BOOMERANG III PHRASE SAMPLER

The best looper pedal if you want a tried-and-tested pro option.

RRP: $550

Bypass: Buffered

Footswitches: Five

Dedicated stop control? Assignable A/D/A conversion: 24 bit

PROS:

• Intuitive as a live tool • Customisation options • Huge feature set

CONS:

• No SD card loading or saving

The Boomerang III may be the size of a bridge console on the starship Enterprise, and it may not have modern affordances like loop saving and loading via either SD card or

USB – and there’s no quantisation, although it can be sync’d to a midi clock –but there’s got to be a reason so many pros use it, right?

The simple answer is that it’s stacked with features for live-only use. This best looper pedal contender isn’t aimed at being a compositional tool, or playing back pre-canned backing tracks. It’s there to support players making loop-based music on the fly. As a result, there’s features you can find on other units (think one shots and stutter effects) but also unique ones. These include a reverse mode that enables you to sample yourself to create reversed solos, like the oddball Digitech Space Station.

Loops can also be copied, shuffled, erased and re-routed on the fly, with serial modes that enable you to transition between loops to effectively keep the flow of a song going from section to section. Depending on the sample rate and whether you choose mono or stereo, there’s up to 35 minutes of recording time available on the Boomerang III, and two assignable footswitches. With the Sidecar Controller (an optional extra), you can expand this further.