I REALLY would like to pull the trigger and buy a Quad Cortex-- BUT-- I have some very specific looper needs, and I can’t discern from the literature if it will have the capability I need.
I do extensive looping with acoustic guitar & voice, in live shows, where the audience is focused on me in large venues, and there isn’t time for knob-twiddling. Here are the needs/questions:
I need to be able to quickly & easily switch the Quad between three modes: looping only guitar… looping only the voice… looping both simultaneously. Possible?
I need to be able to stop and instantly erase current loops & all tracks/layers with ONE quick button press-- not a 2-second press, or a double press. Possible? with an expression button/pedal?
How many separate tracks could I have ready to switch back and forth between live?
Those three things are the deal-breaker, must-have features for me. Here are the perfect-world features I’m wondering if I could do with it.
4. Could I tap or expression-pedal adjust the speed of a loop on the fly ?
5. Could I tap or expression-pedal adjust the level of a loop on the fly?
Hopefully someone can answer these questions for me! Thanks for your time and consideration.
I don’t think the QC Looper would suffice for those needs. The main issue being you can really only have one Loop. You could multilayer it, but you can really only have one loop running at a time. Also, you can’t save the Loop.
The QC Looper is a nice tool for tweaking tones or doing some simple accompaniment, but it’s fairly simple and not particularly easy to use live
Well-- yes, and no. I couldn’t care less about ever saving a loop, because that is literally karaoke. I want it to be just live performance. And, honestly, 99% of my looping is just one loop with layers, anyway. But, you didn’t answer the two most important questions for me… #1 and #2… I’m curious about those.
#1 and #2 are not easily achievable with the QC looper, and because it’s only 1 track with layers #3 is just out of the question. You can easily connect the QC to apps like Quantiloop and Loopy pro, and with that you can do anything you are asking and more
#1 and #2 are doable on QC. I use them all the time.
Scene mode deals with the choice of whats being looped and when you stop a loop its all instantly cleared when you hit record again.
Thanks for this info! But… when you say it clears all the next time you press record… can you stop the loop mid-song and play it again later in the song? Is there a different button for playing a recorded loop and for recording a new one?
You have one button for record/overdub and one for start/stop. When you hit the record button while a loop is playing it will overdub, when no loop is playing it will start a new one.
As for your point 1. this may technically be possibly by using a splitter to merge the two inputs and control the mix with scenes. But this would require you to close the looper, change scenes and reopen the looper, which in scene mode can’t be easily opened with a foot switch.
It’s really awkward and sometimes outright impractical.
You could maybe get around some of the limitations with some MIDI trickery, but I think right now it’s not really well suited for live looping performances unless you keep the same tone/scene.
I eventually bit the bullet and bought a Boss RC-600, which could definitely tick all your boxes, but may be a bit oversized if you only layer on one loop. Also it has its own learning curve and almost too many options.
Thanks, derdoe. Yes, I’ve seen a number of the videos. Your description of point 1 would definitely make it a deal-breaker. And, I’m not going to have a laptop with me onstage all the time. I’ve tried the RC-600, and almost every single looper out there (Been doing it live since 1991), but the problem is the pedalboard footprint size of just the looper. The crazy thing is-- there is/was ONE looper that did it ALL… did ALL the things I needed… ALL the effects, vocal, and guitar, a COMPLETE looper, ALL of it… The TC Helicon Voicelive Extreme. I had two of them. They simply were too unreliable. One let me down in a 12min showcase in front of 450 booking agents. The computer part would just flake/crap out! Simply couldn’t be relied upon for anything more important than a bar gig. And, to top it off, TC Helicon’s tech/repair support was so unbelievably rude/bad/offensive/slow/horrid that I refused to have anything to do with them again. So that was that.
Now I’ve got an almost completely analog setup going with an RC-500 that is working… I just would like to have a smaller pedal board, and the sounds of the Quad Cortex are tempting. I am still just completely baffled though by ALL the companies that make loopers… and, how little they seem to obtain or heed the advise of advanced loopers WHO DO IT LIVE with BOTH guitar and voice. Even with Ed Sheeran and KT Tunstall having big hits that way, they seem to only care about DJ-type or Techno users who have free hands during performance. Let’s say there’s 15 features that would make the perfect live looper. EVERY single looper out there has 13 of them, and are missing 2 or 3. And, the 2 or 3 are usually different on each unit. But, NOBODY seems to be willing to listen to the needs. I’ve done over 6,000 shows with a looper, and I often get $2500 to play for an hour… and, I still can’t get any gear engineers or designers to heed what I’m saying. It’s kinda tragic. And, the saddest part is, the technology is TOTALLY there-- it’s not like they’d have to invent anything new! It’s just a matter of proper layout and setup. But, it is what it is.
That’s definitely my experience, too. Over the years I’ve tried going the software route (which didn’t work out), had an Electro-Harmonix 45000, which is hard to use hands free and also hoped that the QC looper might be enough. Then from researching and trying different units I expirienced exactly what you describe. There are many units that are almost there but each of them is missing a different part that I really need.
The RC-600 does everything I need feature-wise, yet you’re absolutely right about the footprint. That thing almost doubles the size of my pedalboard.
No those 2 apps run on iPhone and iPad and you can connect them directly to the QC, alas still an external device but it’a bit easier than bringing a laptop
