TC Electronic Ditto Mic Looper Review

Summary

• Pros: The Ditto Mic looper is a simple, easy-to-use and well presented looper with excellent sound quality and all the core features you need.
• Cons: No storage spaces to store your loops and generally lacking in features. You can get a lot more if you sacrifice some simplicity.
• Overall: Fantastic for vocalists and singer-songwriters looking for a basic practicing and songwriting companion, but ultimately limited compared to other options.

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• Amazon: Ditto Mic Looper
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Full Review

TC Electronic’s Ditto looper series is all about simplicity and pristine sound quality. Guitarists know them well thanks to the original Ditto, the X2, X4 and the Ditto Stereo.  One thing all of these pedals were missing, however, was a mic jack. For vocalists, and anyone who plays an acoustic instrument, the Ditto series was off the cards. The Ditto Mic looper aims to change all that.

The Ditto Mic Looper: Beauty in Simplicity

The thing that separates Ditto pedals from the competition is their minimalist style. Many looper pedal manufacturers try to cram in so many features that they end up having more dials and buttons than the Starship Enterprise.  In contrast, Ditto pedals are simple, well-presented and compact. The Ditto Mic looper follows this aesthetic down to a tee. It has just two footswitches and a single dial on its 5.4 by 3.5 inch (140 by 90 mm) body. Throw in the typically sleek Ditto look and the result looks polished, professional and inviting.

Ease of Use

The two footswitches control the core looping functions (recording, playing back and overdubbing). You also use them for stopping your loop, undoing (or redoing) your last overdub, and clearing the current loop. In practice, this means you hit the right switch – rugged and metallic so you don’t have to worry about breaking anything – and start singing, beatboxing or playing your instrument. Then hit the footswitch again to play back what you’ve just done. The loop continues playing for as long as you want. You can add additional layers of sound by pressing the pedal again and recording an overdub.

If you’ve never tried a looper before, the above may seem confusing. It doesn’t take long to get to grips with the pedal though. The Ditto series is particularly great for newcomers. It strips away all the extra stuff that can overcomplicate things and focuses on the core task of looping really well. One footswitch handles the looping features, and the other stops and clears the loop.

Making Connections and Setting Up

As you’d expect, the Ditto Mic looper has input and output XLR jacks for your microphone and PA. It has phantom power, so you can use it with condenser microphones. It also has “intelligent mic gain.” This basically means you don’t have to worry about adjusting input gain on both the looper and your mixer. You only need to do it on the mixer. This means it’s easy to setup – it works just like plugging straight into the PA.

If you have vocal effects in your signal chain, it’s best put them before the Ditto Mic looper. That way you can record loops with the effects either on or off. Otherwise, the effects are applied to the whole output of the looper and you lose a lot of creative potential.

Finally for getting the looper setup, the “Loop Level” dial controls the volume of the recorded loops. This is the original volume of your loop when you set it to the maximum, so you can use it to bring your chord progression or beat lower down in the mix so your vocals take center-stage.

The last two jacks on the Ditto Mic are for the included power supply and the USB port. You can use the USB port for firmware updates.

The Features You Need, and Nothing Else

The Ditto Mic looper, like the original Ditto looper, doesn’t have much of a feature-set. The undo/redo function is pretty much all you get aside from the very basics of looping. This is a great feature, though. It allows you to erase and replace any mistakes you make on the last overdub. It also opens up the songwriting potential of the looper. For example, you can add backing vocals for the chorus, remove it for the verse, and then have it ready to bring back in (using redo) for the next chorus. Both of these functions are controlled by holding the “Loop” footswitch down for a couple of seconds.

The only catch is that there isn’t anything else on the Ditto Mic looper. The Ditto X2, for example, added reverse and half-speed to the basic looping functions, but there are no vocal effects built into the Ditto Mic. Similarly, the Ditto X2, Ditto X4 and Ditto Stereo all have a single slot to store your loop in addition to remember what you are currently working on. This is missing from the Ditto Mic too, however. If they’d provided a memory slot, you could also have used the USB port to save loops to your computer, or to import backing tracks to sing along with.

Despite lacking loop storage, the Ditto Mic looper does allow you to record for five minutes, which is definitely enough for most musicians’ purposes.

Great Sound Quality

Like the other pedals in the Ditto line, the Ditto Mic offers 24-bit, uncompressed audio. Before the original Ditto was released, many loopers only had 16-bit audio. This was fine, but TC Electronic was one of the first companies to raise the bar and offer 24-bit audio, which makes a world of difference. The Ditto looper continues this standard of quality. It also features a quiet mic pre-amp so all you hear is your crystal clear vocals.

Is the Ditto Mic the Best Looper for Vocalists?

The big question is whether the Ditto Mic looper does enough for vocalists, singer-songwriters and multi-instrumentalists. Ultimately, the Ditto offers a limited array of looping features and with the benefit of XLR inputs and outputs. It’s strong points are high quality audio, its compact, minimalist style, and ease-of-use. It should also be said that everything the pedal offers is executed expertly. It’s a great option for anybody just getting into looping or who appreciates simplicity.

But if you want to write songs with your acoustic guitar, for example, having memory slots would have been useful. You could build up a library of tracks and even start playing more ambitious sets. Furthermore, if you want a vocalist as a practicing companion, being able to import a backing track would have been really cool.

The issue for the Ditto Mic looper is that a lot of other loopers can do this stuff. The RC-202 and the bigger RC-505 from Boss come to mind, since they were designed with vocalists in mind. But even guitar-focused Jamman Stereo or the RC-30 have XLR jacks and can be used for vocal looping too. The Ditto Mic pulls off the basic looping features with elegance and style, but other pedals can do quite a bit more if you really get into looping.

Conclusion

The Ditto Mic looper is a great pedal for what it is. It opens up the iconic simplicity and high-fidelity of the Ditto series to a larger group of musicians. And it executes everything just as well as you’d expect TC Electronic to do. It’s also priced competitively. If you’re just looking for something simple, it’s a great looper that you should seriously consider. But if you want more from your looping experience and can spend a little more, you should consider sacrificing some simplicity for additional features.

Where to Buy the Ditto Mic Looper?

• Amazon: Ditto Mic Looper
• zZounds: Ditto Mic Looper

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