LOOM Overview

LOOM is a live looper for Apple Silicon Macs, built for hands-free performance. You can loop by hand the way you would on a hardware loop station. You can also draw those same button presses on a timeline, and when the arrangement plays, it records, overdubs, plays and stops the loops for you, and changes the mix and the sounds as the song goes. That leaves both hands free for your instruments.

Hands-free performance:

• Each track has a lane in the arrange view. Draw REC, DUB and PLAY regions on it. Empty space means the track is stopped.
• Press PERFORM FROM TOP, or send one MIDI note from a footswitch, and each region fires at the exact sample where you drew it, through the same engine that handles a press by hand.
• You can take over at any time. PERFORMANCE STOP hands control back to you while every loop keeps playing, which is useful when you want to stretch an outro or take another solo.
• Start from bar 1 or from the playhead, and jump to a bar during the song.
• If any region cannot play correctly, LOOM does not start the arrangement and tells you what to fix. The idea is that you find a problem while setting up, before you are in the middle of a song.

Automation

Automation lanes sit below the regions. They can change:

• Track levels to the main mix, the headphone cue and both effects buses, plus pans and mutes.
• Effect bypass and any effect setting, in any of the eight effect slots on any strip.
• Any synth, drum machine or sampler setting.
• Which sounds are loaded. A node can load a whole effects rack, a single effect preset, a synth preset, a drum kit or a drum pattern at the bar or beat you choose. The lane shows the name of what is loaded, so you can see which sound each section of the song uses.
• Which instrument track your keyboard plays. A MIDI IN lane can move your keyboard from the synth to the sampler at the chorus, for example.
• The harmony effect's key, for a song that changes key.

Each automation node keeps its own copy of the settings, so editing or deleting a preset later does not change a song that used it.

Looping by hand:

• Five stereo audio loop tracks, up to four minutes each, each recording from any mix of your interface's inputs.
• One ring control per track. One press records, the next closes the loop, the next overdubs, and the centre of the ring shows what your next press will do. There is no arm step.
• Start and stop immediately or on the beat, bar or loop, per track or for the whole song. Set a length of 1 to 32 bars and the recording closes itself.
• SUM or REPLACE layering, with undo and redo per track.
• A free-length first loop can set the tempo.
• Clear must be held for a full second, so a stray press cannot wipe a loop.

Foot and pad control

Every track and the transport answer MIDI notes on their own channel, 16 by default. Each track gets an octave with the same seven commands in the same order, and six global notes handle all start, all stop, all clear, transport start, transport stop and perform from the top. A MIDI monitor in every view shows the last message LOOM received.

Instrument tracks

Four instrument tracks loop MIDI through LOOM's own synth, drum machine and sampler, played from any class-compliant keyboard or pad controller. Because LOOM loops the MIDI notes, you can change the preset, kit or instrument while the loop plays and it keeps playing with the new sound. Record quantize keeps a copy of each take as you played it, so you can tighten the timing afterward or turn quantize off again. Each overdub pass undoes separately:

• Synth: two oscillators with a sub and noise, a four-type filter with its own envelope, two LFOs, glide, unison and an arpeggiator that follows the song's tempo and can play several held notes per step or strum them.
• Drum machine: the step grid is the loop itself, with per-step velocity, accent and ratchet. Each synthesised drum layers two sources and can ring through a tube or string resonator.
• Sampler: load a WAV or AIFF and play it across the keys, or use SLICE to cut it at its transients with one slice per key, for vocal chops. Factory presets include drum, guitar and voice samples.

Mixer and effects

Every input, track, bus and the master has eight effect slots. The built-in effects are a six-band parametric EQ over a live spectrum, compressor, tempo-synced delay, reverb, noise gate, chorus, octave, transparent overdrive, guitar amp, cab, harmony, gain stage and tuner. Save one effect as a preset or a whole chain as a rack. One switch sets every fader in view to MAIN, CUE, FX 1 or FX 2, and the pre-fader cue mix gives you a separate headphone balance on its own outputs.

Recording

Press RECORD and LOOM saves the whole performance as synced WAV files: one per loop track, instrument track and effects bus, the main mix, and groups you build from live inputs, tracks and buses. Drop the folder into a DAW and every file lines up at zero.

Built for the stage:

• LOOM makes no network connections. LOOM checks the license file on your Mac once at launch, so a license check can never interrupt a set.
• The memory for every loop is reserved and locked before you play.
• Every control can be reached from the keyboard, and LOOM announces state changes through VoiceOver.

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