looping

[Kevin Dean]

The loop funtion on my Roland GR55 just can't be made to work on live at gigs , are there any that can easily be used at gigs ? a small one would be nice . I'd use it on something like "Water front " Simple minds . cheers.

[radiophonic]

You mean 'play a passage, loop it, play over the top and hope the drummer is paying attention'? I use a Ditto. Very small. I do find the loop cancel a bit annoying though and put it in an LS2 loop so I can disengage the Ditto, delay pedal and volume pedal with one tap. That's specific to my gig though.

[thebassist]

Dittos are nice and easy to use. Seriously, if I can use them, anyone can.

[CameronJ]

The ditto X2 may be a more practical option though as it has an assignable footswitch which you can use to stop your loop without faffing around with press&hold functions like on the standard ditto. EHX do the 720 looper which is very similar in features to the ditto X2.

[Cuzzie]

+1 for Ditto X2 and you can have 2 instruments into it at the same time

[CameronJ]

Truth!

[Bobthedog]

Ditto X2 for me too, although I still struggle to delete old loops!

[burno70]

My band always wanted to use loopers but found it impossible keeping time (we use a click track). However I recently discovered that there's a couple of loopers with midi sync like the Boss RC30 and TC Electronics Ditto x4. We use a lap top to control the click track and samples so this could be a solution for us - and may also be what you're after?

[radiophonic]

It also depends on how much looping time you want. The flashback has a looper setting and with the launch of the Mk2, I'd expect prices for the original to crash. Small footprint was mentioned. I'm considering getting a FB2 and using 2 delays on my board for a mixture of looping, delay and modulation. I don't need more than 40 seconds of loop capacity though.

[ambient]

The TC Dittos are great, and very simple to use.

The only thing with using one in a band situation is to make sure that everyone can hear it, just to avoid timing issues.

[Dood]

I was reminded of this performance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyN-DCfxma8 - Mainly because there's a very tasty all black Fender Power Jazz Bass Special in it - but of course the delay pedal work on the bass line is rather cool too.

[elephantgrey]

I use both a boss rc50 and a digitech jamman express both synced to midi (the digitech uses a box called a syncman to do this). Just a bedroom worrior ATM, but would be comfortable using both/either live.

[Al Krow]

The Boss RC50 does look amazing but it's a bit of a beast in terms of size and I think the OP was after something "small"?

I've got an RC 30 on my board which provides 99 loop tracks and 3 hours of recording and plenty of options for live use made easy to access by 2 pedals. However it's still not tiny and the TC ditto x2 looks more compact and is £35 cheaper than the Boss.

More compact still is the Boss RC3 (and which is £10 less than the ditto x2), but which still allows for 2 inputs.

Maybe worth comparing the feature sets of these three pedals to see which of them meets your needs, Kevin? (For completeness the TC ditto is tiny, and cheaper by some margin, but seems limited in terms of functionality compared to the others mentioned above?).

[elephantgrey]

Well for small I went with the jamman express xt, but then it was my only option for a small/simple looper that could sync to midi (and even then I needed to get a 3rd party adapter to do it).

[radiophonic]

On 06/09/2017 at 16:54, ambient said:

The TC Dittos are great, and very simple to use.

The only thing with using one in a band situation is to make sure that everyone can hear it, just to avoid timing issues.

Agreed. I'm not sure where unity gain is supposed to be on the Ditto and I'm pretty sure it cuts a little bass anyway, but 3pm seems about right  - I think it's actually > unity but with some LF loss, any lower starts to get lost in the mix. 

[CameronJ]

On 16/11/2017 at 07:27, radiophonic said:

Agreed. I'm not sure where unity gain is supposed to be on the Ditto and I'm pretty sure it cuts a little bass anyway, but 3pm seems about right  - I think it's actually > unity but with some LF loss, any lower starts to get lost in the mix. 

I think you’re right. The dittos don’t seem to put out exactly what you put in. Feels like there’s a little EQing going on somewhere...

[Al Krow]

This piece of kit, the Ditto Jam X2 by TC could be a bit of a game changer for live use...

Has "beat sense" so the loop will speed up / slow down to match your playing. Be interesting to see how quickly it responds or whether it ends up being out of sync, but you kinda hope they've thought of that!