Any of you ever used a looper pedal LIVE?

[Dinosaur David B]

Unfortunately, my band probably won't ever gig since my bassist moved to LA, but I was thinking about how I might create some of my songs' guitar parts live as the only guitarist in the band. It occurred to me a looper pedal would probably work for some things. I'd have no issue with using it in theory, but I don't know how complicated it would be in practice. It doesn't seem like it would be tough, but I've never done it. :think:  Wondering if any of you have?
 

 
 

[merlo_zeppelin]

Funny that you bring this up. I began working as a cruise ship musician two weeks ago (haven't had the time to do a topic about it). The thing is now, I use a looper pedal every day, the thing is I use it for acustic performances, mostly to have something to solo over. A two pedal looper (like a Boss RC 30) is much easier to use, you can go crazy trying to double tap, triple tap, holding, etc, in a single pedal looper while you try to play at the same time. Also timing is key, both for your playing and for the stomping of the pedal. I have to get better at this. If you're playing on your own you can get away with less than perfect timing, but trying to sync your loop to a backing track is very hard.

[Vandenberg]

A very good friend of mine called Jon actually uses a looper for writing music for TV/films/ads and all other manner of things, he really has this whole thing down pat, so I asked him about this for you Dave, his advice was to use it as simple as possible in a full band set up, and to make sure you run it through and practice it with your fellow band members, to a certain extent think of it as a click track, you can do multi layers, you can use it to link triggers, and you can build real clever  layers that sound amazing,  BUT if your (you or your fellow band mates) timing goes off  be prepared for it to crash and burn big time, or get the hell out of the loop straight away, if you feel it's going off track, stop the loop and you and the band fall back to as basic a groove within your song context as you can, quick. 

Hope that helps.
 

[eduardoritos]

Forget the looper . 

What I do is a little portable with my daw, two stereo out sound card. 

Stereo 1, to PA, MUSIC TRACKS
STEREO 2, TO DRUMMER, TRACKS+ metrome. 

You only need a stereo mix of your backing track and a metrome track. 

You can activate and stop via midi footswitch. 

Or, tell the drummer to play/stop.



 
 

[Dinosaur David B]

Forget the looper . 

What I do is a little portable with my daw, two stereo out sound card. 

Stereo 1, to PA, MUSIC TRACKS
STEREO 2, TO DRUMMER, TRACKS+ metrome. 

You only need a stereo mix of your backing track and a metrome track. 

You can activate and stop via midi footswitch. 

Or, tell the drummer to play/stop.
 

Appreciate the sentiment, but that's WAY to complicated for my Dino brain. 
 
 

[eduardoritos]

Forget the looper . 

What I do is a little portable with my daw, two stereo out sound card. 

Stereo 1, to PA, MUSIC TRACKS
STEREO 2, TO DRUMMER, TRACKS+ metrome. 

You only need a stereo mix of your backing track and a metrome track. 

You can activate and stop via midi footswitch. 

Or, tell the drummer to play/stop.

 

Appreciate the sentiment, but that's WAY to complicated for my Dino brain. 
 
 

 

 

no, seriously, it's easy and cheap. 
I do use a second hand focusrite 2/4, and a little mini portable. Free reaper audio. 

Just do a mix with the desired tracks. I'd finished on that after different try/errors.

[iplayLouD]

Besides the fact that it's challenging to get it to be in sync with the band (or the band in sync with it), there's also the question of how you get your dirt.

If you run into a single amp AND get your dirt from it, loops + original guitar signal will drive the amp into mushy territory in a heartbeat. The best way to go about it is to have a separate amp for the loops OR to have a clean amp, get your dirt from pedals and run the loops through one pedal and the live single through another.

Messy.