SHEERAN LOOPER+ REVIEW
Probably the most high-profile exponent of live looping lends his know-how and name to this compact looper
SHEERAN LOOPER+ £299
CONTACT Sheeran Loopers WEB www.sheeranloopers.com
1 Sheeran? I’ve heard that name somewhere before…
We dare say you have! Ed Sheeran has got together with HeadRush to create a couple of loopers to his own specifications and under his name.
2 Did you say a couple?
Yes, the flagship Sheeran Looper X with all the bells and whistles, plus this compact + model, which gives you the essentials at a much more affordable price point.
3 I can’t see myself taking one of these on stage...
Live looping isn’t for everyone, but this is a fine resource for general creativity and home practice, too.
There can be few people who’ve done more to raise the profile of live looping than Ed Sheeran. For years the stadium-playing troubadour has been doing live shows with just him, his guitar, microphones and a looper, building up layers of backing for his songs entirely on the fly. Who better, then, to have his own brand of looper? Ed had previously relied upon Boss loopers, graduating to a custom-built rig, but he has now co-designed two machines that are perfect for his workflow. The Sheeran Looper X (£1,199) is a large beast that has four tracks and eight footswitches with a whole range of functions assigned to them, but we’re looking at the twin-footswitch Sheeran Looper+, a lot less complex and certainly more affordable, although its basic functioning follows along the same lines. The Sheeran Looper+ is an extremely robust pedal with two die-cast aluminium pedal pads as footswitches, an intuitive 1.8 ‐inch colour screen and a large navigation wheel for data entry that’s surrounded by an RGB LED loop status ring that lights up red when recording, amber for overdubbing and green for playback. There’s stereo or mono input into the looper, so you can plug a single guitar in or perhaps take a feed from any stereo effects or an amp simulator. There’s also provision to plug in adynamic microphone. Output can be mono or stereo.
In Use
The looper has four different modes that define how you use it. The first and easiest is Single mode where you just use one looping track and build up limitless layers of your performance; the other three modes each utilise two tracks. Multi mode features two tracks with the same loop length, while Sync offers two tracks that can be different lengths but automatically stay in sync with each other. With Sync mode, the second track has to have a length that is a multiple or division
