, notes win: one button, one fixed note, eight buttons and you are done.

From Loopy Pro the answer flips. A widget can send any controller number with any value you type, so control change is tidier: one controller number covers all eight pads, the value picks which one, and the rest of your MIDI range stays free for everything else in the rig.

That is the opposite of the advice for foot controllers, and for a good reason. Many pedals can only send one fixed value per switch, usually 127, so on control change they can never reach pads 2 to 8. Loopy Pro has no such limit, which is why the tidy option is available here and not there.

Two things worth knowing before you build the grid. A value of 8 or higher addresses no pad at all, so a stray message or a fader sweeping its travel will not change your rhythm. And addressing a pad that exists but is empty is not ignored: it fills that pad with whatever you are playing right now, jam and effects included, exactly as a long press would.

Every control and its default

A trap worth five minutes

Momentary, not toggle

On a trigger control the app acts on the press and ignores value 0, because 0 is what a button sends when you let it go. If a widget is set to toggle, it sends 127 on the first press and 0 on the second, so every other press does nothing at all and the thing feels broken rather than misconfigured.

Set those widgets to momentary, which sends 127 every time. The rule is value 0 exactly and not anything below 64: a velocity-sensitive pad sending its hit strength is still a press. Controls that read the value, like Jam, Intensity or the Live Pads themselves, take every value including 0.

Also worth knowing

Tempo, and the other hosts

Tempo comes from the host, as it does everywhere: inside a plugin the app's own MIDI tempo fader is the one control that does nothing. If you would rather run Funk Drummer standalone next to Loopy Pro, both speak Ableton Link, and either side can lead.

The same two Audio Units load in AUM, Logic Pro, GarageBand and the rest. If you are sending MIDI out to your own instruments rather than using the app's kit, load the one with (MIDI) in the name: same grooves, no samples, a fraction of the CPU.