looper

[NickA]

Decided to loop some bass lines to attempt soloing over ...

There's a small loop function on my tc electronics flashback delay effect.  Trouble is, the volume knob not only makes the looped recording quieter, it makes the "through" / dry signal quieter too.  Not the case with any of the delay functions where the volume only affects the wet / "effect" signal.

Am I doing something wrong?  Are all loopers like this?  If I drop £50 on the TC Ditto dedicated looper, will it be the same?

[beans-on-toast]

This is how the Flashback Delay works. It's a limitation in their design. If they had a mix pot that balances the dry/looped signals it wouldn't be an issue. The Ditto doesn't have this problem as the knob sets the looper level.

 

Here's is a log winded explanation from TC:

"This has to do with the analog-dry-through feature and true bypass: 

Basically Flashback is never true bypass when you select looper. The reason why, is that we want it to be "armed" and ready to record as soon as you select the looper. If it was true bypass you'd have to first turn the looper on to active the effect, then turn the recorder on, to actually start recording. Obviously we couldn't be using one press on the footswitch to do both these actions, so we'd have to come up with some way of controlling "looper on" AND "record/stop" using to different footswitch "commands" (for example "press footswitch once to activate looper" and "press and hold to record"), which I hope you'll agree would be very annoying and not very intuitive. 

So the bottom line is that no matter how you set the dip switch on the back of the pedal, Flashback will always be in buffer mode when you select the looper. If you have Flashback in TB mode, it'll of course automatically jump back to TB when you select one of the delay types... you should actually be able to hear the relay clicking when you switch between the looper and delays. 

The reason why the looper controls the volume of the entire signal in loop mode is because of the analog-dry-through feature. The FX Level pot is an analog pot that mixes the wet signal with the dry AFTER the wet signal has been converted back to analog. In other words, we can't do any clever digital trickery to the wet signal (i.e.turn it all the way up when in loop mode), because the pot is analog. Because the looper is 100% wet and no dry as explained above, this means that the FX level pot controls the overall output of the entire signal."

[NickA]

Hey, thanks for that.  I couldn't find that info anywhere.  £50 on a ditto then.   Unless there are better loopers.  Bass direct have a ditto x4 for £95 ... But it's too big for my tiny pedal board.

[Baloney Balderdash]

The TC Electronic Ditto X4 would be everything I could dream of in a looper if it was not for the fact that it is limited to 5 minutes total looping time, all the right features, but I would likely use more than 5 minutes, so this is a thing to consider, of course if it the size is a deal killer that's it, but otherwise if all you need is 5 minutes total looping time, then it seems like the ideal looper to me.

A shame they didn't stuff more memory into it, or even better it having a SD card slot so you could just load it with whatever memory you'd want.

Hope they will make a version 2.0 where this will be possible. 

Edited April 12, 2021 by Baloney Balderdash

[NickA]

5min is enough for me.  Just to loop 16 bars of walking bass to practice over.  I'm no KT Tunstall!

[beans-on-toast]

This inspires me to use a looper.

 

 

[thack]

If you just want to record a simple bassline to jam over the Ditto is deffo a great one. The Boss Rc-1 is a good shot too.