Four tracks, one cycle.

04.1How the looper thinks

One rule sits underneath everything else, and the app prints it along the bottom of the screen:

First loop sets the cycle · others sync to it · MIDI CC 85–88 tap · 89 run/stop · 90 clear

Whichever track you record first defines the cycle. Every other track is fitted to it rather than drifting off on its own, and nothing shifts that cycle afterwards except editing the track that set it, or clearing everything and starting again.

There are four tracks, each holding up to 60 seconds. In portrait the pads sit in a 2×2 grid; in landscape the transport moves to a left-hand column and the four pads line up in a row.

Every track card is laid out the same way: a header row with the big track number, the state label and an LED dot; the circular pad; a 2×2 grid of chips — IN and LEN over DUB and OUT; and a control row underneath.

04.2The circular pads

The pad draws the loop's waveform radially around the ring — one lap of the circle is one lap of the cycle — with a spinning beam marking the play position. Attacks show up as spikes on the ring, so you can read where you are from across a room.

While the very first loop records there is no cycle yet, so the ring behaves differently: the whole circle maps to everything recorded so far. The waveform packs tighter as the take grows, the beam holds still at 12 o'clock — that is the write head — and the centre of the pad counts the elapsed seconds. Once the loop closes, the beam runs the cycle.

Tapping the pad

One tap moves the track one rung up the ladder:

• empty → recording
• recording → close the loop, and it starts playing
• playing → overdub
• overdub → back to playing
• muted → unmute

With AUTO on, tapping an empty pad arms it instead of recording immediately, and tapping an armed pad cancels the arm. That is the only change AUTO makes to the ladder.

Long-press

Long-press the round pad for MIDI Learn: tap loop track 1 (and 2, 3, 4) — that is how a footswitch gets bound to one track. Long-press the card around it and you get the routing menu instead: Input · …, Output · …, Edit loop…, plus Length · Free or Length · N bars and Overdubs · N.

States

The control row under each pad holds four things: mute (Mute track N, which turns yellow), edit (Edit loop N), clear (Clear track N) and a small level knob (Loop track N level, 0 to 1.5).

04.3The transport

Next to the word LOOPER sits the transport row:

• A master ring showing the cycle length in seconds, or — when nothing is recorded yet.
• A PRESETS chip — see what gets saved.
• Play loops / Stop loops, disabled until there is a cycle.
• An undo button, enabled only when there is something to undo.
• A trash button, Clear all loops.

Under it, one status line tells you where you are: recording the master loop… while the first take runs, a running 4.2 / 8.0 s position once there is a cycle, stopped, or tap a track to record when the looper is empty.

04.4AUTO mode

AUTO — the wand chip, next to CLICK — does two jobs: it starts and stops takes for you, and when the master loop closes it works out where the bar lines actually are.

Arming instead of recording

With AUTO on, tapping an empty pad arms it: the card gets a dashed red border and reads armed. What happens next depends on whether there is already a cycle:

• No cycle yet. Recording begins on your first note above the arm threshold. You can pick the guitar up, get comfortable, and the take starts when you play — not when you tapped.
• A cycle already running. Recording begins on the next cycle boundary, so the take starts exactly on the bar. A short grace window forgives an attack that lands slightly late, so hitting the downbeat a hair behind the beam still counts.

A free armed take — one recorded with no cycle in place — also stops itself after about 1.2 seconds of silence, trimmed back to the audible part. The threshold is generous on purpose: reverb tails and gaps between phrases do not count as silence, so a sparse riff is not cut in half.

After each loop closes, AUTO arms the next empty cell by itself, so you can build up all four tracks without touching the screen again.

Boundary snapping

When the master loop closes, NAMper analyses the clean input — the signal before your effects — and looks for attacks. It fits a bar grid to them, then:

1. Trims the end to the bar that contains the last attack, so a take that ran a beat and a half long becomes a whole number of bars.
2. Rotates the loop so it begins on the first beat. The string noise, the breath and the finger squeak that happened before your downbeat are moved round to the end of the loop, where they belong musically.
3. Folds the detected tempo into the 70–180 BPM range, so a fast strum is not read as 240 BPM and a slow one is not read as 45.

On screen it all happens in one moment: the ring re-draws, the length snaps to a clean figure, and the BPM readout — blank until now — fills in. From there the click, the LEN chips, the sampler's quantize and the setlist's bar clock all have a grid to work from.

