NLD - New Looper Day!

[bcdon]

Reverend Rawk's poll gave me GAS, and thanks to Ch0jin's comments I now have my first looper -- A Boss RC-3 Loop Station. Thanks for being such great enablers guys! :dude

Can't wait to get home and try this out!

 

[marnold]

Any time! Be sure to tell us how you like it.

 

[bcdon]

I really love this looper! It is so much fun to play that you lose track of time.

The Boss RC-3 comes with about 10 demo tracks installed so the first thing I did was plug it into my Mac and copied them for safe keeping. The RC-3 appears as a regular USB drive, so all you have to do is copy the entire folder. The drive contains 99 folders, one for each preset, so if you want to download a new trac, just copy your wave file into the appropriate directory. Works great, and nice and fast.

Speaking of the demo tracs, the RC-3 has a sweet Blues trac that I was soloing over it. Even though I'm still very much a beginner, it sounded really good! Better yet, it is so much more fun to practice with and I think it's helping with my timing (which isn't very good either).

One thing I did find is that the RC-3 does not work well with my One-Spot power supply. When powered in with the OneSpot there was a lot of noise and, worse yet, when cycling through the presets you can definitely hear the CPU clock of the RC-3. No worries, I pulled out an old Radio Shack wall wort, and it sounds perfect.

There are a lot of guys on The Fret that recommend getting a looper (thanks again, Cho!) and you can now add me to that list. These little things are a blast! :dude

 

[FrankenFretter]

Cool, Don. One of these days I need to get myself something similar. Glad you're enjoying that looper!

 

[bcdon]

Thanks, Sean! It's almost like having a real human friend to jam with! ;-)

 

[Ch0jin]

Awesome to hear Don! I knew you'd love the RC-3. You'll find your timing improves really quickly and if you're anything like me, you'll start working out what chord progressions match the scales you know pretty soon too, because there's one thing better than jamming to the built in tracks, and that's jamming to your own rhythm guitar!

One little word of warning though. Excessive use of programmed/looped drum beats makes real drummers often seem a little sloppy if you get to jam with them. I had a jam last week with another guitarist and a drummer, and I had to stop adding little rhythm loops as I played because they quickly got out of synch with the drummer. If only I could midi synch a real drummer........... The coolest thing though was after I gave up looping guitar (with two guitars and a drummer it wasn't really needed anyway) I started looping samples from movies I had loaded on my iPhone trying to get all White Zombie like. (sampling Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the living dead etc) Was HEAPS of fun.

 

[bcdon]

That sounds really cool! I haven't experimented with any drum applications (do people mostly use a PC for this or do they buy drum machines?) so that will be my next step.

 

[otaypanky]

I guess that's a newer model Don, I think I have an RC-2 around someplace. Now you have me itching to go play with it again ~
Here's a cool bassist who knows how to use one, check it out. This guy always makes me smile ~

 

[bcdon]

Hey Bob, that was so awesome! That guy has some serious grooves and it certainly brought a smile, thanks!

BTW, you should definitely bring out your RC-2. I think the only real difference between the two is increased storage.

 

[Ch0jin]

....
BTW, you should definitely bring out your RC-2. I think the only real difference between the two is increased storage.

And the USB connectivity. My RC-2 doesn't have that and would have been most welcome. To get samples into the RC-2 you have to use the audio in jack and there is no way to get them out (for backup).

I wish I knew how to make realistic drum sounds! I've been messing about with Reason 5 and can get some vaguely good sounds, but I really need some kind of midi drum pad thing to bash out my beats on. I get frustrated trying to program beats into a sequencer.