The battle for looper pedal supremacy is heating up nicely. Last week it was Zoom’s MS-90LP+ MultiStomp, the first looper with “dual AD converters and 32-bit float technology” and this week it’s Mooer Audio going all in, launching its new flagship unit, the GL-100.
It presents some serious looping power for your pedalboard. To simple call the GL-100 a looper is doing it a disservice. That doesn’t tell the whole story; it is a drum machine too, one with an abundance of patterns and styles to match to your acoustic or electric guitar.
And if you can’t decide which rhythm is right for you, then the GL-100 will choose for you. Under the hood it has AI Band Technology that intuitively matches beats to your guitars. It will be interesting to see how that goes, particularly for wedding band players transitioning from Ace Of Spades to Wonderful Tonight (as all great wedding sets should).
That said, the looping capabilities are something; 300 minutes, 100 user-assignable memory slots. That's a lot of looping. For all the features, and there are many, the GL-100 looks a fairly straightforward unit. There are two footswitches, each of which can handle a number of different functions, including tap tempo and synching up the onboard drum patterns to help design a loop from beginning to end.
The GL-100 uses an internal quantizer to adjust for players being a little late in getting their foot to the switch. Helpful. It will make this whole business run a lot more smoothly.
Another helpful touch, welcome to the point of being essential on such a feature-packed looper/drum machine unit, there is a 1.3” touch screen, allowing you to see what’s going on and to control some of the pedal’s functions. Mooer promises that all these features are easily accessible.
“Despite packing so many features into such a small device, Mooer’s signature multi-purpose footswitches, dials, and, most notably, touchscreen have all been integrated into this pedal to ensure users can squeeze as much dynamic use out of it as possible,” it says. “A perfect example of this is how users have two different ways to browse through their phrase loop creations – both through using the pedal’s menu encoder and by pressing and holding the footswitches, enabling dynamic looping control and real-time phrase selection without needing to stop playing the guitar.”
Other functions include a time stretch, BPM support, real-time browsing for loops so you can switch them up mid performance, a count-in feature, and four stop modes with the drum synchronisation.
Speaking of which, there are 20 standard drum patterns and 11 variations on each of ‘em. You can set these up in various time signatures, which is good, because the looper pedal might have been popularised by KT Tunstall et al but it was the musically adventurous Robert Fripp who really explored its compositional and performative potential for the guitar.
The GL-100 can be run in mono or stereo. It has a 1/8” headphone jack. It exports loops in as .wav files and is powered by a 9V DC pedalboard power supply (included) and draws 300mA.
Available now, priced £108 street, the GL-100 is available now. See Mooer Audio for more details.
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