Looptastic is easy to use, but surprisingly deep. Here are some insider tips for creating more exciting performances.

Quick Mix
You don’t need to wait for all the sounds to load before starting to mix. As soon as a loop icon lights up, you can drag it to the playing field and begin your performance. You can even drag unloaded sounds there; they’ll start to play as soon as they’ve loaded. (This technique works best with percussive loops.)

You don’t have to wait for loops to load before starting your performance.

Hello, I’ll Be Your Fader

Play the Extremes
The Looptastic crossfader is a lot more expressive than you’d think. Tap the extreme right and left edges of the fader on the beat to create DJ-style transform effects. (Try tapping the filter screen on offbeats, too.)

Cue & Evolve
Move the fader all the way to one side, cue up some loops in the silent zone, and then snap the fader over to the silent side on the next downbeat. That will transition to a new section in your song. Repeat this left-right, cue-and-snap movement to keep the mix evolving.

Instant Breakdown
Put all the loops except a vocal into one side zone, and then quickly crossfade to the other side to solo the vocal. (Keeping a subtle hi-hat pulse going in the center zone — which always plays — helps propel the mix along.) Now drag loops horizontally from the silent zone into the center zone, one by one, to start building up your track again.

Right now, only the vocal (right zone) and hi-hat (center zone) are playing. Dragging loops horizontally from the silent zone (left) adds them back to the mix, creating a build.

No-Stress Performance Recording
Unlike most music apps, in which you click Record and then pray you perform something good, Looptastic is always listening. In Looptastic, you hit Record after you’ve played something great, knowing Looptastic has already captured it. This retro-recording design eliminates the “red light jitters” so many performers get. Then after you capture your performance you can play it back and even export a stereo mixdown of it.

Producer’s Cut
With the flagship Looptastic Producer app, you can really personalize your mix by importing your own sounds over Wi-Fi. (We call it Mashup to Go.) Looptastic automatically time-stretches your loops so they play in sync, but there’s also a hidden sound-bite feature: Before import, change the mode to One Shot on your computer. That disables the time-stretching so your sound bite plays normally. By setting the loop length, you can control how often it repeats.

Set sound bites to One Shot mode and Looptastic Producer will play them at the original speed. Control how often the phrase repeats by picking a bar length.

Export Control
One of our biggest customer requests was for a way to export recordings as high-res audio files. That’s now possible in all versions of Looptastic. (Except the free one, although even it captures your performance moves, so you can still record the iPhone’s analog output.) You can burn exported files directly to CD from iTunes.

Got a hot tip? Send it in! We’ll feature the best ones here, along with a link to your site or YouTube demo.