Boomerang III loop pedal, anyone?

[denmalley]

I've been using a boomerang for about a year now, graduating from the original Jamman (or I should say the original jamman pedal that digitech built, not the rackmount unit aforementioned). I spent a lot of time researching all the options out there, and even had the Infinity for a while before returning it.

During my research I was ruling out the boomerang due to lack of onboard memory - I liked the jamman's ability to store loops so I could pull them up later and study what I was doing with them - mainly as a practice/songwriting tool. But then I stopped myself and considered that I never use this function live, and that I could always record my practice session and listen to the building of a loop as it happened if I needed to.

I returned the infinity (one of my main gripes is that it was missing half of it's functionality without the extra $50 pedal - IMHO pigtonix would have done themselves better by including the pedal and marking up the price accordingly). Got the boomerang and have been in looping heaven since.

As far as tips, I have been working out signal routing options on this thing as I like to use it with vocals as well as guitar, and was also looking for the ability to add other instruments into the looping mix if desired. So I've come up with two different setups I use depending on the circumstances.

First, my simple setup, for smaller shows - farmer's markets, open mics, one hour opening sets, etc. The boomerang has two channels available - stereo in, stereo out, as it were, and as such can also be used as a dual-channel looper. So I put a mic into the "left" input and guitar into the "right" and have two separate channels to work with. The pedal manages this nicely, as in you don't have to worry about which "loop channel" you're working with - whatever you sing into the pedal with comes out the singing output, guitar out the guitar output. Even if you layer guitar and vocals on the same loop channel, they come out their own channel (one of the other downsides of the pigtronix, if you use it in this way the two loop channels on the device are split, one to each side). A nice simple two channel mix, and easier for the soundguy. I've even used this setup with an acoustic amp for smaller shows.

The more complex setup is for longer shows, if I have the whole night (3 hr set or so) I'll opt for this one - running the looper through one of the aux buses on a mixer. I use a post-fade setting on the bus so that each channel's mix matches the mix being input to the looper. The aux send goes to the input of the looper and then the looper's output is routed to an empty mixer channel (more control than aux return). I also turn on "through mute" on the rang so that only recorded material is output from it (otherwise you are doubling everything that gets played - output from the instrument's channel itself plus the throughput of the looper). This setup works great, and I've added a bass on a stand as well as a drum pad for recording percussion loops. Can basically loop anything you put through the mixer - and you can "turn off" things you don't want to loop by just turning the aux send for that channel all the way down. So I can play with others, all through the same mixer and only loop the stuff I'm dealing with if I want to.