TC ElectronicDITTO X4 LOOPER Simple and Intuitive Dual-Track Guitar Looper Pedal with Powerful Loop Effects

I’ll start by saying that I researched loopers for almost a year before buying one. I read everything I could get my hands on and watched every video I find. I was about to pull the trigger on the brand new BOSS RC-600, which is a $700 looper. I was convinced that if I was going to get into looping that I might as well get one that I won’t need to replace down the road. Man I’m glad I didn’t do that.The first Ditto looper made its way into the the spotlight because if it’s ease of use and small footprint on a pedal board. But I’m new to this. I didn’t like the idea of click for this, double click for that, click and hold for something else and so on. From everything I’ve read, timing needs to be impeccable to use loopers effectively.While the more advanced loopers have tons of features, you can’t operate them on the fly. You have to spend a lot of time in the presets and even then you have to reach down and scroll through endless menus to get through the settings. I wanted something that was simple and could be operated solely through foot switches without complicated, overstuffed menus full of features I may never use. Enter the Ditto X4.For starters, it’s built like a tank. I was really impressed with how sturdy this thing is. What you essentially have is TWO single loopers in the same housing that can be made to operate independently, or synched together. What does that mean and why is that good? Let’s say you’re playing and putting down a basic chord progression you want to practice your solos over. So you record a loop on channel 1. You add some little flourishes to it by adding more layers, still on channel one. But then you want to add something that you will want to remove part way through the song. You can record that on channel two. If the two channels are synched, they will play in time together. Then you hit channel 2 and the dedicated “stop” switch (yes! A dedicated stop switch!) and your song goes on without messing up or accidentally deleting loops on your original channel 1 recording.OR…. You can run them independent of one another. This means whatever you record on channel 1 will stop when you hit play on whatever you recorded on channel 2. For instance, you can play the verse chords on channel 1, and chorus chords on channel 2. By the way, it works the timing out for you. So you can hit “play” whenever you want and the light flashes until it the next bar rolls around and then it starts automatically. You don’t have to have perfect timing.The other thing I like are the built in effects. Like “tape stop”, and “fade” among a handful of others. They are fun ways to add stops and pauses to your songs. The last feature is a knob in the middle that is a sort of “decay”. What this means is that you can loop infinitely if it’s turned all the way down. But the more loops you add the messier it can start to sound. As you turn it up, the lower loops will start to fall off. This means if you are doing extended performances you can shape and change the performance as you go, without having to re-do loops since you can’t delete the first loop if you have 10 more on top of it. I haven’t used this feature yet and maybe I never will, but I thought it was clever and a handy tool for those who may be really advanced at looping.To summarize this: This is a great looper for learning on. I got it as a practice tool because I liked the ability to have two channels (I don’t need 10) that I can play verse and chorus chords on. Most looper songs are stuck on a single chord progression because they can’t do more than that with one channel. I liked the simple, very user friendly controls as well as some effects to keep things fun. Price wise, it was 1/3 of the cost of the BOSS looper I was going to get and still not priced much higher than a basic one channel looper. Best bang for your buck from a company that has made a name for themselves in the world of looping. Oh, one more thing, it has midi inputs so you can synchronize it to something like a Beat Buddy or drum machine. Then voila! You’re a one man band 😊

I'm going to start off with a slight caveat which is that I haven't owned this looper for very long and I probably haven't explored all the features yet.Let me just say that so far this pedal is the perfect marriage of ease of use and powerful versatility. I've experimented with a lot of software and hardware based loopers. I decided it was time to go with a hardware looper since when you're playing variety or open mic gigs when you have to be on and off stage pretty quickly, you sort of need to be able to plug in and go... something hard to accomplish with software based loopers. Most of the hardware based loopers I had experimented with seemed to have limited functionality to create anything that would generate interest and dynamics as the song went on and seemed to be mostly meant for the guitar player who wanted to lay down a riff and practice a solo over it (useful, but not exactly a way to spice up your live performance). On the flip side software based loopers seemed to involve too many "moving parts" and became unwieldy when trying to layer or create secondary loops. Too much input was required to create the desired effect and distracted from the performance. What TC electronic has done is basically to leave the important parts to you and do the rest.Highlights of the pedal include; the sync/serial switch which allows you to either run both loops simultaneously or create loops that work as separate parts of the song, the all stop function and the ability to stop and start loops while remaining in sync individually. The FX section is a pretty cool added feature as well as the ability to independently control levels and the rate of decay of old loops as new ones are added (many of you I'm sure are aware that as intense overdubbing occurs, things can get a bit muddy). The sound quality of the unit is also amazing and the fact that you can add in backing tracks created in your DAW through the USB connectivity is pretty cool.My only complaints are that some of the switching is sometimes hard to accomplish. For example to stop an individual loop (i.e. stop loop 1 while keeping loop 2 running) it requires a double tap which for is sometimes hard to do without sending it into a single tap for overdub (perhaps this could be solved with external MIDI input, still looking into it). The other thing I think could be improved upon in this pedal is the versatility of backing tracks. At this point you can only load 1 backing track per loop button and any kind of MIDI input doesn't allow any further versatility there. I would like it if there were an interface through the USB connectivity that allowed you to program your preferred inputs for each command on the unit.Overall, this thing is fantastic, and besides a few quirks it's very intuitive and streamlined to use and will allow you A LOT of creativity with your looping. Personally I've been doing experiments with a mandolin going through a Boss OC-3 Octave Pedal creating pizzicato viola/cello like lines under my mandolin.