How To Use A Looper Pedal - Guitar Lesson Tutorial - JustinGuitar [QA-004]

hey how you doin Justin here today we are going to look at how to use a looper pedal now there are really really great practice tool definitely one of those pedals that you really should have but I made a lot of people all the time and say well I bought one but I can't make it work properly it doesn't see a loop right and you know it there's a few little tricks that I can give you that will help you make the most of your looper pedal for practice so that's what kind of what I want to go through in this little session today so the first thing for those of you who don't know is about what a looper pedal does so basically it records your guitar and then plays back the bit that you record over and over again in a loop so you can use it lots of different ways but one example if I want to work on my blues licks or whatever I've got a little kind of blues rhythm pattern say something like that so I'm going to hit the looper to start recording hit the looper again to finish recording a little loop back that little section right so I'm gonna start three one three one three four it's just going to repeat that one little bit in between my two clicks of that pedal block I like it whatever I can sit there and then start to you know play about with my licks or whatever it is that I want to work on that day so that's the basic kind of thing of what it is now which looper pedal should you buy because there's a loads and loads on the market I don't like the ones that have got stuff other than just the looper function really I don't like the ones that have got drums and things in it that they get a little bit kind of complicated for me generally the one button ones I quite like the TC electronic dito is probably the standard one sounds really good very easy to use I use well I'm using here the dito x2 now the x2 is got a second button on it to use for starting and stopping so on the on the single button one you have to double tap it to stop it which is sometimes a little bit of a pain but you know following practice it's great just if I'm running a workshop whatever I prefer to have a dedicated stop button so that's that you know there's lots of different ones to try it usually they're just going to have a start the stop button which is the just one button in a loop level to control how loud your loop is you know the TCO track one's really good the digitech Jam man one's really good there's a good one built into the timeline if you've got a stream and time line already that's got a looper built into it the boomerang is one that's got several loops kind of available on it that so that all of those ones are ones that I do recommend that you check out but again it's you know have a look around see what you like you do find them secondhand a bit as well because people can't figure out how to use them so that could work in your advantage if you have a look on eBay or or whatever so up let's talk about a few little tips now the first tip is to play before you start recording if you hit the loop button and then start playing there's usually going to be a little bit of a gap there between you hitting the button and starting playing no matter how what you try and time it if you just click it and start it's generally going to be a little bit wonky right so you want to start playing first get your tempo and only when you feel like your tempo is nice and solid you're tapping along then you tap on one okay we're going to talk about that in a second so just start playing first there so I'm going to go starting there here particularly with chords if you press the loop and just started you wouldn't get the right notes hanging over because you're trying to loop it really you want those extra strings if you don't accord those strum notes kind of that you might not be picking right on beat one that you picked on beat four or the last by you want them kind of ringing out still as you go for your loop so really really important to start playing before you hit the loop um that's my tip number one tip number two you really want to be hitting your your button the recording the stop button which is the same button right on the beat on beat one usually you can do it on other beats if you want to get fancy later on but generally it's beat one so a good thing to practice is like that little slow slow bluesy kind of a thing so just it's playing first two three four one two three get your tempos I'm pretty cool with that three four one two three four one two three four okay now it's always a matter of getting it so it syncs really nicely I actually find a little hard to do sitting down for some reason I just prefer operate your loopers standing up but um I think as I kind of step side to side instead of tap my foot but definitely kind of tapping your foot or keeping your body movies a really really good idea some people find it helpful to tap their foot and then just move it onto the loop on beat one so if we had this again three four one two three four one two three you're just using your foots already tapping just moving it onto the to the tap button you know it's a really big deal it's learning how to get the loops to kind of go around in a nice circle is really what you're after most people struggle with that and it does take a bit of practice don't expect it like everything else on the guitar it's unlikely you're going to get it straight away so be cool the idea it's going to take you a little bit of time to get that together if you don't get it right you doing this if you go one two three whatever then it's good trips over and you definitely definitely don't want to be trying to practice over that when the loops kind of not quite there it always seems a little bit weak but likes it it's going to take practice to be able to get it to sync and I don't get them syncing every time either you know did sometimes it just kind of doesn't you know I might depending on what I'm playing you know I might not quite sit with a looper exactly right and then I have to stop and start again there's a function on the looper that we'll talk about a little bit to show you what to do if you if you get a wrong layer later on when we talk about layers so that's the really important thing is play before you start recording and make sure that you tap your foot that's that's a really big deal now if you're going to play for a long time it's very likely that your time will falter that you'll either speed up or slow down okay I do if I was to play say a whole jazz standard all the way through like 16 or 32 bars the tempo that I start with and the tempo that I finish with unlikely to be exactly the same right so I'm likely to speed up during the tune or slow down I shouldn't that's something I'm still working on you know and somebody was really great time wouldn't do that but it's still pretty difficult actually for 16 bars or 32 bars to stay perfectly consistent so one of the things that I use if I'm playing something long like that like I'm working on a jazz standard you know it's a good example I'll often put a metronome down so I'll set my