I, I
think I'm done?
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I've been a bit bummed out about not having a stereo looper. I have the Memory Man, which has a looper, but it's a little basic and I like having it earlier in the chain. The M13 has a 28 second looper, but it bounces everything to mono, which is a weird design decision on Line 6's part.
So I got the Mooer GL200. I paid £130ish for it. It's stupendous for the price. Stereo in/out, midi in/out, bluetooth in, XLR in, line/instrument switch, phantom power (?!?!?!!!), a touchscreen control, and a drum machine. And it lets you add your own midi tracks for the drum machine. And your own samples. So you could use it for anything, really. It also allows you to write your own audio into the loop memory, so you could add backing tracks etc.
I've had it about a week now, but to be honest, most of that time has been spent rejigging, remaking cables, cutting new foam risers/spacers for everything. It all fits, just about.
I've spent a few hours with the Mooer and it's great, although some things seem a bit odd. Uploading midi and samples isn't as straightforward as it could be. Or rather, the interface is super straightforward, but it seems to lose the midi mapping, or I'm making some strange error in exporting midi from Ableton. Either is possible. Sometimes the drum machine seems to glitch a bit: earlier it was playing some weird beat, despite it being on a preset and not a user beat. I switched to a different beat and back again and it seemed to fix it.
It seems to be impossible to turn off the click in when you record your first loop into a slot. Maybe I'm missing a setting somewhere, because this seems like a crazy restriction. The workaround that I've discovered is that the click doesn't happen if a drumbeat is already playing, so you start a beat playing, but with the drum volume on zero, then use the record button as you'd expect to.
I'm hoping these issues might get patched in a firmware update at some point. If they don't, it's not the end of the world.
There are loads of preprogrammed beats. Most are okay, which is about as much as you would want. Certainly good enough for developing ideas from.
Crucially, it sends MIDI clock messages to the M13 and the 8-Step Program, so they're all in sync. It also sends a play message when play is hit on the looper, which will start the 8-Step Program. I
think this is a good thing.
Today I got the final piece of the jigsaw: an amp modeller. I love my big valve amps for proper playing, but I've been asked to play an ambient type set where I'll be going straight into a PA, and I like the flexibility of this.
The Zoom MS80 cost me £65 has stereo in/out, which doesn't really exist at this price. After maybe 45 minutes play, I'm very happy with the sounds, and that's before really getting to know the models. The Twin Reverb sounds fine and sounds like what you'd want it to. There's silly metal amps there, which sound like silly metal amps and will be fun. There's a load of stuff in between (Marshalls, Orange, Matchless, Vox etc) which all sound pretty good.
The MS80 allows you to load your own IRs, and apparently this makes a bit of a difference. I'll play with this is and see what happens.
The big advantage, though is that this is upstream of the looper, which means that any drums etc don't need to go through an amp sim on my computer, and that any amp drive that I want (post all the delayey/reverby/modulationey nonsense) gets saved to the loop.
It sounds pretty great, all together. I'm pretty delighted with this board as it is now.
