- 1. Incredible Practice Tool
- 2. Enhance Live Performance
- 3. Creative Songwriting
- 4. Recording Potential
- 5. A Standalone Looper Effect
Looping is a curious effect. A looper pedal doesn’t have the same impact on your guitar tone as, say, an overdrive or a delay. But as well as its most common use as a practice and improvisation tool, it has the power to expand your creativity and even change the way you’re perceived as a musician. These powerful stompboxes can improve your guitar playing abilities and define your sound in performance and recording settings. Depending on the type of pedal you get, you’ll be able to add multiple looped phrases, time signature changes, stereo sound, built-in effects and rhythm tracks to your creative arsenal.
Here are our 5 reasons you should own a looper:
1. Incredible Practice Tool
A looper pedal might be the best guitar teacher you’ve ever had. It’s especially handy when you don’t have someone with you to play a repeating rhythm. Try looping a simple riff and put your fretboard knowledge to the test with a lead melody over the top. Work on what sounds good and experiment with any variety of technique you like, without your musical partner getting bored of playing the same section again and again.
Recording that first loop is a form of practice in itself. Playing a part so spot on it’s worthy of multiple repeats is a tricky art to master. It’ll improve your timing and encourage you to play to perfection. Even loopers at the low end of the cost spectrum such as the Landlord FX Happy Hour will serve you well if practice is the focus.
2. Enhance Live Performance
From one of the biggest names in popular music in Ed Sheeran (see the Sheeran Looper + and Looper X pedals) to the musical genius of Jacob Collier, solo artists rely on guitar looper pedals to flesh out their live sound. This is done exactly how you’d expect in a gradual build-up of looped phrases to give the impression of a full backing band.
To get the most out of a live looper performance, you might want to invest in an advanced looper station such as the Boss RC-600. These are like multi-FX units, housing extras features such as effects with expression pedal control, and potentially infinite loop repeats. Another perk of a looper station are the multiple loop banks, which let you transition from a verse to a chorus in a structured way. The result is a more natural-sounding song formed of multiple phrases rather than just one punched-in loop.
3. Creative Songwriting
Looping is a great method to discover what song ideas work well together. There are a couple ways to go about it. The first is to loop your rhythm section and play a lead part over the top, giving you plenty of thinking time to perfect your piece. It’ll ensure you’re in the right key and tempo.
The second is to dive into the functions of more advanced pedals such as the Pigtronix Infinity 2 to line up two loops back-to-back. Alternatively, you could use a DAW to do this, but it’s a bit more tactile to use a pedal at your feet and far less fuss to delete and re-record.
There’s also a chance you forget your new material the next time you go to play it. Saving ideas to banks on a looper pedal is a simple and effective way to jot down and recall everything you’re working on, and you can do this without sitting at a PC.
4. Recording Potential
You’ve got the potential to dive deep into looper capabilities while recording. Similar to a live performance, creating loops to track in an audio workstation is like building up your music from its simplest form into more complex layers, and back down again if you choose. But in this situation it’s less of a crowd-pleasing activity and one to take your time with in introducing the right textures. You can always go back and edit what you’ve recorded.
Recording is also where other effects and your looper’s inbuilt tricks come into play. You don’t have to play endlessly to make an interesting song. Sometimes it’s worth keeping the loop repeating while you experiment with the tone of the loop. Placing the looper before other pedals in the guitar’s signal chain opens possibilities to even more tonal manipulation.
5. A Standalone Looper Effect
It might not be possible to use every looper as its own effect like a reverb or delay, but a few particular pedals contain unusual effects to spice up your guitar tone. The likes of Electro Harmonix, TC Electronic Ditto and Boss pedals possess the ability to alter the speed, decay and modulation your loops and even put them in reverse. Arm yourself with a looper to produce these intrepid spirals of noise as you please. It could just inspire your next great song.
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