As I have posted in these forums, I now have two Taylors - a nylon string and a steel string. The steel string has the ES2 pickup system and the nylon string has the ES-N system. Just yesterday, I picked up (via the local Craigslist) a mint Gibson Echoplex Digital Pro Plus looper. This is the model with full memory and the last firmware (Loop IV), and it has the foot pedal. I was able to download the proper manual online and print it out. I got this at an incredible price. It was part of an estate, though the seller is quite knowledgeable on these things and is a guitar player himself, as well as having worked at Guitar Center for a few years a while back. We had a great conversation, so the whole experience was fun and we both came away pleased with the deal.
The thing that I have been grappling with for a while now is that I really don't want to play "covers" or even my arrangements of other people's songs. What I want to do is find my own musical voice. My interest in looping is more from the "artistic" perspective, rather than laying down a karaoke type of backing track to play over. So I don't really need a couple of hours of recording time or even the ability to back up what I have done because I want it new every time.
What I do want is to do something along the lines of Phil Keaggy, in which he interleaves very short loops that he creates as he plays, and changes all the time. For that, I am fine with short recording time, but want real depth in terms of looping capabilities. From everything that I have read, it seems that the Gibson Echoplex is the best available for this, even though it has been discontinued for a long time.
So, I set up a small work area on a TV tray that consists of the Echoplex and Tascam DP-008EX recorder, so I can use that as a mixer to hear my guitar and/or the looper through two channels, since it allows me to map one input to multiple tracks, and then to record if I come up with anything worthwhile. My Microsoft Surface Pro 4 sits on top of the Echoplex, and has tons of MP3s, videos, and Transcribe! slow down software on it. I like to pickup tunes, or parts of them, that catch my ear, doing it by ear rather than from TAB. For some reason, taking in music by ear seems to allow me to really "get it" in ways I don't when reading from a page. This is how I learn my musical vocabulary. So the whole thing is very compact, which is great in a condo situation, and it all can run through headphones so I don't disturb anybody. I can plug either Taylor in directly and work with whatever I feel at the moment.
I hope, over time and with consistent effort, to begin to form my own musical voice with this setup.
What are others here doing to find theirs?
Tony
