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Looper's Delight
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Hi: In answer to your questions: We have the Zoom 2100, which we bought at the DEMO price of $109 in store at Musician's Friend. Sound quality is good close enough to the Oberheim Echoplex or Lexicon Jamman that we can live with it. Looping features in what otherwise is a dedicated digital guitar buzz box and wah/whammy for kids plugging into practice amps are... three five second dedicated pedals...in other words, you can do "three track" looping as long as you don't go over five seconds per track, and you have the toe agility to hold down the pedals...which we have developed over years of tapping the horrible plastic pedals that came with the original Jamman. OR one 16 second long loop...non divisible at CD quality... OR Extend looper to 32 non-divisible seconds but go to lower-fi Boomerang like sound quality.... OR Edit a patch for near infinite delay so you just ad on loop over long fading loop... In short, this thing is comparable in some areas to the original Jamman, but it's a lot cheaper...it's very small and portable, and you get a not bad guitar effects processor thrown in for free. You can do a lot of looping atmospheric damage with this...hook a Digitech Space station (the poor man's Eventide) in front of it, bring along your ebow, don't forget the paper clips, the claw hammer, and the Julia Child recipes for your guitar strings...and away you go. Drawbacks? ...no knobs and you have to do a visual kind of tic-tac-toe (like the Echoplex) before you know what button to push.. Also it's all BLACK plastic...and hard to read the print on the damn thing. Another annoyance...you can't jump quickly from "multi-tracking" to the single 16 or 32 second mode...you gotta go in and edit. And finally, your toes are cramped with the little Sugar Daddy sucker type pedals, and some people won't like that you have to HOLD DOWN the pedal to get playback in the "multi-tracking" mode, but personally we love this because it's different. Zoom has set up the little pedals with a cassette deck type of interface which actually is very clever and reminds us a little bit of the Boomerang. It also has an excellent LED tree for telling you where you are as far as seconds left in the loop. There is no "tap" feature...so that's a little tricky...you ain't going to want to do your Bach partita on this thing...save that for the Echoplex. The manual, however, is MUCH better then the Oberhiems (ARE YOU LISTENING GIBSON?). We'll say it again...THE MANUAL IS MUCH BETTER THEN THE OBERHEIM ECHOPLEX. And for someone who wants to dip their toe, so to speak, into this looping stuff, -- or for the jaded musicians tired of carrying a rack to the coffeehouse "arena" -- this is a terrific little bargain. Best, Roctologists