HEADRUSH LOOPERBOARD

A brilliant or flawed flagship looper, depending on how you’d use it.

RRP: $1,879

Bypass: Buffered Footswitches: 12

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

PROS:

• Most advanced floor looper around • Granular quantisation options

CONS:

• A bit of a learning curve • Reassigning footswitches not

possible yet

The HeadRush pedalboard amp modeller and multi-effects unit sounds fantastic, but despite having a large touch-screen, it’s less intuitive to use than other units, such as the Line 6 Helix. To some extent, the same is true of the HeadRush Looper. In terms of features, it has everything you could ever need: reverse and transposing options, a slew of I/O ports on the back, up to four-track recording, and loading/saving via both USB and SD card.

However, at the time of writing, the footswitches aren’t reassignable beyond their ‘hold’ function, and the ‘stop all’ switch is on the second row, as are the ‘stop’ switches for the four main loops. Anyone with experience of live-looping will tell you that you’re usually juggling loops, and the footswitches need to be as close to your feet as possible.

Being able to stop and start a loop by either rapidly hitting the ‘stop’ on one and ‘start’ on another with one foot, or rocking with both your feet to instantaneously switch loops is a staple of live-looping performance, if you’re not playing to pre-canned loops that you could sequence. As a result, guitarists looking to record and overdub multiple instruments and don’t need to tap-dance will likely get on with the HeadRush, while those doing on-the-fly looping might find it leads to mistakes when playing live.