“There isn’t a guitar teacher in the world who can do all of your practicing for you and there isn’t a magic video or book on guitar playing you can study that will make you a great guitar player simply because you watched/studied it.“
Looper pedals have become a big part of the curriculum here at Sinclair Music Studios
A loop pedal records a musical passage and then repeatedly plays it back on a loop. Once it is played back, most loop pedals allow for overdubbing new passages over the first one. Most loopers also can change the tempo as well as the direction (i.e. reverse) of the playback loop. This leaves a limitless blank canvas for creating different harmonic soundscapes and rhythms. Also not to be overlooked is the trusty “Undo” button to erase your mistakes.
Why would you want to loop? There are endless applications and situations for guitar players to benefit from looping.
Practicing guitar solo technique
Since a looper basically works as a kind of recording and playback device, you can use it to jam out over chord progressions. Record your first pass playing your chord progression. When you play the progression back, you can practice soloing or any other guitar techniques over it. You can also loop riffs to figure out perfect harmonies to play.
Songwriting
The above technique is also a great help while writing songs. There’s no better way to flesh out a melody than repetition. Looping gives you an infinite amount of time to perfect your parts. It’s also great for lyric writing.
Rhythm
The art of looping lies heavily on rhythm. The first passage needs to be recorded within the correct time to work properly. It will force you to have a better sense of time and rhythm. Though it may be daunting at first, if you can count to 4 you can learn to loop. Once you lay down a chord progression or percussive track, you can try out different rhythmic guitar patterns over it and experiment to see how they fit.
Performance
During performances I often use a loop pedal to fill it out the sound. If I am using the loop pedal with an acoustic guitar most times I will use the first passage to set up a percussive loop made by either palm muting strings or hitting the guitar. Next I’ll add either a basic melody riff or possibly a bass line. Once those are played back I begin playing live along with them or building the melody even further with the loop pedal.
Resource Links