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Looper's Delight
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I'm so fascinated by taking unusual wave forms and slicing them into grooving patterns that I ordered the new BOSS SL-20 Audio Pattern Processor pedals before they had even been released. I've been very busy lately so it came a week ago and tonight I finally sat down with it. What major fun! This pedal will generate different rhythmic slicing patters from any input (and some slice patterns will just sound great with only the noise of a guitar inputted). I don't know it well yet, but there are several salient features (Including a simple onboard looping function_!_) that I thought you all might want to read about it. The pedal boasts 50 different rhyhtmic approaches but I haven't been able to get through more than 3 or 4 in the last hour and a half because they sound so good. The pedal can also be used in latch or momentary mode which is fantastic for jamming with yourself (especially if you are running , as I was tonight, through a digital delay). It has an onboard tap button and a cool lit metronone light that shoes a red flashing light on the downbeat of the rhythmic pulse and three green lights on the down beat (wouldn't if be cool if loopers came equipped with such a cool tool?) No only are there multiple rhythmic patterns , including some cool ones that generate harmonics and form very musical rhythmic patterns and some ones with evolving filters, but you can control the envelope of the pulses width, and attack and decay times. There are no progammable rhythmic patterns which could be cool and the machine is set to 4/4 with 16th notes for the most part (I did find one triplet shuffle feel as well and there may be more amongst the 40 or so rhythms I have experienced yet, but I'd be nitpicking to say that this bugged me. Essentially, with a simple fretless guitar (I just had my frets on my hideous pink strat removed today) and playing really simple single and double note melodies and chords, I was able to generate interesting grooves that would fit anywhere in electronica. This thing is just a dance composing machine as the simplest kinds of ideas can generate a lot to work off of and the sounds are great. I especially loved using harmonics and bar harmonics with the combination of the fretless and floyd roses whammy bar that's on this guitar With the looper included, you can hold down the on/off button for the rhythmic slices for 2 seconds as you play and then, the next time you hit the button, it will record a fairly long loop that seems to be automatically synchonized to the rhythm pattern (you have midi control too, though I did not play with that tonight)when you truncate the loop with another press of the on/off button. The next time you turn off the effect, it immediately erases the loop so it's great for improvising and playing with the grooves going and not going. I wouldn't use it as my only looper but the ability to loop something is awesome for me as a multi-instrumentalis. Several times I broke my neighborhoods sound curfew because I got a loop going that made me leap onto my drum set to groove with it. It is effective enough that it replaces the need for arpeggiated or sequenced synth lines that are so often associated with electronic music. I could concieve of myself hitting the stage with this, a guitar, bass, drumset and microkorg synth and playing a really covincing set of dance music for a party I'll write more as I know more about it, but I'm very, very happy I got it. Check it out if you get a chance. Rick Walker ps it also has cool stereo modes though I did not use them tonight pps it also an expression pedal to control several functions which I also haven't tried out yet.