TC Electronic Ditto+

The new best mini looper to buy?

When the original Ditto looper pedal emerged in 2013, it was such a simple and effective proposition – a plug-in-and-play no-brainer for anyone wanting an easy to use, dedicated looper that didn’t take up much space on their pedalboard. Moreover, it was a superb introduction to the benefits of a looper for practice and creativity.

But what if you want more than simple with the same mini footprint? TC has managed to cram it in the same mini dimensions here, but is it trying to do too much to stay intuitive with just three controls and a small screen?

A looper needs to be easy to use on the fly, and a quick start guide that’s a two-sided sheet not much bigger than the pedal itself suggests that TC Electronic is confident about delivering that – though it certainly leaves some important information off of it.

Like the previous mini Ditto, you press once to record, again to play and once more to overdub – and you can overdub as many times as you like. Then you can hold the same footswitch down for two seconds to erase your last loop or hold down for another two to bring it back, double click and hold to delete the whole session. So far, so intuitive and your loop time limit has now increased from five minutes to a whole hour of 24-bit audio. Plus indeed!

The new colour LCD screen offers a visual guide to the progress of your playback, but it’s also crucial to managing the new features here. With the original, you could only keep one loop session at a time, now there’s 99 sessions you can save. On top of this, it is incredibly simple to keep them, too. Once they’re recorded, they remain until you delete them, regardless of whether you turn the pedal off or not.

You can also import and explore up to 99 loops via the USB – yes, that can mean backing tracks. Plug in via the USB and the pedal shows up as an external drive on your computer with 99 track folders – simply drop your file in whichever one you want, as long as it’s in 44.1hz WAV format. MP3S are not welcome here, sorry.

We think the new Extended Loop Mode is equally as significant as the onboard storage here; it allows you to record a longer overdub over your initial shorter loop. The mode extends the loop to match your new overdub. Simple and effective!

This is a worthy follow-up to the hugely popular original true bypass Ditto, retaining everything that was good about it with useful additions to justify the extra cost.

Rob Laing

A WORTHY FOLLOW-UP TO THE HUGELY POPULAR ORIGINAL