I’m thinking of expanding my looping capability - mainly guitar.
My Line6 HD500X has a looper, but it’s not ever-so flexible in terms of putting the looper before delays and reverb.
I reckon I want delays and reverb to be common on the back-end, for generating stacked sound-scapes. Otherwise, they’ll be cut-off at the end of the loop.
So, I’m considering a Boss RC300, using the HD500X for pretty-much everything except delays and reverbs. Delays and reverbs to be done on the RC500.
Does that sound like a reasonable plan? Anyone here do this kind of thing for looping etc.? Any suggestions?
I used to use the line6 Hd500 looper, I’m sure you can set the looper to pre or post fx? Not sure if that’s the same on the Hd500x tho? Either way, if youre serious about guitar looping I’d recommend grab the rc300, way more flexibility/depth having the 3 separate loop tracks and parameters for each
I’ve tried all sorts of things to get decent looping with midi clock, so I could sync my midi gear with guitar or whatever else took my fancy (as a send from a small live desk). Boss units only seemed to work as midi clock master. Octatrack didn’t quite do the job. The best option I found was my MacBook pro with ableton live looper controlled by a Behringer FCB1010 foot controller. Works great, with great FX, I often set up a dub delay on one expression pedal, and something like a filter on the other. Reverse etc is also easy to set up. I only set up 3 loopers to keep it simple.
I never found one pedalboard that would do the job properly, with decent control of parameters, and midi clocking
When I got into looping and guitar for a while, I found Ableton and a laptop unstoppable. I think it was Michael Una that had a post about it on CDM years ago, you rip off all the keys off a qwerty keyboard except the ones you want to keep for footswitches, and away you go. The in /out and and off monitoring and live quantization, all the routing, its just so flexible. I loved that setup for a long time and it was how i made tunes for a good while. http://cdm.link/2007/08/get-loopy-with-the-diy-10-ableton-footcontroller-no-soldering-required/
I second those who recommend an ableton plus foot controller setup. I use an Octatrack currently for a lot of different reasons, but if that option isn’t your bag, try the ableton route. I used to put multiple looper devices on Live’s return tracks (busses) and just turned up the sends on my audio input track(s). Amazing looping potential.
Edit: if you try this configuration, just remember to select “no” (or “never” I forget) input on the looper devices (monitoring of the live input is never done through the loopers) so that you don’t end up with an ear/speaker damaging feedback loop.
Infinity looper is cool, and if you only need 2 discrete tracks or want “series” looping with some other tricks, it’s a great box. I sold mine to get an OT, though. I hear the TC Electronics Ditto X4 is great too and comparable to the Pigtronix.
When I was looking into looper recently the tradeoff of audio quality to features was frustrating… 16 bit is fine fir live and in lots of cases studio but I couldn’t justify in my mind, converting High quality audio to 16 bit before it’s recorded… doesn’t make sense to me so I went fir the best audio I could find over features as I wanted a studio looper at a decent price.
I went fir an x4 (on paper it’s plenty for my needs) and the the loop fx are nice, you can fir eg record half time on one pass then record a pass in reverse at double time then then play it all back in normal time to get some really nice textures on the fly…
however it has a pretty nasty bug that has been acknowledged by support where the loop makes an audible click with a bit of silence at loop point… I get round it by making a silent loop then leaving it overdubbing and just send to it what I want to loop but it’s obviously not ideal. As soon as you commit to a loop or use loop 2 you get an artefact at the end.
Edit - :(Annoyingly this isn’t mentioned anywhere I seen and was introduced in the last update but you need a pc to downgrade):
Other than that pretty big fuck up, that’s waiting on a fix, it’s solid and simple looper at a fair price with, I believe, the best audio quality… if they fix it…
I’ve been using a Boss RC-505 for some years now and I’m pretty pleased with it. once you get past the slightly flimsy construction and the lousy on-board fx it’s one of the most flexible loopers on the market, with some great features for electronic setups, like a MIDI sync that actually works, plenty of memory, the
ability to set up different sets and change between them without going out of sync and (a thing most loopers don’t have) 5 totally independent tracks! 90% of the fx are a bit lousy, but the beat-repeat and beat-shuffle are really usable, plus you can overdub those, so the fx actually get applied to the loop and you can keep glitching up your loop.
