In 2011, at the height of a college freshman year that’s all but gag ordered from our memories, we do distinctly remember purchasing the Vox VDL-1 Dynamic Looper from Musician’s Friend, and our lives changing forever upon receiving it. In more ways than one, it was a special kind of time.
We were just starting to dissect what was going on with bands like Giraffes? Giraffes!, El Ten Eleven, Minus the Bear and Adebisi Shank – we hadn’t even stumbled into Tera Melos yet, which would happen some time in the next couple of years when skimming an interview with Save Us from the Archon.
We covered it at length in our first ever article for Fecking Bahamas here, but suffice it say, there were some very particular sounds emanating from the above bands through when it came to time-manipulated phrases.
Most often, but not always, it starts with ordinary parts parts played to tempo, then flipped to half-time or double-time at the press of a button. The pitch is often deliberately effected an octave up or down as well, often lending a SNES-like quality to it, and to this day it’s some of the most fun you can have with a guitar + looper setup. Whether you use classics like the Line 6 DL-4 or Eventide TimeFactor or choices of a new generation like the Walrus Audio Xero or one those… Sheeran… things, most of the time, you can find ways to get the job done, especially if you have more than one or a capable delay pedal.
(This is actually a pretty talk-y video but it’s got a good list of recent units.)
But sometimes you’re looking for a little extra special sauce, yaknowwhatimean? Looking back, we’re not which quality it was that made the VDL-1 perfect for us – perhaps, more than one in particular, it was all the qualities. We’re a nut now, but we were truly insane in college, so we could see the Dynamic Looper appealing to our maximalist ideals and… uninhibited creative process.
Whatever the case might have been, life was changed the afternoon it arrived, almost entirely for the positive. We were practicing up to two or three hours a day at that point, and the gains from those sessions went from ‘slowly but surely’ before to seeing improvements daily, because it didn’t just amplify our focus, it ignited curiosity without getting in our way. It also let us turn ideas inside out at a moment’s notice. For simple looping, there were zero complaints – compared to most others, the VDL-1’s Boss-style triggers were perfectly comfortable, even if you have big feet or weird shoes. In fact, we’d argue that the slightly smaller footprint for the actual trigger is more comfortable than a Boss, with a more natural feeling downbeat.
(This Rodriguez-Lopez esque intro from the beginning of Childspeak‘s “Alligator Ballet” was created using various guitar parts in the DL-1’s Reverse mode through a Roland JC-120.)
But it seems the time has finally come after all these years. Dust and debris can and does come in to contact the circuitry if you’re not careful where you store it, and this can make for an unquantifiable host of error, some of which could be pretty scary. So at this point, no, there’s no real justification for holding onto it. Deep down, we know we should be fine with that, and yet…
(Just about everything you hear that isn’t a drum on this old bedroom demo is the VDL-1’s modulation, filtering, tremolo, and reverse, although an Ibanez S5EX-1 trem was also abused.)
Even though we’ve been less and less precious with gear over the years, we’re no less possessed by it.
Translation: we have cheap enough guitars to the point that most things about them are replaceable, if not interchangeable outside of specific functions like pickups, scale length, etc. That way it doesn’t hurt when they’re destroyed, traded, etc. For most amps and modelers, it’s pretty similar – we try to like them all. They’re all tools, and we’re all on the same team trying to build the same house.
But with pedals, it’s not as simple, and we don’t know why. That DL-1 feels like it was meant for us, we’ve created things together that we’ll never remember, but always hold dear. However, it’s also been fifteen years since the VDL-1 came out. You’d think that by now, we’d have long surpassed a pedal that most aficionados dismissed as a needlessly complex oddity from a bygone era?
Well, in some ways, it’s completely true. As we’ll touch on in a moment, the Dynamic Looper does have some quirks. But in a handful of other ways, to dismiss the VDL-1 is to dismiss a piece of equipment that still offers unique bandwidth in today’s arena. Let’s get the notable handicaps out of the way, because for many, they’re not going to be a make-or-break thing. It’s not that we seriously expect eyes on this article to result in some kind of influx for a discontinued pedal’s demand, but you might see one used at a local retailer or pawn shop, and if the price is right, now you know what you’re dealing with.
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Perhaps the most pressing of all the issues with the DL-1 is that without any doctoring, it can start off pretty noisy. If the compression is engaged and you’re working with single-coils, you just have to tune it out, and some goes for the onboard distortion pedals. Funny enough, we actually found the best fix for this was putting a volume or overdrive pedal before the VDL-1, particularly finding a lot of success with a J. Rockett Archer and the Earthquaker Devices Plumes. Setting the level going into it seemed to tame the noise without killing headroom. Still, boosting the pedal can potentially make things pretty hairy if you’re not mindful of your gain and volume. Also, after a few dubs, you can definitely tell there’s a higher than average noise floor, but again, things like single-coils or less-than-ideal power can contribute to this about as much as the DL-1 itself.
There are a couple of other minor considerations, like the high-brow setup for jumping between two independent loops (you have to hold one while triggering the other), the sheer amount of buttons and knobs, or less-than-perfect tracking when modeling sub-standard pitches… but those things never actually caused us issues. When all is said and done, the only real issue the DL-1 has been it’s slowly creeping death.
So what do we do? Should we just replace it? Should we try something new? It can’t hurt to take a look, right? Two birds, one looper? Well, hopefully just one. As we think about potentially getting something new altogether, let’s take a look at some of the qualities that make Vox’s DL-1 the strange but strong contender that it is.
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First, there’s a pretty robust pre-section that’s never got enough credit: from left to right, you can effect the signal going into the loop with pedal (compression, overdrive, or distortion), wah, modulation, bass, acoustic, pitch, stutter, eq, delay, reverb, and sci-fi (ring mod).
