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I did my June tour with a malfunctioning looper. Not completely broken, just intermittent: not doing what it’s supposed to every time. I suspect a failing microswitch in the left pedal. As I said to my audience in more than one gig, “This is improvisation on a whole nother level.” Sometimes my loop started and stopped when it was supposed to, but other times I’d hit that playback switch and get nothin’. And other times the overdub wouldn’t happen. Interesting times. When I got home, I opened the new looper I had bought several months ago and not yet tried. Feature creep. Goddammit. The Boss RC-30 does quite a bit more than the RC-20XL it purports to replace. Too much more, for my current needs. First thing I had to learn was reasonably easy, and actually a feature: hit the left pedal to start recording, and when you hit it again it stops recording, begins playing back the loop immediately, and goes into overdub mode. (The old system went RECORD->PLAY->OVERDUB, which occasionally required a bit of quick footwork.) For many of my loop pieces, this is desirable. In other situations, a quick second tap on the pedal and all is well. The most important difference is a big one: to clear the loop requires hitting both pedals. At first I’d hold the right pedal down with my right foot and tap the left pedal with my left foot, but by the middle of the second gig (this morning at Nelson Ledges Quarry Park) I was becoming adept at placing my left foot on the right pedal at such an angle that I could clear the loop one-footed. Unlike its predecessor, the RC-30 is a two-channel device. I accidentally kicked it over to the second channel in the middle of a song this morning, and I could not figure out how to stop the sound, let alone clear it. I bloody well had to stop the song and apologize to the audience. The humiliation of that moment must have brought focus, because from that moment on (about ten minutes into my hour-long set, I think) I was all business and on target. I kept the looper in Channel 1, started and stopped and overdubbed with my accustomed precision, and even managed to deliver a nearly-perfect “Surely You Jest” after not playing it for several months. Oh, one other thing about the new looper: the loop stops when you let go of the right pedal. In previous editions, hitting the right pedal stopped the music; now, HOLDING the right pedal does something (this may be how I blundered into Channel 2 in mid-fiasco), so it dosn’t stop til you release the pedal. I have to train myself to tap the pedal to stop, and remember come back to clear the loop ASAP so I don’t accidentally play something back when I mean to record something new. My previous practice had been to stop and clear in one long press of that pedal; that is no longer how it works. Live and learn. My next step is to get an iPad and start using a software looper. Once I have that in place, there’s lots of other cool stuff I can do, e.g. using the Roland GR interface on my new Renaissance RS-6 to play sampled sounds.