Donner Circle Looper Pedal Review

Summary

• Pros: Very affordable, 100 rhythm patterns to choose from, easy to use and with great sound quality.
• Cons: Drum tracks are hit-and-miss, the footswitch layout is weird and it’s missing many of the features you’ll find on more expensive models. As you’d expect from a cheap product, poor quality control and customer support.
• Overall: The Donner Circle isn’t the perfect looper, but if you want to try looping out and practice at home without spending half your paycheck, it might just be perfect for you.

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Full Review

If you’ve been shopping around for loopers, you’ll have undoubtedly noticed it can get real expensive if you don’t want a crummy pedal. Boss essentially rules the game through sheer numbers, and the new “flagship,” the RC-600, costs in the neighborhood of $700. No matter how much you love looping, that starts to sting a little. But what are your alternatives? Can you even get a looper under $150 without going for something super simple like the Ditto Looper? Are there any choices that aren’t painfully stripped-down or painfully expensive? Enter the Donner Circle Looper.

Meet the Donner Circle Looper

The Donner Circle Looper kind of looks like an off-brand Boss RC-10R in terms of layout. It’s just a little flatter and with a friendlier-looking color scheme. It measures 99 by 121 mm (4 by 4 and 3/4 inches), which makes it much more compact than many loopers out there. In fact, it’s even a little smaller than the RC-10R.

The layout is definitely the most familiar part, though. It has two footswitches along the bottom, a couple of dials at the top and a split between rhythm and looping, similar to the Boss RC-10R. Of course, it is still unique. The display screen sits right in the center, and there are six LED indicators at the top you use to specify which setting you’re editing. Additionally, there’s a big “Merger Ctrl” button under the screen (more on that later).

Overall, despite the cheerful color scheme, it’s very nicely designed. Personally I prefer something a bit sleeker like the Pigtronix Infinity 2, but this is really down to the individual.

Creating a Loop with the Donner Circle Looper

It’s always useful to think about the core functionality before getting into all the bells and whistles. So how do you make a loop? After the basics (plug in, tune, power up the looper), all you have to do is hit the left pedal to start recording and play your phrase. When you’re done, hit the right pedal to start playback. You can then hit the left pedal again to overdub and continue the process indefinitely. The screen also counts the loop’s time and has a circular countdown so you can tell how far from the start you are at a glance.

This is all basically intuitive if you’ve used a looper before. The only complaint is how they’ve arranged the footswitches. The left handles recording and overdubbing (really the same thing, of course) and the right handles the playing, stopping and clearing functions. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, but rec/play/overdub is usually handled with a single pedal. This would have freed up the second pedal for the rhythm (as on the RC-10R) or just for stopping, clearing, undo and redo. It’s a bit of a nitpick but it’s a strange choice considering the norms for loopers.

Adding in Backing Rhythms

If you want to incorporate some rhythm into your loop, the Donner Circle is ready. First off, if you push the “Rhythm” dial (yes, the dials are push-able) you’ll activate the rhythm half of the pedal. This automatically chooses “Select” from the options above, so you just turn the dial to choose your rhythm. There are 100 different beats across 10 styles: rock, metal, pop, hip hop, jazz, blues, funk, Latin, disco and fusion. There’s also just a basic metronome mode if you only need it to keep you in time.

You can easily just play along with the rhythms if you like. Press the right footswitch (in rhythm mode) to start or stop the rhythm. You can also tap a tempo with the left switch. Alternatively, you can push the right dial to highlight “BPM” and set the tempo that way. If you want to use it in a loop with perfect timing, you’ll need to hit the “Merger Ctrl” button to combine the functions. Then you’ll get a count in when you start to record your loop. The drums will start when your loop does. If not, you can also freestyle it with the merge switched off.

The selection of rhythms is pretty good, overall. Although of course it does fall short of what pedals like the Boss RC-505 MKII offer (over 200 rhythms with variations and multiple options for drum kits). It’s also missing options for things like fills that can really bring the patterns to life.

