Syncing Rytm with a Looper pedal

I play in a three piece band, with the rytm as ‘the drummer’.
i receive midi clock from my band mate’s analog 4.
i was thinking about adding some loops (i play guitar) that go in sync and quantize with the tempo from the rytm/a4. anyone tried something like that? it is doable?
i know that the heavy candidates are the pigtronix infinity looper, eventide timefactor h9, and boomerang 3, but i heard of drifting issues from lots of them.
also i heard about just using something like a digitech jamman and putting the same tempo as a preset and pressing it and presto, it should work.
any ideas or suggestions for this?
thanks!

1 Like

my reply was asinine…

i misubderstood

Hi,

what about the octatrack?
its a great piece of gear and is totally fun to use it as a mulitple looper + midisequencer + sampleplayback (even whole tracks) all at once…

i also connected the octatrack to a boss loop pedal… i think it was the RC300…
the violin player looped herself in the Boss one, while i was looping myself in octatrack with OP-1 and Prophet 08… works perfect… (RC was the master tempo)

… the OT is great, but at first a little hard to learn (but if you already know elektron from AR…)… boss is straight forward (press and play) but not so good in terms of soundquality… maybe you try it out in a shop to find out, what fits your needs… also hear a lot of loopers have issues…

and at least: ableton is good too, as long as you have a good soundcard and forget about effect chains to keep the delay short… worked for me for looping piano a few years ago and matches with AR too.

or… just came to my mind just a second ago… TC helicon voice live 3… it has effects for the guitar, cool vocal effects, that you can use on synths too and a simple looper… i am not sure if the looper can be a sync slave… but its a great piece of gear and a soundcard in parallel… have the older voicelive 2: https://www.musicstore.de/de_DE/EUR/TC-Helicon-Voice-Live-3-/art-REC0011046-000

tapping live without sync… doesnt really work… you should be a robot for that :-))…

He’s clearly not looking for all that but only for a (pedal) looper. Why would he pay more then twice as much as necessary and get a machine that is super deep and hard to learn? Not to mention the looping functionality just came to the OT as an afterthought in some update. It’s not a dedicated looper. Also he’s playing guitar so he’d need an extra midi pedal.
enparticular, I’d just order all the mentioned pigtronix and eventide boxes online. maybe also the new Boss DD-500 Delay Pedal (don’t know if the looper does midi sync though), or the the Boss RC 300. Just see what works for you and send back the ones that don’t…
A lot of these boxes CLAIM to do Midi synced looping but it really doesn’t work very well because drift and bad implementation make that feature almost unusable.

@ alfred:
haha… you are right… if you just want a oneloop-player… OT is overdone :-))… but its a killer-fun machine and fits perfectly to the AR… as far as i tested it in comparison to other loopers i would say they loose against the functionality of OT… and yes, you would need a midi pedal… or use a delayed recording start, press rec (on the OT) and start rec with the next loop…as i do mostly when playing bass…

though OT has only one problem: when timesyncing it to the internal OT-sequencer you NEED to play 4/8/16/32/64/128/256/… bars. if you do not end on this settings OT will change the host tempo, which is a little sad, cause it can kill a whole performance when you do long loops… and you cant record a 12 bar loop :frowning:

but in a free running mode it worked perfect :-))

new boss doesn’t sync the looper fn
to OP
it does work
used it on the original Lexicon JamMan effortlessly, then it seemed to go downhill for loopers after that wrt Midi sync
the chunky 3 trk boss one does it, but i thought it clicked too much

midi will drift - some devices may work around this more successfully than others - but driving the clock from the looper may be a more robust way ahead
imho - if it’s for lots of repeats, manual syncing to an unsynced box will be hit and miss at best
try it with your tap tempo delay - it’s not robust enough, though you may be lucky with some scenarios
.
a few VSTs offer this too, use a lightweight host if you have a spare laptop/midi-pedal
.
you might explore syncing via a pulse from a track out (if spare) to drive a relay to tap a tempo on a normal pedal for you - or something hacky along those lines, certainly something i’m gonna try for the DD20s i have - or maybe create midi clock from the led tempo guide on them using an arduino
.
might be workable to try with a regular non-midi looper and get into the habit of nudging the tempo on the elektron master

H9 works, but mono only. Great for guitar.
Pigtronix infinity also works.

Both sync to midi input.

Not heard of any drifting with these.

Hey, question please, I’m trying to to sync a Dittox4 looper with my A4mk2 and it works but if I stop the A4’s sequencer playback and start it again the plays way off time. So I’m forced to either keep the A4 sequencer running or if I stop it I have to play the A4 and then quickly stop the looper so it doesn’t play off time and then play at the next bar line.

Just wondering if you or anyone has tips on how to manage this better?

can’t help with that one - the ditto (like many loopers) is intrinsically inflexible if the midi clock has variance or jitter as it becomes locked to its initiating sample length (thus basically ignoring clock) … wrt your issue, no idea as don’t have one, there is a looper topic with dittox4 owners (probably moaning about the former issue, but may have workarounds for you)

1 Like

I use it with strymon timeline. You can rec,start and stop looper by sending midi notes from rytm (described in timeline’s manual).but looping time is short - 28 sec.