Looper pedal in Pure Acid app

I just went on vacation and was away from my gear for a stretch, so I had a chance to focus on some iOS music-making apps for a change. One app that I fell in love with (and I know is popular among folks here) is JimAudio Pure Acid. What a great app!

One thing in Pure Acid that I really enjoy playing around with is the looper pedal. It’s great for grabbing little phrases and repeating them over the main groove.

For those of you who’ve used Pure Acid, but are also into hardware synths and effects, do hardware looper pedals function similar to how this one does? I’ve never used looper pedals, and I always kind of assumed they were traditionally used to flesh out a song and keep parts going while you added new parts (Marc Rebillet style).

What I love about this looper in Pure Acid is using it more for adding rhythmic texture, i.e., taking a single bar (or less) out of a random part of the song and looping it while continuing to play the song.

Does anyone have recommendations for a hardware looper pedal along these lines?

4 Likes

Yeah that is generally how they work, plus or minus some bells and whistles. For simple looping the Ditto X2 is popular, and it has reverse/half speed as well as looping. Some (pigtronix infinity) offer midi sync if you want perfect loops. My favourite stompbox looper is the Eventide Timefactor, which gives you smooth or quantized repitching, lots of overdub options and realtime access to the loop position and window size. Check this thread for more suggestions:

https://www.elektronauts.com/t/loopers

2 Likes

I tried using the EHX 1440 looper pedal for this, as it has a midi input for staying in sync. I found that the sync drifted (maybe they’ve fixed it in an update, I tried it right after release).

Since all my audio runs through my iPad in my setup, I ended up just using the Enso looper AUv3. That stays in time with my sequencing perfectly (though it has some other bugginess with some of its features).

I’ve met musicians who use their octatrack solely to loop material going through it. If I had mine around still I’d probably try it as well.

1 Like