How does Schon Sync?

[The Man Himself <altruist@shoko.CALARTS.EDU>]

On Sun, 17 Nov 1996, Kim Flint wrote:

> Another rocker using loopers is Neal Schon of Journey. 
> He does a couple of things with them live. One is the obvious,
> looping a rhythm part so that he can solo over it. For a band like 
>Journey
> its pretty important to duplicate the recorded versions fairly 
>accurately,
> and the loopers make the overdubbed parts on the album doable live.

OK, here's a question: Does Schon's drummer play to a click, to which the 
Echoplex is also synched?

I ask because it seems to me that getting a perfectly in-sync loop of a 
rhythm guitar part that the drummer (and the rest of the band) can 
reliably play to is an extremely dubious proposition.

Playing a rhythmic, strictly in-time loop, and triggering the start/stop 
points manually from a footpedal, is a quite demanding task.  Take all of 
the possible rhythmic quirks that could crop up in that process, and then 
compund that with the entire band having to groove to the loop, and what 
have you got?  A potential train wreck.

So I'd be very interested to know if the band does indeed use some sort 
of time code with which to sync the band (and the Plex) together.

--Andre