Re: The New Looper Thread
Headrush Looperboard is here from Sweetwater. This thing is massive and came in an absolutely massive box inside an even bigger box. Fortunately, it's not as big as all that when it's out of the boxes and Styrofoam and onto my desk.
First thing I did with it after unboxing was to hook up the included USB cord to my Mac Mini, and do a full firmware update. I know Randy had some problems with version 1 and I have now version 1.0.1.605d8cb. Hopefully they've fixed the many problems Randy had with it, and a few I saw online as well.
I've played with it just since last night, and I've only hooked up a vocal mic to it, and haven't even plugged in a single Stick, guitar, or keyboard. But man! The fun I'm having with looped vocals and being a beatbox! Imagine if I actually could hold a pitch without correction. This thing is soooo much fun.
It pitch shifts, and quantizes, and does half speed, double and quadruple speed. It will transpose up and down semitones up to an octave in real time.
It has a million onboard effects for vocals, most useful guitar effects, and a slew of general FX. It can route any of the 4 XLR inputs to any of the 4 outputs, including 2 XLR outs and 2 line outs, and a headphone out. (Plus it will take a stereo aux line). You can also input wave files via USB or card, or internal memory. There's 302 drum and percussion tracks built in, and it will record up to 9 hours of 48 kHz sound.
I'll have to make a separate posting in the gear section for this, when I get some video and also get some more familiarity with the Headrush Looperboard.
So far, I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to use and figure out. It's really extremely intuitive, and even though I've never used a multitrack looper before, I was able to get the hang of looping tracks, bringing them in and out, and adding to them, and bouncing them. Lots of fun but it'll take some work to get all the foot switches done in real time as I jam.
More to come! Tonight we hook up the bass side and the treble side XLR inputs of the Railboard (with onboard phantom +48 volts power) into two separate XLR inputs, and we have some fun with bass lines and then treble lines and then soloing on top of it all! Yowsa!!!