If you’re a singer/songwriter, the reasons for owning a loop pedal are numerous. A basic looper will let you lay down an accompaniment for the solo break of a tune. A feature rich looper, on the other hand, can provide effectual madness for your impromptu arrangements, adding sudden glissandos or pitch freezes. Heck, with dual-track loopers, you can progressively arrange a song in real time, adding more and more elements as verses, pre-choruses, choruses, or bridges come into the fray.
Maybe you don’t need all the bells and whistles. Maybe you do. Either way, here are seven loop-pedals for the singer/songwriter, broken down into three categories.
Basic Loopers
Perhaps your tunes frequently have solo sections. Maybe you tend to write songs the way a contractor fashions a house: on a strong and steady foundation, always building upwards. Maybe you just want to get your toes wet in the waters of looping.
For these purposes, TC Electronic’s Ditto—a veritable standard in the looping world—gives you five minutes of looping time, unlimited overdubs, undo/redo capabilities, a super small footprint, true bypass, and, best of all, a sublimely simple user-interface. It also plays your loops in 24-bit uncompressed digital audio, while providing analog dry-through signal for your instrument.
Want that in English? The pedal is small, easy to use, and sounds great.
The Ditto is often considered the gold-standard of on-the-spot looping for simple accompaniment and layering. However, other models are definitely worth checking out, like the Wally from Hotone’s Skyline series. This little guy gives you 15 minutes of loop time, unlimited overdubs, and knobs that are easy to see on a darkened stage. True, you don’t get undo/redo, but the tempo/pitch control sounds quite fat and sumptuous (definitely more sumptuous than the pedal’s price-tag would suggest), enabling you to add creative textures to your loops (recording something, slowing it down, overdubbing a phrase, returning the tempo to its original BPM—raising the pitch of your overdub in the process, and so on).
Both of these are great options for giving yourself some accompaniment in a solo break and layering parts over a relatively static song. But if you need something a little more complicated, read on…
Feature-Friendly
Perhaps your songs have both a verse and a chorus; more than that, perhaps you’d like these “verses” and “choruses” to gain steam, accumulating additional sonic elements as the song progresses. Maybe you’d like to eschew bringing a band along to the gig, as you don’t want to pay them/deal with their egos.
Also, what if you wanted to add on-board effects—something atmospheric to spice up your arrangements? And, wouldn’t it be nice to save your loops to a computer, or even bring in pre-recorded material to trigger live?
If all that sounds like your speed, then you’re looking for something like the Electro-Harmonix 22500. This pedal sports two independent loops, 16 built-in drum patterns, reverse and octave functions (for sonic mangling), quantizing capabilities, CD-quality playback, storing options, and the ability to transfer your loops to computers for safekeeping by means of SDHC cards. With this stompbox, you can also plug a microphone into an XLR input and do funny stuff to your voice. All these options render this stompbox a suitable unit for singer/songwriters looking to make musical decisions on stage whilst looping.
If the Ditto was your first loop pedal, then you’d might want to check out the Ditto x4. The user experience and rugged enclosure are similar to the Ditto, and this stereo looper gives you both sync and serial looping modes just like the 22500.
That having been said, this pedal gives you some interesting additions, such as the ability to manage headroom by means of the decay knob. This feature enables loops to fade away over time at a rate of your choosing, thereby keeping the mix uncluttered. Also, don’t sleep on that FX trigger—you can use it to throw your loops into reverse, freeze their pitches for long swathes of time, play material back at half-speed, and more. This pedal also sports MIDI sync and talks to your computer via USB, so you can store your arrangements for later (or trigger the playback of prerecorded material from the pedal itself).
Other stompboxes, like the more budget conscious Lil’ Looper from Vox, give you similar two-track looping capabilities, but as a singer-songwriter looking for options, it’s important to keep one thing in mind:
If your song has a lot of moving parts, the two-track operation of these pedals might not accommodate you. In other words, you might have to play the bridge or pre-chorus of your tune all by your lonesome. Also, while some of these pedals sport the ability to play programmed material, any sort of further tweaking can be rather limited.
So if you want to go truly crazy with your looping options, check out the following:
LUDICROUS SPEED!
For complicated purposes, lots of folks seem to love the Boss RC-300, which offers three different loops, 16 onboard effects, an expression pedal to manipulate these effects, jacks for additional expression pedals, 3 hours of recording, and 99 phrase memories (if you’d like to program a set-list ahead of time). That was a long list, and we haven’t even begun to cover MIDI sync (for talking to host sequencers), USB (for backups) or its array of inputs (microphone, auxiliary, headphone). Like the pedals mentioned above, this one can operate in sequential mode—although the three stereo loopers at your disposal allow you to free yourself from the verse/chorus format, if you so choose. Also, this pedal is an evolution of the RC-3 or RC-30 in terms of topography, so if you’re familiar with those popular stompboxes, it won’t take you too long to get the hang of the RC-300.
That’s all well and good—but what if you need a little extra something-something? Enter the TC Helicon Voicelive 3, a pedal which offers most of the features listed above (three stereo tracks, USB backup, pre-recorded playback triggering, MIDI sync, etc.), and also add superb amp modeling and vocal effects into the bargain. For instance, if you want to give your vocals Eagles-style, three-part harmony that sounds scarily natural, this pedal has you covered; it actually follows the chords you play, as you play them, to ensure you’re tonally linked up. If you want to trigger more than one effect at a time between sections—instantiating distortion, chorus, and delay simultaneously—this pedal has your back, allowing you to program such a trick with relative ease. So in effect, you can trigger a backing track, change your complicated guitar sounds between sections, and instantly affect your vocals.
It’s safe to say that with a pedal such as this, you can accomplish everything from the most basic barebones jam to the faithful recreation of your record—and everything in between. What’s more, you can do all of this by yourself, in one set, varying up the listening experience for your audience.
So that’s our list for seven loop-pedals every singer/songwriter should check out. If you have suggestions of your own (I’m looking at you, JamMan fans), give us a shout in the comments section.
