Loop Station Review

Two week ago, I wrote about winning an eBay auction for a looper pedal, and promised a review once I received it. I've now been using the looper for a week, and here's my review - it's the greatest practice tool ever.

If you're learning how to solo or improvise, I don't see how you can do without a looper. You tap the pedal with your foot, play a few bars or a chord progression, then tap it again, and what you just played loops continually (until you double-tap the pedal to stop the loop.) While it's looping, you have a background track to practice improvising over.

It took me a little while to learn how to use it properly. I couldn't sync the timing of the loop, and finally realized that I was coming in on an off beat. I now pay attention to coming in right on the beat, and it works like a charm.

My looper (the Boss RC-2 Loop Station) has many features that I haven't yet used - I've only recorded a loop, then played it back. I could save eleven loops to play back later - but I'm doing very simple chord progressions - nothing so complicated that I can't just play it again next time. There are also drum tracks that can sync with your loop - I've played with that a little, but it's not necessary, and I've been fine practicing to just my simple loop.

Boss RC-2 Loop Station Auction

Well, that was fast. eBay is pretty amazing. I was looking at the current generation Boss RC-3 Loop Station, and thought that it had way more features than I would want, and cost more than I wanted to pay. One of the comments I saw on the RC-3 compared it to the superseded RC-2, so I went searching for that on eBay. There were plenty of  RC-2's up for auction, either lightly used or "new in the box".

I put a few of the RC-2 auctions in my "follow" list. Yesterday, as time was expiring on a "new in the box" RC-2, I put in a bid, and won it. So hopefully in the next week or so, I'll have a looper to practice with. I'm quite excited.

Stay tuned for a full review.

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.

Epiphone Casino

I am now the owner of a used Epiphone Casino guitar. I've been interested in electric hollow-body guitars, and the Casino specifically, for a while now. And I look in on the Craigslist "musical instruments for sale" section from time to time, just to see what people are selling. (As Darling Wife noted with raised eyebrow when I told her I'd found a guitar that I wanted to go look at, "One doesn't find without looking." And of course she's right.)

Late last week, I saw an ad for a nearly-new Casino. I wrote and said I was interested to see it, and after some back-and-forth, we settled on a late Sunday afternoon time when I could look at it. It appeared to be in pristine condition (in natural finish, as at right), so I played it for a bit, and we quickly settled on terms.

The Casino is most famously John Lennon's guitar. I'm not such a big Lennon fan that I have to have his guitar, but that is a cool fact. And the previous owner removed the white pickguard (which is shown in the stock pic at right) for a more authentic look, which I like and will keep. (I have the pickguard if I change my mind.)

I put a fresh set of strings on, and it sounds fantastic. So I'm quite pleased. Now begins the process of seeing just what sounds she's capable of - playing with the guitar settings, and seeing what different amp settings do.

I made a promise that I'm not accumulating guitars - that if I got this one that another would go. So my Epiphone Les Paul is now officially for sale. I've put the word out to my musician friends, and if no one bites, it'll be on CL or eBay very shortly. If I can get somewhere near what I paid for it two years ago, I'll have made a very nice trade for not very much money.

Recording: Audio Interface

I posted in December about my initial experiments in recording my guitar playing on my laptop. I ran a guitar amp's "line out" to capture an electric guitar, and used the laptop's voice mic to capture an acoustic guitar. It worked, though the quality was not wonderful, and I was able to record a simple multi-track project that I was able to make into an MP3.

That was basically step 1 - proof of concept. I was certain that it's possible to capture better quality sound, and my Internet research indicated that the first necessity was a USB audio interface. Instead of running amps or microphones directly into the laptop (with its rudimentary sound card), everything plugs into the audio interface unit, which then plugs (via USB) into the laptop.

Musician's Friend has any number of these, and I had a few in mind when I went into Guitar Center with Eric's (Christmas gift) gift card in my pocket. After a discussion with an employee there, I walked out with a Tascam TrackPack SE - an audio interface bundled with a nice microphone, closed-ear headphones, and Cubase LE5 software.

Cubase is an alternative to Audacity - the recording/editing software. It apparently has many more features, but is also considerably more complicated than Audacity, and I simply haven't had the time to go through tutorials and get a feel for it.

I've set up the audio interface, installed drivers, etc., and done a little playing with it, but I still felt like something was missing.

Once again, Guitar Center comes to the rescue. I'm on their e-mail list, and get a list of coupons/promotions just about every day. I noticed that they hold free recording workshops on Saturday mornings - a four week course in home recording with your laptop that repeats every month. Part 1 was yesterday, and I thought that would be perfect - rather than continue to fumble around, I could go and watch someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm very glad I went.

(To be continued)