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Old 01-15-2019, 09:57 AM
beninma beninma is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2015
Posts: 813
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You could do a lot worse than purchasing the following:

- An amp (You already have this)
- A looper (TC Ditto is the one for me, dead simple so less to learn)
- Something like a Beat Buddy Mini

You don't have to plug your guitar into the Amp necessarily if you just want to have something to play drums/metronome for you, but the looper with an acoustic will let you lay down a part to play with.

An amazing practice tool setup. My setup is with the Beat Buddy before the looper, I typically record the Beatbuddy + rhythm track into the looper and then turn off the beat buddy.

I have a ton of iOS apps that can do rhythm stuff but I kind of feel like they all suck compared to the Beat Buddy. The Beatbuddy is super no-nonsense and works really well. The majority of the iOS rhythm apps don't do any time signatures except 4/4 without swing which is highly annoying. (I think the target market is probably EDM) Another thing that drives me nuts is a lot of iOS apps will just stop playing when power saving kicks in.

The only thing I wish the Ditto had was a line in to pump backing tracks through the amp. But my AMP doesn't have that. If your amp has a line-in you're set, although I still think it's better when the looper has it, as you can then loop any music as a backing track. I previously had a Digitech Jamman that did have a line in but that looper was stupendously overcomplicated and so I traded it for the ditto.

Smartphone music playback apps are horrible about letting you loop an A-B section too which is really annoying, a looper with a line in will let you bypass that completely. The one app I have on my iPhone that will do an A-B loop is the Yamaha THR app, it's a very useful app that doesn't really have anything to do with the THR, but even then it will only let you A-B loop songs that you have purchased from the Apple iTunes store. It doesn't help you at all if you bought the music elsewhere or have a streaming music subscription.
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