Looper Pedal

From the "there are always more fun toys necessities" file. Twice in the last few weeks I've seen what a cool thing a looper pedal is.

A couple of Saturdays ago, Darling Wife and I went to a local bar where they advertised live acoustic music. There was a guy with a guitar playing, and at one point we realized we heard two guitars at once - he would take a solo, but the chords of the songs were still playing. In between songs, he addressed that, saying that he wasn't playing to a recorded backing track, that he was using a looper and playing over himself.

I knew how that worked - it's a foot pedal, and you tap it once to start the loop, then tap it again to stop, then the loop repeats until you stop it. So if you set a loop of 8 or 12 or 16 bars of a song, it will keep repeating until you stop it, and you can play a solo over the looped chords.

Then on Tuesday night we went to an open mic, and a very talented guitarist also used a looper. He played a few bars of a chord progression to set the loop, then soloed over top of himself.

I have *no* intention of playing out as a one-man band, but the possibilities for using a looper to practice seem endless. It would be very cool to set up a loop of a chord progression and practice soloing over it.

Looking online, even the basic looper pedals are more expensive than I'm comfortable with - and they also have *way* more features than I want. I just want a very simple pedal that will store a few minutes of a chord progression to let me practice soloing and improvising. Some research shows that older-generation loopers are still readily available on eBay.

Let's just say that I'm monitoring the situation closely.