Six weeks into owning a programmable looper and I've finally gotten my thoughts together into a "review" type format. I'd been after a programmable looper for a while now. Or something like it. I've been waffling back and forth on a floor-board based unit or going rack-based and just keeping a All Access-type board on the floor in front of me. A used, but essentially new Loopholic unit came up for sale and I decided to try it out. New company, not much out there in the way of a website at the time I bought this, but it looked solid and the price was right so I jumped on it.

There are some other, more established players in the programmable floor-board looper market, notably the Musicom Labs and GigRig guys, but the Loopholic unit really drew me in. It seemed to hit the right size/loops trade off point. Not too big, but still 10 loops. The Musicom is small, but short on loops for my needs. And the GigRig is a bit of a beast and not nearly as programmable as the Musicom or Loopholic units (although direct access is considerably easier). Trade-offs abound in this space. There doesn't seem to be one unit that has it all. I'm now of the mind though that the Loopholic is the most expandable platform of the three mentioned, largely because it has a MIDI in jack and can respond to PC and CC messages so you can control it with other MIDI gear. That makes it expandable in some cool ways I'll talk about later on.

The unit itself has nicely spaced switches. Five soft-touch switches offer access to patches or individual loops in direct-access mode. Two soft-touch switches do multiple-duty as the bank up/down switches as well as tuner mode, mute mode and edit/save patch functions. The mode switch cycles through the different modes: patch mode, direct-access mode 1 (loops 1-5), direct-access mode 2 (loops 6-10), buffer on/off select, MIDI settings, etc. The exterior is a nice, sturdy metal chassis. All in all the physical aesthetics of the unit are clean, simple and very rugged. It is definitely made to be stomped on.

After wiring everything up I was creating and saving patches in a matter of minutes. The interface for setting up patches is pretty straightforward. A cursory read of the manual was all that was required to learn enough to create and save patches, change banks, etc. If you've used bank-based MIDI equipment with patches it'll all feel very natural. 32 banks with 5 patches per bank gives you lots of room for storing pedal combinations. On a per-patch basis you can enable or disable the built-in buffer that sits immediately after the guitar input on the unit. Handy if you want the buffer normally on to pad long cable runs, but need it off for a patch that uses a finickity fuzz or some such effect that likes to play with the load presented by guitar pickups. The buffer sounds nice, lots of headroom. I've taken to leaving it on in all patches.

Once you've programmed some patches accessing the them in patch access mode is straight forward: select the bank, press a patch switch in the bank to turn the patch on. Press it again to go to full bypass mode (all loops bypassed), press another patch to switch to that patch.

I've set my unit up to use loop 10 as a relay control for for Koch Twintone's channel selection. It was easy to do: I just ran a TS cable from loop 10's send jack to the amp's channel control jack. Turning loop 10 on now changes my Twintone from the green channel to the red channel. Off and you're back to the green channel. You can configure the amp control relay to be normally open or normally closed so it accommodates most channel changing characteristics and offers some good versatility. With my normally open setup, going to full bypass mode puts me back on my guitar straight into the amp on the green channel. If I switch to normally closed for loop 10, full bypass mode would mean guitar straight into the amp on the red channel. Lots of flexibility.

The unit sports a "volume insert" send/return jack pair between loop 5 and loop 6. I use this point to patch the unit to the preamp and f/x loop on my combo. This puts loops 1-5 in front of my amp's input, and loops 6-10 in the f/x loop of my amp. I'm using a 1 amp setup so output A goes back to the f/x return and output B goes to my tuner. You can use output B to drive a second amplifier if you like for a stereo setup. It's fully isolated from output A. There are, however, no stereo loops on the unit so stereo effects would need to be run after the unit. Loop 9 and 10 can both be used to control amp functions. You can also use a TRS cable on these loops to use them as relay controls for an amp and an effects loop. Handy if you're always using an effect with a specific channel on your amp -- you save a loop in your setup.

