Daniel Park

A pedalboard that can grow with the musician

Daniel Park has been live looping since 2005, when seeing Howie Day perform with a Line 6 DL4 sent him toward his first loop pedal. The rig expanded from there: more pedals, more sounds, and eventually a Boomerang III that stayed at the center of his setup for roughly fifteen years.

Daniel now performs professionally with guitar, violin, voice, and loops, including busking and travel-based work where every piece of equipment has to earn its place. The old hardware did its job well, but every new musical idea made the board larger without changing its basic limits. The number of loops was fixed. Routing and effects lived in separate boxes. Adding an instrument or changing the way a song moved meant working around the architecture again.

He first saw Loopy Pro in other performers’ setups while working aboard Virgin Voyages. The discovery was less about replacing one looper with another than finding a performance system he could keep reshaping. The canvas, mixer, AUv3 hosting, routing, and control layers could all move with the show instead of defining its ceiling.

“Finally, I found something that can keep up with what I want to do.”

Start with the pedalboard you already know

Daniel’s template still looks and behaves like the hardware rig that came before it. Inputs occupy their own area. Guitar sounds sit in banks. Four loop tracks have undo, overdub, master, play, stop, clear, and peel controls above them. Tempo, tuning, output levels, and performance effects live where he expects to find them.

That familiarity is also his advice to new users. Rather than opening Loopy Pro and immediately trying to design the ultimate system, reproduce the controls and effects that already make sense. Learn the touchscreen first. Connect the interface and instruments you already own. Then add the deeper routing, plugins, controllers, and custom actions one piece at a time.

“I think anyone starting off on Loopy Pro, the best thing to do is try to recreate or emulate your pedalboard that you had before.”

A complete rig that still fits the journey

The current setup is built around an 11-inch iPad Pro and an RME Babyface Pro FS. The interface supplies four inputs, XLR outputs, and separate headphone connections in a compact unit Daniel trusts for professional work. A USB-C hub brings the interface, iPad, and controllers together, while a power supply of roughly 70 watts runs the system. For busking or situations away from mains power, a large battery bank can keep it going for several hours.

Control is split between an Intech Studio modular controller system and a Paint Audio MIDI Captain at his feet. The Intech modules give him physical encoders and buttons for vocal and instrument levels, effects, and preset adjustments. The MIDI Captain sends CC messages directly into Loopy Pro for loop recording, overdubbing, undo, playback, stopping, clearing, and peeling.

The instruments are chosen with travel in mind too: a carbon-fibre KLOS guitar, an OpenFab PDX 3D-printed violin, and a Shure KSM8 microphone. The modular gear, controllers, stand, and instruments travel in a Pelican Air 1615 case targeted at the 23-kilogram airline limit. It is not a tiny rig, but it replaces the expanding pedalboard and gives every component more than one job.

The routing protects the performance

Behind the pedalboard-like canvas is a carefully organised mixer. Each input has its own EQ, AUv3 processing, destinations, and bus sends. Colour assignments decide which source can record into which of the four loop tracks. Koala supplies drums in this setup and feeds only the blue loop, so a stray action cannot capture it somewhere Daniel does not expect.

Guitar sounds are built as separate mixer channels rather than one channel with an ever-changing effect chain. Clean, bass, overdrive, and other sounds each have their own processing, with only the selected channel active. ToneStack Pro supplies amp and pedal-style processing, while Taurus and bass enhancement turn the guitar into a convincing low-end voice. The violin follows the same idea, moving between its natural sound, a cello-like register, delay, and fuzz without rebuilding the input path.

Monitoring is equally deliberate. Daniel has separate controls for front of house, in-ear level, and click. The audience receives the stereo mix while the metronome remains in his ears. That lets him begin a song from a tapped tempo and private click instead of recording a drum layer simply to establish time.

Hands, feet, and glass all have different jobs

Moving the rig onto an iPad did not make Daniel’s performance less tactile. His feet still handle the loop actions that need to happen while guitar or violin occupies both hands. Encoders provide quick physical access to levels and sound changes. The touchscreen adds another layer that a conventional board cannot offer: swipes, visual feedback, and large controls for vocal effects, stutters, transitions, and full-loop transformations.

Shared reverb and delay buses keep the mixer efficient. Another bus collects the loop outputs so Daniel can filter, stutter, drop, or reshape the entire arrangement as a musical gesture. Plugins including Koala, ToneStack Pro, FabFilter Pro-Q 3, Transit 2, Other Desert Cities, Taurus, and BLEASS Reverb provide the sound palette, but the important part is how the canvas and controller mappings turn them into performance controls.

One toolkit for the unusual jobs

The value of an adaptable rig becomes clearest when a job does not fit the normal show. For a wedding entrance in New Zealand, Daniel prepared the large musical moment in advance, triggered it immediately, and sang live over it. The same system can combine prepared sections with live instruments, gain another loop, accept a new controller, or change effect chains without buying a new generation of hardware.

Much of the gear also crosses into his recording work. When he wants to record, Daniel connects the same interface and instruments to a laptop running Ableton Live rather than rebuilding a studio around a second setup. A recent release was recorded from a hotel room in Perth using that travel rig.

For a musician moving between streets, ships, weddings, venues, and temporary recording spaces, that continuity matters. The controls remain familiar even when the job changes.

“It actually fundamentally changed how I perform, how my live performance sounds. It sounds much richer and much fuller in the speakers.”

More control, with less rebuilding

Daniel’s walkthrough is detailed, but its central idea is simple. A fixed looper solves the problem it was designed for. His Loopy Pro rig can keep changing as the musician changes: more loops when the set needs them, different effects when the sound develops, another controller when the performance calls for it, and new routing without pulling the whole system apart.

That is why his starting advice is so useful. Begin by making Loopy Pro feel like the instrument or pedalboard already under your hands. Once that foundation is comfortable, the deeper system stops looking like complexity and starts feeling like room to grow.