Looper

The LOOPER records what you play — post-FX, at the level you hear — and loops it with the band, locked to its downbeat. Lay down a rhythm part, then solo over it.

The plate

A 3U plate in the right column after JAM. Left to right: the REC pad under TAKE and the PLAY pad under LOOP (the band's PLAY measure), UNDO over CLEAR, the six LENGTH keys in two rows of three, and a screen as tall as the pads with the loop as bars and a playhead over them. Collapsed, the header reads the length (4 BARS) or what the loop is doing.

The loop's level is the LOOP fader in VOLUME.

Recording

1. Pick a LENGTH.
2. Press REC. With the band playing, the screen reads REC ON THE NEXT ONE · 4, and on the one: RECORDING · BAR 1 OF 4. After the last bar the take plays on without a gap, and the screen reads PLAYING · REC ADDS A LAYER.
3. With the clock stopped, REC starts a fresh clock and the looper counts one bar in on its own click (COUNT-IN · 4 … 1) — the band does not start. Join it afterwards with SPACE, D or J; it comes in on the one.

The take is recorded after the FX chain and the GUITAR fader, so the loop sounds the way you heard it. It is audio: a new key or chord does not change it, so record in the key you will play in.

Layers

While the loop plays, REC (now DUB) arms a layer from the top of the loop — LAYER 2 FROM THE TOP OF THE LOOP — writes it for exactly one loop (LAYER 2 · BAR 1 OF 4) and then reads 2 LAYERS. Up to four layers in all: the take and three dubs; a fourth dub is refused (FOUR LAYERS IS THE MOST). UNDO takes the last one back, a layer being written included. REC on a stopped loop does nothing — a test loop was once lost to one keypress.

With the band

• SPACE holds the loop with the band and carries it on in place; the screen reads HELD · SPACE CARRIES ON.
• RETURN is "done": the band and the loop stop, the clock resets. A loop playing on its own counts as the band for SPACE and RETURN.
• A stopped loop (STOPPED · PLAY COMES BACK ON THE ONE) re-enters at the next downbeat, from its top, the way the band does.
• The tempo is pinned while a take exists. GRID's BPM refuses, TIME is disabled and the readout says PINNED · LOOP: the loop was recorded at that speed. CLEAR frees it. A tempo or meter change from anywhere else — a song loading, the wizard — clears the take, and the plate says CLEARED · TEMPO. A sample-rate change on an engine restart clears it too (CLEARED · RATE); a same-rate restart keeps it, silent for at most a bar.

When REC is off

The reading says why:

Why it does not drift

The first looper ran on a wall clock, cut the take on whatever audio buffer came next, re-scheduled the loop point every pass and compensated no latency — and never felt right. The new engine:

• anchors the loop to the band's downbeat as a sample number on the timeline every node in the engine shares;
• writes the take by each buffer's timestamp, not by when it arrived;
• plays back by index arithmetic in a render block — nothing is scheduled, nothing restarts, so the loop point cannot jitter, and STOP, HOLD and PLAY are click-free;
• subtracts the interface's round trip, so a note you heard on the one comes back on the one;
• re-latches the anchor to the downbeat once a cycle, so drift never accumulates.

Measured on an AIR 192|14 at 44.1 kHz: fifteen bars of a one-bar loop against the drums strayed from the loop point by at most 4 samples.

Keys

L records or dubs, ⇧L plays and stops, U takes a layer back, ⌥L clears — a pedal's two switches and its hold, listed with every other key on the shortcuts page. The looper has its own tour: INFO → LOOPER.

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