It’s the end of the 2 week tour with Alex Cornish and I’ve been asked a few times at gigs about the looper I’m using so – to kill time in the tour bus I’ve made a diagram!
I use the looper in songs like She Loves Sushi, Quicksand and No Rain and it lets me build up a song bit by bit by recording something like a beat-box rhythm and then making it repeat automatically while I add more layers and play over the top. To see/hear this in action, check me on You Tube here: She Loves Sushi
This hopefully makes my solo gigs sound more interesting than just bloke-with-guitar.
The looper I use now is the Boss RC-50. It’s my 3rd loop pedal and effectively it’s 3 loopers in one so I can create 3 independent loops and use them all at once, any one by itself or any combination of the three which is handy for different sections of a song. I use 2 microphones on stage – the main one is my normal vocal mic (controlled by the sound engineer) and the 2nd one connects straight into the looper. I use an A-B switch on my guitar signal so it either goes straight to the guitar DI box (bypassing the looper) or into the looper when I want to record guitar loops. This means I can record vocal loops while playing the guitar at the same time (without recording the guitar). The looper sends the combined vocal and guitar loops to a second DI box.
In the past I’ve used the Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeller and the Digitech Jam Man.
The Line 6 is a brilliant delay pedal that models classic delays like the Roland Space Echo. As a looper it’s a bit limited as it has a feature that dips the volume of previous loops as you overdub new ones. This can be useful but not for the way I want to use it live. They’ve since brought out the JM4 looper but I’ve not tried this out.
The Jam Man was a great pedal (it’s now discontinued) with XLR mic input and an Undo feature that could be used creatively to bring overdubs in and out but ultimately it’s not as versatile as the RC-50 which is why I’ve moved to that.
So there you are!
Tonight is the last night of the tour with our gig at The Portland Arms, Cambridge.
Just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who’s come to the gigs, everyone who’s bought my CD and finally a huge thanks to Alex Cornish for having me as the support act for every show.
If you haven’t bought Alex’s new album “No Shore” yet, you’re missing out as according to yesterday’s Sunday Times four star review it’s a “beautiful album that has Mercury Prize shortlist wild-card written all over it“!)
Buy it here: http://www.alexcornish.com