How do you guys use loopers?

I never really 'got' loopers until I bought one of those dinky little TC Dittos. It kinda changed everything and now I'm in deep.

I know everyone and his dog is using one now but bear with me.

What I loved about the ditto was that I could do my songwriting on the fly in the rehearsal room without having to have any other hardware. Play the chord sequence into it and then start working out other parts on the fly -- bass, drums, whatever. And I started to realize I could use it live too for ostinato parts and such.

Then it broke. But also suddenly some dude with a deal wanted one of my guitars, so I sold it to him and used the money to get an RC300 looper. This thing is mindblowing for me, because I can put guitar, bass and vocals through it and route them all to different places, and stack three different independent loops. As a songwriting tool it's out of this world. Put down guitar riff, put down bass line, jam on drums, sing some... it's just wonderful in the rehearsal room.

But I'm sure there's more I could do. A lot of my friends use them live when playing solo and I can see how that might work. But I'm interested to know how you guys are using them, if at all.

posted by unSane (16 comments total)

OK, deafening silence. I guess no-one uses them?

The two vaguely non-standard things I've done so far are

1. To route the left and right channels differently -- left channel is guitar, right channel is bass, and they go to guitar and bass amps respectively. This way I can make loop 1 a guitar part and loop 2 a bass part. I'd like to be able to have a third routing for keyboards or vocals. This is FANTASTIC for jamming with yourself in the rehearsal room, a completely different energy than doing it in your studio.

2. Laying down an ostinato part in a live setting. We have a couple of songs where there's a guitar figure on the demo that repeats pretty much throughout. We've been trying looping this and using it as a click for the drummer. Still ironing out the bugs (it's a monitoring issue really) but it sounds kind of amazing when it works.
posted by unSane at 4:20 AM on June 28, 2013

You could start with posts tagged with Loop / Loops.
I don't have any fancy way to use my looper. I plug my guitar in, and add layer after layer.
posted by nicolin at 7:29 AM on June 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

I use them as a generative thing, and use several in my chain, all purposely out of sync, so that they just keep churning out new kinds of atmospheres and interactions while I'm building on top.
posted by sonascope at 7:55 PM on June 30, 2013 [2 favorites]

I got an RC60 and every time I try to figure out how to get going with it I spend hours trying to figure it out, then give up in frustration and let it sit in a corner for another six months before I try again. The levels are never what I expect after I record a loop, the loops don't seem to start and end at the right times, there are modes that are only vaguely explained in the manual and after a couple hours I have one paltry loop going and I'm angry and sad.

I'm guessing that's not the answer you're looking for though.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 10:03 PM on June 30, 2013

Here's a video of me working with a pair of loopers. One is the late, great Electrix Repeater, which is an amazing four track looper (essentially four loopers in parallel) with the (for me) super useful ability to multiply the loop so I don't get stuck with one short loop, and because there are faders, I can mix the elements as I go. The other is the looper in a Stereo Memory Man (with Hazarai), which is lovely as a warping tool, with the ability to speed up and slow the loop with a knob. Of course, my music is pretty amorphous and drifty, so such things may not be useful to most.
posted by sonascope at 3:19 AM on July 1, 2013 [4 favorites]

I've got loopers but haven't got around to using them... This Minus the Bear rig rundown shows how they use them (and convinced me to get several).
posted by drezdn at 5:38 AM on July 1, 2013

sonascope, what kind of guitar is that?
posted by dubold at 5:45 PM on July 2, 2013

It's a '59 Multivox Premier. Despite the super-glam glitter parts, I'm told it's a pretty crappy guitar, but I'm no guitarist, so it's all the same to me.
posted by sonascope at 7:29 PM on July 2, 2013

Hey, that was a really cool piece, sonascope.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:12 PM on July 3, 2013 [2 favorites]

I've a Boss RC-30 - I use it for making backing tracks on the fly when busking on the underground and... that's about it. Haven't got into the live looping thing yet. Not sure if mine is the right tool for that job - certainly it seems much harder than it should be to make simple rhythm guitar / bass / drum loops, and that One Touch Delete button screws me *every* single time I do it. Every single time. I haven't got a single backing loop I haven't had to record twice.

It's great though.
posted by motty at 3:25 PM on July 15, 2013

Oh yeah, and the levels thing. The levels you record at and the levels it plays back at are apparently randomly generated.
posted by motty at 3:26 PM on July 15, 2013

I always wanted an Electrix Repeater, but 1) damn they're expensive, and 2) I gave up hardware long ago. I use Propellerhead's Reason a lot, so I ended up making a plug-in for Reason that had everything I wanted from the Electrix unit.

Here's the first song that I tried with the plug-in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQUOSY_Tyr0 (It's a cover of Such Great Heights by The Postal Service)

I point it out because there's a running commentary using the captions on how it's put together.

That's how I use loopers.
posted by ochenk at 7:52 PM on July 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

Mainly for creating a buzzy, drone-y type noise underneath everything else that's going on (see here, about half way through). The randomness and ability to reverse, overdub and slow down the loop helps with live stuff. The looper on the Pod HD500 works pretty well, but when we've needed accuracy I always come rather unstuck, hence the introduction of a sample pad instead.
posted by srednivashtar at 4:09 PM on July 31, 2013

Thanks for the responses!

The way I use it has pretty much settled down now. In the band situation I can use it to put down an ostinato riff with a click going to the drummer (the separate outs are super for that). We have a couple of songs where that works.

But most of the time I'm using it as a songwriting pad, which it's great for. I come up with a riff, play it in, then keep working with it on different instruments, and replace the loop every time I make some progress. Eventually I can get the whole song in there. And if I get bored I go to a different memory and work on something else. It's very different (and more immediate) than doing the same thing with a DAW or a recorder of some kind. The built in cheezy rhythms are pretty useful for this too.
posted by unSane at 4:50 AM on August 1, 2013

unSane: "But most of the time I'm using it as a songwriting pad, which it's great for. I come up with a riff, play it in, then keep working with it on different instruments, and replace the loop every time I make some progress."

I scored a free copy of RiffWorks, which I use in a very similar way. They have a limited free version, for those interested in testing out this way of playing. There's the added annoyance/friction of having to work with a computer, though it's nowhere near as finnicky as using a regular DAW.
posted by vanar sena at 12:49 PM on August 4, 2013

2. Laying down an ostinato part in a live setting. We have a couple of songs where there's a guitar figure on the demo that repeats pretty much throughout. We've been trying looping this and using it as a click for the drummer. Still ironing out the bugs (it's a monitoring issue really) but it sounds kind of amazing when it works.

This is what the singer I work with does. We're just a duo, so if she wants anything more complicated than just a guitar and a bass to accompany her she's got to loop it. She'll do a really cool thing where she builds up the layers of the loop. She'll have a prerecorded guitar loop, sing a verse, add a layer of guitar that loops, sing another verse, add a layer, etc. It works out pretty well, and people will come and tell us after all the shows and say how cool they thought it was.
posted by Gygesringtone at 7:56 AM on August 5, 2013