I’ve been a fan of loopers for a while now. I really enjoyed working on my little ambient solo project, something I want to pursue again when things settle down a bit. For that project, I experimented with Line 6 DL 4, Boss RC-3, but finally ended up with the Boomerang Phrase Sampler. Even though the Boomerang ‘appears’ more complex, in the end, it was actually much simpler to use. I’m a big believer in simplicity – don’t get me started about knobby delay pedals, so when I saw the TC Electronic Ditto Looper, it got my attention.
Here we have the ultimate in simplicity. One knob. One footswitch. Small enclosure. What?
Features that I thought they paid attention to – true bypass and analog dry-through. That’s was one of my biggest beefs with the Boss RC-3, it was noisy and I felt it colored my tone too much. The unit can store up to 5 minutes of loops. There no click tracks/USB ports, etc. You can perform undo/redo functions with long presses with footswitch. Unfortunately you have to do the double click to stop. Another feature I didn’t like on the RC-3. Hopefully, they’ll include a external jack that will allow additional function switches (ie: Skull Taps), but can’t see how they’ll be able to do that and maintain the small enclosure.
Here is a great video that explains the Ditto Looper by tcelectronic:
The TC Electronic Ditto Looper is available for $169.95 at Amazon.com. If you own this looper, please let us know what you think by commenting below!
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10 years ago
Got one last weekend and have been playing around with it for a few days.
I commend TCE on doing a great job with this one and not compromising on the design. Yes, they could have added more stuff, but if you want that you can buy this looper in a different form factor (Flashback).
It is true bypass / analog dry. If you are happy with the TB on other TCE products, there will be no surprises here. I haven’t tested the max recording time, but for my purposes 5 minutes is entirely too much.
Once you get the hang of it it’s very easy to control:
One tap to record, tap again to loop. Tap again for overdub mode (keeps overdubbing over and over until you tap again to leave overdub mode). To undo/redo you tap and hold – I thought this would be kind of awkward, but after you use this thing for a couple of hours it’s really easy to get the timing right. If you already have more than one layer, undo eliminates everything you recorded during the last overdub (could be many layers if you let it loop for a while in overdub mode), and redo brings it back. If you undo your first loop layer the unit simply stops and goes back to bypass mode.
Double click to stop admittedly isn’t the best situation, but it’s not terrible. I haven’t used this in a band situation yet so maybe I will change my mind about that later. Personally the most inconvenient command for me is erasing – double tap and hold – however this command can be combined with stopping the loop. So if you know you are stopping the loop and you need to wipe what you recorded, you can do both at once with a double tap and hold until the unit goes back to bypass mode.
Verdict – I’m pretty happy with the unit and it’s the first looper I’ve ever felt truly comfortable with enough to buy – in spite of the lack of controls and features, it beats the BOSS RC2, RC3, and RC20 at least for my purposes.
Also, I thought TC did a great job with the video.
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10 years ago
Additional comments:
Frequency response – haven’t tried out on bass.
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Size – it’s TINY! Fit on what I thought was a too-small space on my board with no reconfiguration. Now that I see how little space it takes up, am considering investing in a flip-flop pedal so I can have the looper both at the end of the chain (so I can have effected playing going into it) and at the beginning (so I can change effects on the recorded loops).
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