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Hi James, I’m new here too but would like to take a stab at your
question. As long as everything you play live goes through the PA when you play
live (guitar amp mics, vocals, drum mics keyboard output, turntable mixer or
whatever else floats your boat) all you need to do is to run a stereo
looper through the effects loop of the house mixer. It can be done in mono but
stereo is much nicer because you can keep the placement in the mix how you like
it and play with panning as a powerful form of expression. You could even get a
panning pedal to use onstage and control it on the fly. There are a few hardware products that can handle stereo and
would be useful for something like this . “I'd like to be able to record say 2 bars then overdub a
32 bar loop over that, if you know what I mean” I know exactly what you mean and I believe the function is
called “multiply”. It saves a lot of time and makes everything much
more exciting. This actually narrows things down a bit though if you are
looking at hardware rather than software solutions like ableton live or
whatever else the software gurus on here recommend. It turns out not too hardware
many loopers actually have an easy to use “multiply” function. The best
solution in my opinion is two echoplex’s running in stereo but an
RC-50 or boomerang 3 could handle the job perfectly and are significantly
cheaper. Avoid the otherwise great EHX 2880 for this reason, this is what
caused me to sell mine, lack of ”multiply”. If I were doing it all over gain starting now, I would go with
the rang because for some reason I don’t gel with the RC50 at all. I find
the interface uninspiring and there are some timing idiosyncrasies with it I
just cannot get used to. Bear in mind, if you are not going to be using a PA at practice
that can handle everything you want to throw at it ( ie. if you have a
bitchy singer who gets upset when anything other than vocal harmony goes
through his/her PA, LOL), you can use one channel from the looper (the L or R)
to feed the amp for your main instrument (guitar in my case) and the other
channel to feed everything else from your small mixer into a full range system
like a small PA. The bose L1 compact would be perfect but is $$$$ or you can
use a keyboard amp/bass amp type thing. All you would need to do then, is pan
your main instrument (let’s say guitar for arguments sake) hard right and
connect the R output to the guitar amp. Then pan everything else hard L and
connect the output to the full range keyboard amp/bass amp small PA type thingy
(Used Roland keyboard amps can be had on the cheap and work fabulously for
this). In my case, all this was NOT cheap at all, but well worth it. I
have made the money back many times over by doing little “one man band”
cover gigs on the side here in my area. I actually find this is also a great
way to increase looping proficiency and saves you some embarrassing “what
do I press?” time when you are with your band. Hope this helps, Ace From: JAMES FRASER
[mailto:thejamesfraser@btinternet.com]
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