REVIEW + VIDEO: Singular Sound Aeros Loop Studio Stereo Looper Pedal

To say that there is an art to looping is an understatement; it’s like doing a live multitrack recording session. Singular Sound has expanded the concept, and made a looper that acts like DAW, allowing pre-recorded parts to be played back with ease.

The Singular Sound Aeros Loop Studio is a decent sized unit, with large, big button footswitches, three of which do a lot of the function of the recording aspects, along with a global “play/stop” footswitch. A roller switch can allow for controlling levels of the loops. With stereo input and outputs, and an external expression control connection, along with full size MIDI in and out’s, all your connectivity is pretty much covered. There are also aux ins and outs for extra instrument connection, and output to another source, USB as well as a SD card slot allows for importing and exporting songs/loops.

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The touchscreen is multipurpose, and easy to navigate. It’s also wi-fi enabled for ease of firmware updates. The audio quality is 24-bit at 32-bit floating point processing, so the audio quality is on par with a DAW, and we didn’t run into any latency issues. Users can work in a 2×2 loop situation with two song parts each with two parallel tracks, with a 6×6 version of six song parts and six parallel tracks, making up to 36 loops an option.

Out of the box, we were able to easily plug in and navigate to start looping; the large touchscreen was a godsend, with a display that allows the user to see the waveform (as you would in a DAW type platform). Once that loop was complete, moving on to the next layer was just as easy, and then doing a complementary part to sweeten the sound.

Switching between the two tracks was a breeze. For users who require the visual cue, this can’t be beat. Some players get tangled up with simple mini loopers, just because it takes some thought into mapping all the layers and parts in your head, but here it’s all laid out like a recording session. Loops can also be quantized to a specific BPM and time signatures. With three hours of internal recording time, there’s plenty of space to work with using just the internal storage.

For experienced loop fanatics, this is a big leap into a user-friendly system with the large display and overall features and looping range. For novices or intermediate users who like the idea of looping but have a hard time figuring out where they are, this could be your gateway to a better experience (and more creative sessions).

A great application would be to load in individual tracks and parts from an actual DAW session and use the Aeros as a playback device. For EDM users this could easily be THE playback game changer, for solo artists, importing their own backing tracks from their latest EP could mean touring without a full band, or rhythm section but maintaining a true-to-form performance, and the ability to swap parts around on the fly for unique arrangements or extending parts for solos and the like really opens things up beyond a canned backing track.

It’s a serious piece of kit, for the serious looper, but it’s not something to have to re-arrange your life to figure out how to incorporate into a live setting. We love the creativity it affords today’s artists, the ease of use, and the way it fits the modern workflow. Highly recommended.

PROS:

large display area, plenty of loops to layer, SD card slot

CONS:

None

STREET PRICE:

$699

 

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