Additional Looping Features and Memory

The rhythm section is a big selling-point, but first and foremost the Donner Circle is a looper. To that end, Donner has included 40 different memory slots for you to store your creations, with four minutes of storage for each one. This means you get a total of 160 minutes of looping. Again, this 2 hours and 40 minutes falls short of the 6 hours on the RC-10R and even further behind Boss’ newer pedals. However, since it has a USB port so you can export your creations, do you even need more on-board storage?

The looper also includes an undo/redo function, even if it might not be obvious until you look at the manual. If you hold the right footswitch for two seconds during playback, it will remove the last pass. If you hold it again, it will put it back. This is a crucial feature in a looper for reasons we’ve been over many times, so suffice it to say it’s great to see it included.

Finally, you can also set each track to fade out rather than stop abruptly when you hit the right pedal. You do this by highlighting the “Fade Out” LED (press the left dial) and setting your fade time with the dial. Overall, this and the other features are nicely incorporated, even if it’s not always immediately clear how to use them.

Connection Options

The Donner Circle comes with stereo ins and outs on its right and left sides, respectively. So you can use a single cable to run in mono, but there are two 1/4 inch jacks on each side if you want to play in stereo. The right hand side also has a spot for an external footswitch. Honestly, it just allows you to switch modes and control the upper-most function for the dials, though. It doesn’t really seem worth it. Finally, there is a USB port and a power jack spot on the top side.

One thing to mention here is that it doesn’t include a power supply. So yes it’s cheap, but you should mentally add a little on for that.  

How Does the Donner Circle Looper Perform? And How Does it Sound?

The Donner Circle has 24 bit audio with 44.1 kHz sampling, which is impressive for something so affordable. You don’t feel like the pedal sucking anything away from your tone when your loops are played back to you. The drum beats also sound quite good, in terms of audio quality, but some are disappointing regardless.

The metal ones, in particular, sound like they were programmed by your annoying flatmate using a Casio keyboard-turned-drum-machine at 3:00 in the morning. They have this tinny, hollow quality to them that really pulls you out of the mood. However, there are good options in most of the genres and they really are great for practicing.

One issue people run into is with the levels of the drums and the loop. You have to set the drums quite low to really hear both the drums and yourself through an amp. You can basically get this tailored to your amp and then leave it, but it’s a bit of a nuisance at first. It doesn’t help that you have to switch “mode” constantly while tweaking this rather than just having dedicated “Level” dials.

However, if you’re mainly looking for a practicing tool, it’s a solid option. It’s simple enough that you’ll be right at home with operating it pretty quickly. And, frankly, the sometimes-janky drum beats won’t matter too much. If you’re doing something more serious, you’ll really need a real drummer or maybe drum specific software.

Some Issues Worth Considering

As you’d expect from such an off-brand, inexpensive product, there are some quality control issues with this pedal. My demo unit seems okay (so far), but many people report things like popping noises, smoke coming from the unit, issues with connecting the unit to your PC, and the unit failing to work altogether. Furthermore, don’t expect much in the way of customer support. If you’re interested in this pedal, my recommendation is to buy it from somewhere with a return policy like Amazon.

Really, if you don’t have the stomach for these things, then I recommend simply coughing up a little more for a unit from a company like Boss or TC Electronic. They have much better manufacturing quality control and customer support. As noted above, the Boss RC-10R is a good alternative to the Donner Circle Looper.

Is it Worth Picking Up?

Besides the issues mentioned above, there are a few things to complain about with the Donner Circle. Why not use the standard footswitch layout? Why are the rhythm beats so loud? Who the heck signed off on these metal rhythm options? Why does my badass rock-and-roll pedal look so damn cute? And it doesn’t help that the company name makes you think of kebabs before it does anything musical. But that all said: it is one of the best value-for-money loopers we’ve encountered so far. Sure, the Ditto is cheaper and more respectable, but the Ditto can’t do much aside from sound good. For a looper with hours of memory, 100 rhythm backings and some handy extras, the Donner Circle is a bargain.

It is absolutely not the best looper out there. In many ways the functionality and design could have been easily improved. But if someone came to me interested in trying looping but concerned about the behemoth units and extortionate prices, I would recommend it. If you’re playing at home and on a budget, it’s a darn good option. If you’re looking to be the next looping sensation, I’m afraid you’ll have to spend a little more.

Where to Buy the Donner Circle Looper?