Amy Viola
- Sep 12, 2018
- 2 min read

Gear Update - Live looping

I started at very humble beginnings - a $5 plug microphone bought on Ebay and a little JamMan looper pedal. This was only 6 months ago - it got me out and performing in front of audiences, testing out my looped viola sound on audiences, despite my ears cringing at the lack of tone coming out of the PA.

It's incredibly loud up there!

Fast forward to now, and the gear upgrades I made are as follows, in the order I made them:

1. Barcus Berry pickup: this is attached to the bout of my viola and allows a good quality instrument cable to be plugged in without movement or vibration.

2. Firewood Acoustic preamp: this brings my viola signal to life. Without this on, I sound like a small, muted cow-like animal. With this on, my sound has power - tone and depth, that I can tweak (low, mid + high) according to the system I am being run through.

3. Boss RC-300 Looper: instead of doing a balancing act with my JamMan to double-tap a loop to stop, I have three loop channels at my feet with seperate on and off pedals to trigger and stop loops. The possibilities are endless with three channels, plus a whole lot of programmable options that can quantize loops together or keep them separate.

4. OC-3 bass pedal: this is my most recent purchase and it allows me to create wonderful bass pizzicato sounds at the register of a cello. I can set it to transform only my C-string notes which create a cleaner, crisper bass sound than the octave option in the RC-300.

Judge for yourselves: here are the clips from my most recent performance with this rig. What do you think?

-AV

Holy Morning