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Looper's Delight
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For the last few years I’ve been pairing back my
effects usage while my Looping has continued to become more complex. With my
move to the Looperlative and its 8 track and bounce capability, I’ve
found less and less need for complex effects processing, and I’m sure it’s
also a matter of my tastes changing as well. I used to be a chronic chorus and
modulation abuser. At one time I even had a dedicated intelligent pitch
shifter, the Digiitech IPS33B. These days my tastes run to clean guitar, a
couple of flavors of overdrive, sparing use of compression, tap tempo delay (preferably
of the ducking variety), and good reverb. Recently I dedicated my trusty TC model
1 to my acoustic guitar rig, and went looking for a worthy replacement for my electric
rig. After reading a couple of reviews, I bought the entry level TC G-Sharp, a
strait forward 24 bit dual engine DSP (god I sound like a car salesman). The
G-sharp sounds fantastic, has great headroom and transparency, and has front
panel knobs for on the fly tweaking. It does an excellent job of 2290 style
dynamic (ducking) delay, but its tape simulation and lo-fi delay are just as
convincing. The reverbs are also wonderful sounding, even concert hall verbs
never get artificial sounding, and there is a color knob that lets you darken
the reverb’s tone. My only complaint is that you can’t increase
feedback to the point on oscillation like you can on delays like the line 6
DL-4, but since I rarely do that, it’s a minor complaint. Also, you have
a choice of either delay or modulation effects (excellent BTW), not both
simultaneously, as they share the same engine, and there isn’t a
modulation delay algorithm, but I really don’t miss that.. Otherwise,
this is an astonishingly good sounding effects unit, it doesn’t have many
bells and whistles , but its tweak-able like a floor effect, and what it does,
it does very well. I also bought a G Switch to control the G-sharp. This was a
major disappointment for me as I’m used to tapping tempo with a non
latching momentary style switch. The G-Switch claims to have momentary
switches, hell it even says so right on the box,” Triple Momentary Switch
Elements”, but the switches obviously have a very loud clicking latch
type feel and sound, rendering tap tempo clumsy, with the added insult of
sounding like a hoard hostile locusts cueing up for a swarm. I don’t know
what they were thinking, I thought it was a mistake actually, I e-mailed the
nice folks at TC, and after getting a, ” well, it works with my TC
Helicon” response, I took the guys advice and tried another manufacturers
triple footswitch pedal. Luckily my Digitech footswitch works fine with the
G-Sharp, and is half the size and weight of the TC G- switch. Now I’m
stuck with this clunky, noisy, bulky behemoth of a footswitch. If this sounds
appealing to anyone out there, I’ll let it go cheap J So I have paired my looping rig down too a Keeley compressor,
a mesa formula preamp, the G-sharp, and the Looperlative, with a midi
controller, and two pedals to channel switch the boogie and control the
G-Sharp. At Y2K7 I essentially used this rig, but I also dragged my big stomp
box pedal board, that I use on conventional gigs, along. I realized at the end
of my set I had barely touched any of my stomp boxes, and I had a bit of a revelation
that, Ah this has happened before... wasting energy setting up a mountain of
gear only to not use half of it. The other revelation that is somewhat obvious
is that in pairing back the gear I end up playing more music and spending less
time tweaking and thinking about sound design. Bill |