With CLICK on, the tempo is locked to whatever tempo is set and only the phase is fitted. That is the mode to use when you are playing to a click or to a backing track and the tempo must not move.

04.5Tempo and the click

The tempo block on the Loop tab shows a big number captioned BPM. With no tempo set it reads SET TEMPO over a —. Tap it for the tempo sheet.

The sheet has a numeric field (placeholder 120, range 20 to 300) with BPM beside it, a large TAP button that reads again… after your first tap, plus Clear (AUTO re-detects) and Done. Clear it when you want AUTO to work the tempo out from your playing instead.

The same sheet is reachable from the Rig header: the metronome chip toggles the click on a tap and opens SET TEMPO on a long-press.

CLICK turns the metronome on. Turning it on with no tempo set forces 120 BPM and restarts the bar, so switching the click on is never a neutral act. Click level and the click's output bus live in Settings → METRONOME, where it can have its own output pair for in-ear monitoring.

04.6The loop editor

Open it with the edit button in a pad's control row, or long-press the card → Edit loop…. The sheet is headed LOOP N with a live length label.

The label reads something like 8.00 s · 4.0 bars. Dragging the end handle adds the tempo that length would produce; dragging the start handle changes it to start +0.50 beats.

The waveform carries a bar and beat grid overlay — beat ticks and numbered bar lines, anchored at the loop start. Audio past the loop end is drawn dimmed: kept but silent, which is what lets you push the end handle back out again later.

The two handles

• The start (Loop start handle) rotates the phase: the loop begins later and the skipped piece wraps round to the end. Length and tempo do not change. This is the fix for a loop that starts half a beat early.
• The end (Loop end handle) resizes the loop, and works only on the track that defines the cycle. The bar count is preserved and the set tempo follows, so stretching the loop slows the whole set down. The sheet says as much: Drag the edges to move the start and resize the loop — resizing retunes the set tempo.

An empty track shows no audio and nothing to drag.

The button rows

Under the waveform, START gives four phase nudges — -BAR, -BEAT, +BEAT, +BAR — for when your thumb is less precise than the grid. They move the start only.

LENGTH · TEMPO KEPT gives six: the same four plus ÷2 and ×2. Halving turns an accidental eight-bar take into the four-bar loop you meant to play; doubling gives room to overdub a phrase spanning twice the cycle.

The bottom row holds a Level knob (0 to 1.5), a Pan knob reading C, L50 or R50, and the buttons Mute, Undo and Clear.

There is no reverse. Loops play forwards only.

04.7Undo

Undo is a toggle, not a stack. Every overdub session snapshots the audio before the dub goes on; undo swaps that snapshot back in, and pressing it again swaps your overdub back. It is a compare button as much as an undo button.

Two limits: it is one session deep, so a second overdub replaces what undo was holding, and it is shared across tracks — one snapshot for the whole looper, not one per track. Overdub track 2 and the undo you were saving for track 1 is gone.

04.8Per-track routing

IN and OUT decide where a track's audio comes from and goes to; LEN and DUB decide how long and how many passes.

IN

The IN menu offers Post FX (the rig) — the processed guitar, which is what you usually want. With several rigs it becomes Post FX · <rig name> per rig and the chip reads FX · <rig>. Below that, one entry per hardware input channel under its own name — a dry vocal or a second player straight off the interface — and Sampler, chip SMP, for looping the pads.

OUT

The OUT menu offers Main mix (chip MAIN), one entry per extra hardware output pair — Out 3/4, Out 5/6 and so on, which need Use all interface outputs switched on in Settings — and Into <rig name>.

That last one is the interesting one: rather than going straight to the mix, the loop plays into that rig, so the rig's effects process it live. Loop a clean part, send it into a rig with a delay and a filter, and sweep the filter while the loop runs. A rig the track records from is not offered — that would be a feedback path.

LEN and DUB

The LEN chip cycles 0, 1, 2, 4 and 8 bars. At 0 it reads FREE; otherwise N BAR, and the take is fixed to that many bars. With no tempo set the menu says No tempo yet — record the first loop with AUTO on.

The DUB chip cycles 0, 1, 2 and 4 automatic overdub passes — the track drops back to playing by itself after that many laps.

04.9What gets saved

The PRESETS chip opens Looper Presets, and they hold the setup only: each track's IN, OUT, LEN, DUB and pan, plus the AUTO flag. A routing template you recall at the start of a song — not a recording.