This is my first looper and I was impressed enough with the specs to get one. Some of my apparent frustration with this unit is no doubt my own freshness at working with such a thing. My first foray was to try to lay down a couple of chords as a backing track using the included Drum beat on loop 1. I hit record, the count in in starts and I am off and recording. Not bad. But it’s my first take and I messed up the timing. But now after reading the thin manual and looking all around it seems you can’t undo or erase a track. You can hit the Punch In button and then you can re-record the track, but your original take is going to play back and you don’t get the count in. You can re-record silence over the top of the track to essentially erase what was there, but your loop length is still set by your first take. You can’t hit New Loop without erasing the Drum track on the Mix Down track, so you’re stuck.

I’m mystified as to how you could use this pedal to create any kind of conventional multi-part song. There is no copy function, so you can’t copy a Drum loop you to a blank position and create your master piece there with your new fresh take. Unless I’m missing something, it seems like these included Drum tracks are good for one take only, you can’t recreate a fresh start without resorting to computer manipulation of the WAV files on the SD card.

If you forget about the drum tracks it’s pretty easy to lay down a couple measure vamp to practice solos over, but then you don’t really need a four track device to do that, you can just get a cheap ditto looper and practice your scales.

After a few hours of messing around like this trying to create something resembling conventional backing tracks with drums to solo over, I decided to just forget that preconceived idea of what this unit should be. It seemed like I was bucking the true nature of this thing. I decided to try another approach and explore the really awesome faders which control your feed back as you record. After your first track sets the loop length, your second third and fourth tracks are now all the same length as track 1. You have essentially set the delay time. As you record these, the recording wraps around over dubbing whatever was there. As subsequent passes roll through the level on the fader controls the level of the old material on the track as it mixes into the live source signal. So you can keep going and it acts like a delay with a really long delay time equal to the loop length. The old passes will gradually fade at a rate based on the fader level so you can just keep layering and playing and the old material just fades away as new layers are build on. You have four of these to play with, so you have four tracks of really long delays that you can mix together and play with in real time.

It’s really fun to play with one track for a while, then leave it and pick another one and start layering that and so on, creating a slowly evolving tapestry, each track a cascading psychedelic thread in the mix. It’s very easy to interact with and create these slowly shifting real time delay tapestries.

To me it seems like this device is an awesome sonic trip machine with a kind of identity crisis being dress up as a conventional four track. The software is not really ready for productive use as such.

Maybe instead you need to be willing to go with the flow and not worry about creating anything extremely premeditated. It seems like in some ways this is the true best use of the pedal rather than seeing this as a conventional multi track recording device which also happens to loop around. It’s a mind bending texture building trippy fun machine!

I’m not sure if I wanted that though so at least right now I’m on the fence about keeping the unit, since I really wasn’t the market for that. But it’s so much fun I might just keep it and change my expectations of what the unit is best used for.