MIDI is supposed to be one of this unit's strong points. If you can figure it out. In addition to sending MIDI PC and CC messages on patch changes the unit can also recieve MIDI. I haven't yet worked through the MIDI PC and CC message send stuff -- I'll admit the manual, at this point, gets pretty hard to read. It's easy to tell the manual writer is comfortable, but not highly fluent, with English and the detailed MIDI portion of the manual suffers from some head scratching passages that I've yet to work through. I'll be tackling this is in the near future and I promise to update this review when I get the Loopholic changing patches on my ModFactor in sync with patches on the unit. If I can make this work, keeping the ModFactor in a loop becomes potentially uncessary because the Loopholic should not only be able to trigger patch changes on the ModFactor but bypass and engage the ModFactor as well. Frees up another loop. Awesome. There's a tap tempo input on the unit that apparently broadcasts a MIDI tempo for you that allows you to sync the temp on several MIDI units. Sure makes a ModFactor + TimeFactor setup look appealing. I could have tempo-sync'ed delay and modulation patches using a single tap tempo input and patch changes co-ordinated through the Loopholic. I do find myself wishing my Super Delay had MIDI-controllable patch changes now.

The other cool MIDI feature on the unit is a MIDI input. The unit can be controlled by other MIDI equipment using standard PC and CC messages. This is appealing because, as a DIYer, I see the possibility to build an outboard box that solves my major beef with this unit (and the Musicom) unit: there are only enough switches to access 5 loops at a time in direct access mode. So if you want to stop using pre-programmed patches for a bit and just get back to some honest-to-goodness tap dancing you have to program a patch that turns on all the loops and start stomping your effects manually. Otherwise you're limited to direct access to just loops 1-5 or 6-10 without having to cycle through a bunch of functions with the Mode switch. It's inconvenient enough to make switching to direct access mode during a performance something that'd need to be rehearsed and I'd like to be able to inject a little spontaneity into my effect selection live.

Enter the MIDI input as the potential solution to my problem. The unit will turn on or off any loop on the unit in response to CC messages 80-89. It is therefore possible to build an outboard strip of 10 switches that, when pressed, send a MIDI CC message to the Loopholic that turns the corressponding loop off or on. An outboard instance access strip! The MIDI is easy enough with an off-the-shelf dev kit with something like an Arduino chip in it. That's a pretty cool thing to a DIYer. I'm looking forward to tinkering with the idea later this year.

And if you're still not decided on rack versus pedalboard the MIDI in on the unit lets you continue to sit on the fence. You could rack the unit and use it like you would a GCX unit to control your pedals from another MIDI control at the front of stage. I like options so that kind of flexibility appeals to me.

So that's a lot of gushing. The six weeks can't have been all good right? Indeed you are. My major beef is with the manual. Some money would be well spent by the guys at Loopholic to have a native English speaker rework the manual for English-language markets. The MIDI section in particular is really quite hard to read. I find myself guessing at what I think they were trying to write. Thankfully the non-MIDI functions of the unit are so easy to use that they're handily described in the manual and readily understood even by the less tech savvy out there.

My other beef is with the power supply. 15VDC is...odd...to say the least. And means you're going to need the vendor-supplied unit to power this pedal. It's not a wall wart style supply, thankfully. It's a black converter fed by a standard IEC-type cable that connects to the unit with a 2.1mm Boss-type adapter. I would have preferred 12VDC and "standard" aftermarket clean power compatibility (read: I'd like it to work with a Voodoo Labs PP2+). Odder still, even the companies own forthcoming power supply can't provide power for their looper. You can see the looper running off it's power supply on a board that contains their pedal power supply in this picture here -- pity. I would have invested in their supply if it would have eliminated the Loopholic's power supply.

Customer support for the unit seems pretty good. I've exchanged a few emails with Jang at Loopholic and he's been nice, courteous and fast to respond to my questions. No worries there.

I'm looking forward to putting this unit through some serious this paces this month as I embark on a Duran Duran tribute project -- lots of patches, lots of changes. I'm confident the Loopholic will turn a tap dancing nightmare into easy, one touch, taps. Has it revolutionized my pedal board? Not quite. I'm having trouble fitting it into ad hoc scenarios. For me it's going to work best if there's planning, if I've got a set list in mind and patches laid out accordingly. For an ad hoc jam, without instance access to every loop, it's harder for my brain to use it. But I've got a plan to solve that so ultimately it's not a big deal. For me at least.