Surveying the field of loopers visible on Youtube.com it’s become pretty clear that there is a need for more fidelity and range than a standard guitar amp provides. My own stage equipment includes a drum sample player, an electronic hand-drum and an electric 5 string bass. These two devices caused me to need a broader range of sound reproduction to accommodate the much greater needed range. The solution I used in the past was a typical singer/songwriter gig setup from the early ’90s, “boxes on sticks”, hundreds of watts of Crown Poweramp was pretty glorious into a couple of JBL cabinets. The Mackie 16 channel mixer pulled it all together and a rack reverb was all the effects I needed.
And all together I realized was loading and unloading a few hundred pounds of equipment everytime to just to play an acoustic show.
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My new solution is the Bose L1 Compact a 28 pound miracle of modern technology. “Stick on box”, designed for an audience of 100 people or so, this little beast can be loud. And the solution for more capacity is as simple as chaining another Bose L1 Compact.
Needing a mixer that weighed less than the whole PA, I then added the Bose T1 mixer an especially good choice since I needed some better effect processing than a simple reverb. And since this little beast only weighs a pound or two it comes along easily.
I always thought I needed a lot of channels, but when I looked at my real usage I realized I usually was only using a few. That only changes when I’m micing drums, and I still have that Mackie.
It’s still a challenge to get the mix together on the fly and manually merge the different audio sources, but it’s fun!
In the world of looping I see a lot of variety in the playback devices chosen, these were just my choices.
What will yours be?
