Loop Pedal
 

With over 25 years of electronic innovation having been created since I messed with a guitar, I am in catch up mode.

I am looking to buy a simple and inexpensive loop pedal. $100 gets me a simple Boss RC 1. I would like to ask you guys to confirm an assumption. I am ASSUMING that once you record say the rhythm part and than play it back while playing the lead over it, that any effect you have dialed into the amp is heard when you play it back.

In other words, you record the rhythm, and when it is fed through the amp with your live lead it will sound the same out of the amp on the replay as it did when you played it live.

Hope my question and examples make sense and thanks in advance for your help and input.

I have that pedal too.

If you put it in the effects loop, it will play back what you heard when you recorded. It will not be affected by future changes to the tone, when you set up your lead sound.

If you put it between the guitar and the amp, all future tone changes will affect your recorded rhythm. One major problem (to me) here is that your signal will be bigger (rhythm and lead parts) and your amp will distort faster. It is near impossible to have a cleaner rhythm than lead tone in this context - unless you have a very clean amp and dial the output of that pedal back.

Effects loops are nice for this application.

Thanks very much Paul! So is there a way to make the rhythm/lead difference problem go away? With a different loop pedal maybe?

Just put the looper as the last pedal in your chain, and use effects (overdrive, boost, dist., etc. ) before the looper. The looper plays back the recorded part right into the amp unaffected by any tone changes before it. The guitar signal chain passes through the looper.

That sounds about right too. I play through a modeling amp, so its is either before amp (and 'pedals') or in the loop.

In this context, of course, the amp changes are still after the loop, so keep it clean and drive the lead with the pedals.

Good stuff guys! I think I have it figured out. My little practice amp has no reverb so I use reverb pedal, RV6 I think. I want to play the rhythm clean and the lead with reverb. So... I will turn off the reverb and record the rhythm clean, then turn on the reverb while playing the lead over it.

So, I will connect the guitar to the RV 6, connect it to the RC 1 and then to the amp. When I try this on my big amp I will have to rethink it, but my main objective is to play both rhythm and lead while practicing.

Thanks a bunch for the help!

If I am understanding your question correctly. Then yes and no
As Paule noted and far as I know what ever FX you have onboard the amp will be heard if you are running from the RC1 into the main amp input.... But if you have an FX loop on the amp AND it is wired to bypass your on board FX ( which it should be ) your loop pedal is being fed by the FX loop send from the amp > RC1 > Fx loop return to amp Then the loop sound will not include the onboard FX


I have one amp with an FX loop and one without.

So on the amp without the FX loop , which does have an onboard tube reverb and I almost always use it (albeit only slightly) so my loop sound does include verb,,,, BUT....Since I also have a Delay and mild OD pedal, my chain connection order is feeding from my guitar into the OD > Delay > RC 3 > to main amp input ... That way while the loop will have reverb, only the lead has the delay and or the OD in the sound

Looper
 

Although this is off track I'll mention it anyway. You need to keep one thing in mind if you ever want to record multiple loops over one another. Your first loop has to be your longest loop. If you overdub a loop and the first is shorter it will begin playing back before your finished with the second. That messed me up a bunch until other forum members told me what was going on. When it happens you'll understand.

I have the one button ditto by tc elctronics. It works great, sounds great and is very easy to use. Make sure you check that one out.

Tom

I have a one-button looper, the Nano 360 by EHX.
It's a good looper but the single button takes some, a lot, of getting used to. Push once to record, and once to play the loop, but then you have to 'double-click' to stop the loop. It can mess up your, my, timing.

More recently I bought the Flashback x4 by TC and it has multiple buttons, which is much more intuitive and easy to use in real time.

If I hadn't bought the FBx4 I probably would've traded the 360 for the 2-button Nano 720 which also has double the storage.

Thanks for all the comments, advice and even instruction in this thread.

I just thought I would post what I came up with: I bought a Boss RC 1. I set it up like I was instructed in this thread and it is doing exactly what I want.

I have an RV6 pedal which I connect the guitar to, then that connects to the looper, then the looper connects to a clean channel. I record the rythm clean, then play it back as I play the lead with reverb from the RV 6.

The fx I remember from the sixties is mostly limited to reverb, and tremolo in the amp and a fuzz tone box. Things have changed a bit during the ensuing fifty years or so.

That said, when I was in the sixth grade, circa 1960, we had a next door neighbor that was a guitarist for a band that played on local TV on Saturday Nights. My Dad and I would visit with him some times as he played and practiced on his couch. I remember him using a reel to reel recorder to play one part and then accompany it. I remember him saying that he stumbled across a way to delay with the tape recorder. Maybe that isn’t exactly what he was doing, because I was too young to thoroughly understand and now too old to remember if I had understood.

The same guy offered to teach me to play a guitar, but we were so poor, there was no way I could afford to buy a guitar even a cheap one.

Yes tape delay was one early method of creating an delay effect