Looper Pedals

Definitely! A looper will accept any audio source that can be plugged into it. Some loopers, such as the BOSS RC-30, also have a balanced XLR input for accepting a microphone. This opens the looper right up to be used with vocals or anything else you point the mic at! And remember, this is AS WELL AS the guitar (or keyboard, or bass) being plugged into the quarter inch jack input. Your imagination is the limit of what these machines can achieve.

Yes, a significant number of them do! All of the bigger models including the Line 6 Pod HD500x and the Bodd GT1000 have a built-in looper but so do more affordable units such as the ZOOM G3XN. Looping technology has caught on so much now that everyone can enjoy it.

Single pedal loopers add functionality by introducing features that require double taps of the pedal or holding down the pedal with your foot for a second or two to engage secondary functions. This can take a little getting used to at first but the space you save on your pedalboard more than makes up for it...more room for fuzz pedals!

That's very much up to you. We recommend either right at the beginning or right at the end of your pedal chain but wherever you place it, you'll get different results. Think about this: if the pedal is at the end of your chain, you can feed lots of different effects combinations into it and build up dense, colourful patterns of sound. The loops will remain unchanged, allowing you to create a loop of clean guitar, then overdub a distorted line, perhaps followed by one with distortion and flanger, and so on. This can all happen in real time of course. If you put your looper at the beginning of your chain, you are essentially giving it your 'dry' guitar sound which it is using to make the loop and then passing onto through the rest of the effects on your board. You can then use your other pedals to affect the sound of the loop in real time. The loop will, for example, only stay distorted as long as the distortion pedal is switched on. Turning off the distortion pedal will revert the looper to its original clean state. Both ways are excellent fun...it is more a case of what you're trying to achieve! Some players actually use two separate loopers, one at the beginning and one at the end of their chain!

Well, the top end BOSS units (the RC-30 and the RC-300) have a huge 3 hours of looping time available, meaning they probably qualify for the longest looping time. However, to keep this in perspective: if you tend to use one or two loops per song, a 30 second loop played 6 or 7 times makes up the length of a whole song! If most band's sets take up half an hour, something like the TC Electornics' Ditto with it's relatively slight 5 minutes recording time is much more than you actually need! We would recommend picking a looper based more on the features you need (storage space, FX, amount of pedals etc) rather than a specification regarding recording time.