Continuing this from Need a looper: Replace Digitakt with ______?
Posting it here, because it’s a more general thought and not directly an answer to the other topic OP’s question
Right now I don’t think there’s anything that ticks all my boxes when it comes to looping.
I find the Octatrack pretty unusable for looping, except if you don’t use overdubbing
The Blackbox seems cool if you want to sample loops on the fly and/or mostly use existing loops, but don’t need to overdub or do any of the classic guitar pedal looper tricks.
The Boss RC-505 does 5 tracks (also asynchronous), but lacks pitch shifiting, you can’t adjust start/stop points, looks bad and is entirely made of plastic. The EHX 45000 has 4 tracks but they can’t be asynchronous, etc.
In the end, it might be best to just get multiple units of simpler one/two track loopers.
I’m recently using the Eventide Timefactor as a looper and it’s pretty cool. You can adjust start/stop points, pitch shift with various quantization options also in reverse and it’s pretty straightforward to use. The only major gripe I have with it is that to go into reverse mode – something I use a lot – you have to pass through all the pitch shifting options in between. In its simplest configuration (octaves) when you are playing at 1x speed you need to go through 0.5x, 0.25x 0 (stopped) -0.25 and -0.5. The pitch shifting is immediate and real-time, it doesn’t wait for the next loop iteration, so any change you make is immediately audible, which isn’t desirable in most cases and especially problematic with drones and long sustained sounds.
If I’d find a looper like the Timefactor, but with a dedicated reverse switch, I’d totally get it!
