What Is Looping; Using The Play Electric Looper - TC-Helicon Play Electric User Manual

What is looping?

At its core, looping is the simple process of tak-
ing a small audio recording and playing it over
and over seamlessly. When coupled with cre-
ativity and musical ability, the results can be as-
tonishing.
Basic looping concepts
Most loopers – including the one in Play Electric
– are built around a few basic controls: Record,
Play and Overdub. You should be familiar with
Record and Play. Overdubbing is the process of
recording another "take" to a recording without
deleting the first take.
Play Electric – Reference manual (2014-07-16)

Using the Play Electric looper

Activating Loop mode
To enter Loop mode, press and hold the DOWN
and UP footswitches simultaneously.
The Loop mode screen
In Loop mode, the DOWN footswitch controls
the following functions:
PLAY
►
REC (Record)
►
Overdub
►
Undo (removes the most recently recorded
►
Overdub, if there is one)
In Loop mode, the UP footswitch controls the
following functions:
STOP
►
ERA (HOLD to erase)
►
Exiting Loop mode
To exit Loop mode, tap the HIT footswitch. You
may exit Loop mode while a loop is still playing.
That means you can choose a new vocal sound
– and then re-enter Loop mode to add a new
overdub to the loop.
Recording your first loop
Press the footswitch assigned to REC/PLAY/
►
ODUB to start a recording.
Press the footswitch again to finish recording
►
and immediately begin playback.
Alternatively, you can press the footswitch as-
►
signed to STOP/ERA(se) to finish recording
and not switch to playback.
Press the REC/PLAY/ODUB footswitch again
►
to record an overdub (another part) onto the
initial recording. You can overdub as many
times as you want to.
What gets recorded as
part of your loop?
Use the Loop Input parameter in the SETUP
Menu to define which parts of your performance
are captured by the looper. For example, you can
set the looper to only record guitar, not vocals, or
vice versa, or both.
Here is a good example of why you might want
to capture just the guitar while singing and play-
ing your instrument.
You have an 8 bar chord progression that you
sing a verse over. After the second 8 bar "verse"
section, you want to play a guitar solo. Wouldn't
it be cool if the rhythm guitar part kept playing
as you perform the solo? With a looper, you can
do just that!
1. Set the looper to record "Guitar".
2. Play the verse as you normally would.
3. When you get to the second round of the
chord progression, keep singing and playing,
but press REC on the Looper.
The Looper
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