tc electronic Ditto X4 Looper

The tc electronic Ditto X4 Looper has clearly been designed by a looping enthusiast that fully understands the needs of the live looping musician. The user interface is so easy to operate, leaving you to focus on playing and easily creating tight loops without being distracted by the technology.

It provides dual loops, plenty looping time (5 minutes), and the two loops can be synchronised to either serially follow each other (eg verse/chorus) or play in parallel to layer over each other. The second loop can be the same length as loop 1, or multiples of loop 1 length.

It features true stereo inputs and outputs, so you can use it with just your guitar as a mono input, or combine your guitar on one input with your bass player on the other input for example, or feed your stereo FX output into the looper retaining your full stereo delay/reverb effects etc on the looper output.

As well as guitar, I use it with my 12 string Grand Chapman Stick, feeding my combined bass and guitar effects into the stereo ins, but can also feed the melody side to one input and bass side to the other for a more ?acoustic? approach, keeping each side of the instrument to a separate output for recording and later EQ or processing. Perfect flexibility for the Chapman Stick player.

One of the key features of this device is that it enables decaying loops, which transforms the fixed looping concept into fading echoe loops that morph continuously into the next overlayered loops, allowing harmonised parts to continuously evolve and change. This gives fantastic creative possibilities. For example, in serial mode you could create a fixed bass or rhythmic progression in loop 1, then go to loop 2 keeping it open in decaying mode to play melodic lines over the top of loop 1 that combine with but gradually fade under the next loop 2 layers as you build evolving harmonised parts. These can be directly synchronised or played in ?Canon?. The decay control lets you easily set the number of fading repeats for each layer.

A great sounding set of loop specific effects can be selected and switched on with a dedicated footswitch. These include a fade out when stopping, a cool stop mode that sounds like a tape machine slowing down to finally stop, loop reverse, half speed, double speed, single loop trigger, and a digital stuttering ?Hold? effect. Again these are so easy to use.

There are four dedicated footswitches for Loop 1, Loop 2, Stop and Loop FX engage/disengage.

The easy interface has been designed to allow flexible operation to suit your preferred way of working, the footswitches can be set to either close the loop on second press or go immediately to over-layering.

Midi synchronisation is provided to allow locking to externally defined tempo, sequencers or loops.

You can save your loops and export them, re-import them or other existing backing loops.

Even if you don?t want to use a looper as a performance tool I still recommend working with one to tighten up your internal timing and listening skills, and as a composing tool.

I Wish I?d had the X4 to add to my loopers when recording my ?Wavedance? CD, decaying loops would have been ideal. The X4 has already quickly inspired lots new material for the next CD.

The sound quality is excellent, totally transparent without any colourisation, and when not looping defaults to true bypass avoiding digitisation or processing.

In summary this is an easy to use and flexible dual looper incorporating variable loop decay, great loop specific effects, external sychronisation, and loops import/export. This is a complete list of features I?ve waited a long time for, and I would highly recommend it.

Simple operation, a great creative tool with decaying loops.

Thomann set the standards by stocking this unit as soon as it was made available in Europe, I was impressed that they actually shipped it to me the day before stock was due, and gave clear shipment notification and communications.

Dave Bowmer ? February 2016
www.davebowmer.com

The looper works fine the first days, when it's fresh electronics, but after couple of days starts producing clicks, pops and volume drops, probably due a bad engineering and/or software part, managing the looper memory chips. It's a well known issue, that have been reported hundreds of time in the T.C. forums, and it's still there since firmware 1.0. Also the unit takes ages to boot and some times goes stuck while booting and you need to unplug and plug again.

I bought the pedal hoping to find a good one, but after couple of days I started getting exactly those problems that many other guys are getting and reporting, without having proper attention and support from the T.C. company.

It's a shame really, because on paper would be a great easy peasy looper, for almost any genre, but these bugs are making this a no-way for live performance (totally unreliable) .

I returned the pedal and I think this is my first and last TC looper I'll buy.

Beeing a great fan of the first small '1 button' ditto looper, I hoped this to be 'it'

First off, it works like it should....most of the time! I encountered a few glitches.
- Encountered a device ' hang/crash' where I had to power it off.
- As the the looper is at the end of my chain...I noticed a hum in my signal , also the solution was ...power off/ on.

I updated the firmware wich is really easy to do. Haven't had the glitches anymore, but still not confident with the device to take it out live!

The fx part of the pedal are kinda cool, but the fade out and the tape stop should be configurable so that you can choose for how long they will fade/stop , kinda useless in a song the way they are now.

The device ain't ' bad' , but it could be better!

The looper is extremely easy to use and still has a nice array of features, as it has been said, even a guitarist can use, haha.
The extra effects sound nice and although some of them can sound just a bit too gimmicky, I'm sure some of us can find a use for all of them.
The only reason I lowered my rating was that the midi sync can be a bit finnicky, especially when it comes to start and stop messages from an external device. Of course you can manually start and stop your loops and it works fine in this case, but you just have to be aware of it. Fortunately, while recording, the midi sync feature works very well.