metronome just set up the size we put her in a certain tempo and then I'm going to make sure I tap my foot exactly with one of the metronome beats while I'm playing so I might just start off with a vamp click the metronome off we go I'll play the thing so long as i keeping my time with the metronome and then when I at the end I tap my foot again right on beat one with the metronome it to stay in time right and then you can turn your metronome off okay and that way you're going to get a really nice consistently timed loop because like you know when it if it gradually speeds up then when it goes back to the beginning again it's slower feels really weird you know so that that timing thing is that is a pretty big deal so don't be afraid of using the metronome for that I think that's a really I do it nearly all the time if I'm doing like a long even a 12 bar blues you know to to make sure it's exactly consistent can be a little bit tricky it depends on the speed and lots of other factors the complexity of what you're playing as well but and it's a good thing to work on to try and keep you your tempo consistent for for 12 or more bars but you know you might struggle with that a little bit so using it using a metronome to help you with that is really good okay tip number four here is to experiment with overdub layers now when I mentioned that it records a layer what am I going to do now okay can't use that because that was the bad one so let's do another one uh and we don't get - okay - one two three four three four okay so not my little loop going on that so if I hit the loop button again it's going to let me do an overdub so I could record another layer over the top so I'm going to hit it now three four one two time I hope okay so that layers now there as well I might have okay I can turn off then on the dumb mode and now I'm back to just having my regular old one I can stop it when I want travel again stop two three four stop so one of the other cool things that you get with a looper pedal is the ability to undo the last layer okay the last time that you cycle recorded you know especially if you're doing overdubs this can be a pretty useful feature so if you're doing your okay so this is where can we hit the overdub oops Oh Lala okay where are the shot press and hold and it disappears okay it's gone back to its regular kinda green color now so now you can tap it again the light's gone red I can over dumb like me so the overdub off if you forget to turn the over if you forget to turn the overdub off everything that you play will end up going over the top so let's play that's overdone of support so it's still recording okay so that's all of the basics of how to actually use your looper but let's look at some specific things that you might like to practice one the most obvious one is your licks blues licks you know to start off with if you've got a particularly good you know real good thing is to practice the liquor over and over again to see how many different ways you can play the lick so if we've got whatever you just take a little blues phrase like that and then really just jam over it and play about with it as much as you like remember that the sounds passing through it don't make any difference so quite a nice again would be to have that loop going maybe turn on a bit of distortion okay it's not going to affect the whole loop if it's at the end okay now this is a really important thing as well that you want to place your looper pedal at the end of your effects chain okay so especially if you want to play about you want to do some cool stuff where the FEC's say let's just delete that need to turn on a couple of delays okay oh this is pretty trippy okay if I want to record all of those delays it's really important that the loopers become after them all because if it comes before everything that comes out of the looper is going to go through those maybe I don't want to have everything with those effects so learning to experiment with layers is another really really cool thing too that you definitely want to check out stuff like playing on - and for the chips for blues is a really nice thing just having you you know having you yeah there's lots of different ways of kind of layering up that sort of blues thing also really nice to learn about how to layer up different chord groups as well if you you so that was just basically Secord to key Cordwell with a bee base but then i overdubbed it with a what was just listening to the effect of trying out different chord groups over the top of that so you can start to get a bit of an understanding of how the things that you might want to work with if you're recording great also for the kind of jazz things if you want to practice over a particular chord sequence you know two five one is a kind of a common we have a little thing like this you you whatever you know so you can just take like a little chord sequence and then start experimenting with playing over that chord sequence so rather because it can be just licks it can be exploring layers and really into I love doing the the you know exploring big layers of stuff and trying out you know soundscape ii sort of things the split there's a lot of guys around that have got big looper pedals with with you know the ability to record lots of different layers of loops but I must admit I can kind of amuse myself a lot to the hours just playing about with probably get some effects going on and let's see let's go for plenty of delays have we the temper let's go okay we're cool with that so now I might try adding another layer so it's the same chords it's just at a minor chord going to a G chord so I hit the overdub button maybe something it's very happy with that last loop I can just undo it I press and hold go back to the straight yeah try this one better turn the overdub off put a massive big sea of reverb down see what you come up with okay there want to try something like this you I mean I can get lost doing this sort of stuff for days and days and days you know but it's really good fun that's the kind of thing I think you can get into if it once you feel a bit confident with with starting and stopping your Luther pillar you got all of these different things that you can practice and and they're a great tool they really are something a kind of wish I'd got into them sooner but if you haven't got one I'll put up my recommended ones on my website again and go and check it out and hopefully that will help you get started with your looper pedal and I'll see if any more lessons very soon you take care of yourselves bye bye

Channel: JustinGuitar

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Keywords: justinguitar, justin sandercoe, guitar lesson, how to play, pedal steel guitar lessons, looper pedal, best looper pedal, diy looper pedal, diy pedalboard, pedalboard, pedal board, guitar pedals, guitar effects pedals, justin sandercoe pedal board, guitar pedal board, guitar pedal, guitar pedal schematics, guitar lessons for beginners, beginner guitar, how to learn guitar, guitar tutorial, guitar lessons

Id: Gd0NhglZWtw

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2015