Of course, some of these features are more functional than others, but all of them are slightly deeper than you’d expect thanks to the presence of two things – an onboard expression pedal and a program knob that doubles as a time /rate control when applicable. Most of them were familiar to anyone that played a Vox modeling amp in the 2000’s, as the pre-section was roughly the same layout and build as what you’d see you on the top of their popular VT20’s or AD30’s.
Yes, if you were there, you remember – those big, sewer-grated things. Those things were pretty great when compared to Peavy Vypyrs and Line 6 Spiders, but more importantly, when ported to the VDL-1, the onboard Valvetronix effects offer a whole other world of dynamic expression that inspires to this day. We’re not even sure why they threw so much into it, maybe that’s why it was discontinued. But speaking of depth and expression, let’s dive a little deeper into the capabilities of the pre-section.
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The pre-section’s first function allows you to find the right sound quickly via classic pedals, and if you start with Preset 01, it just plops you right in the middle with an undeniably decent overdrive modeled after a Klon. Yes, a looper with Klon flavor. That’s crazy enough, but it also lets you play with Tubescreamer and HM-2 emulations, not to mention adjust your gain via the expression pedal if you engage it the way you would with a classic wah. Speaking of, the wah is pretty great, with the added bonus that the pots would never get as dirty on the VDL-1 as they would on the normal chassis of a V847.
Pushing past that is a decent spread of modulation effects, with an analog chorus that’s slightly more watery than it is lush, but it makes up for that with warm, natural sounding flanger and phaser modes. It also has a dual-chorus mode that actually sounds pretty rich, and of all places, this is actually where they put the tremolo function, which emulates the optical trem on old Fender amps.
Then we get to the bass function, which, in a word or two, is not incredible. But it is fun if you apply some gain, you just wouldn’t want to play a show or record like that unless it really matched the mood with its mosquito-like tracking. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this bass-modeling messiness would apply to the pedal’s adjacent pitch section, but surprisingly the Dynamic Looper has a competitive Whammy clone inside it, with nearly identical tones on tap. For years, we just played it in toe-down position and changed the pitch in the post-section, but we were elated to find we didn’t need to buy a Whammy for some pitch-y madness. You can even change it into de-tune mode for dive-bomb effects.
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The stutter section is amazing too, because you can treat it like a simple tremolo when half-cocked on the expression pedal, but it’s like a Boss Slicer at higher levels, allowing you to emulate the rhythmic weirdness of things more like Fuck Buttons and Oneohtrixpointnever as you tweak controls via control knob. It would take both hands to adjust the filtering and patterns, but it’s worth it if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty. The onboard verb and delays are fun too, but mostly functional. The last of the looper’s strange pre-section though, is the pedal’s oddest oddity – the sci-fi section. It’s essentially a glitch sound not unlike what you’d hear in pedals from companies like No Kill or Death by Audio, but with a distinct honk all it’s own. It’s hilarious more often than it is truly musical, but combined with other effects, unlimited happy accidents await.
Most of the pedal’s post-section are the same effects with a couple notable additions like speed and sample-scrubbing that you can apply to parts of the loop, the entire loop, or even in ways that resample the loop so it’s longer, complete with larger-scale modulations in speed, delay time, filtering, etc. To top it all off, there’s also an XLR / mic input, complete with a trim knob for vocal, acoustic, and experimental recordings.
At the time of our penultimate conclusion, that’s a eulogy for a set of features that makes it pretty grim for the competition. But there are other options:
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(The Boomerang III Phrase Sampler)
We’ve always wanted to play around with the Boomerang Phrase Sampler. We can’t remember who it was, but at some point there was a guitar player or a band that was known for using these, but it hit our radar long after we’d already purchased the VDL-1. Looking at it now, it certainly ranks among the highest quality options with pristine audio quality, pitch / speed manipulation, and user-friendly, tactile design. Same as it ever was though, the Boomerang III is definitely on the expensive side, so we’ll see what happens. Maybe used?
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(The Keeley ECCOS Delay / Looper)
Similarly to the Boomerang III, perhaps the most immediate quality we associate with the Keeley Eccos is high-quality signal strength and glorious, natural tone. Due to its analog concept, the tape manipulation on tap makes for deep modulation, short to medium delay times, 1/2 speed, double time, and reverse, all in a compact, easy to use package. All things considered, if we don’t end up getting another VDL-1, we’ll probably pull the trigger on this one because we were recently amazed by the Octa Psi’s build quality and need a good delay, plus we wouldn’t need to think about still getting a looper.
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(The Line 6 DL4 MKII)
Of course, just about everything we’ve said about both of the above pedals could be applied to the recently reupholstered DL4, a known classic whose original version indeed defined so many of the sounds we’re looking for. In fact, it even has some pretty familiar modeling capabilities when we look back at the VDL-1 (though mostly in the context of delay), and now it has SD storage, better controls, and according to David Knutson, an expanded secret reverb. Are we complete fools for not having one already?
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(The MXR Clone Looper)
Much like the ECCOS, perhaps the most immediately rewarding thing about the MXR Clone Looper would be its size and its immediate clarity. This bite-size pedal could fit almost anywhere in the signal chain without impeding the signal itself, so when you factor that in with it’s flexible two-button, one-knob design and capabilities for 1/2 or 2x speed and reverse, it’s certainly tempting.
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(The Walrus Audio Xero Poly Looper)
Honestly, the Walrus Xero might be the most futuristic and forward thinking looper that isn’t some kind of mothership loop-station to it the market since the heydays of the VDL-1 and Line 6 DL4. The speed and pitch options are there, the reverse options are there, and there are modes to choose from regarding the switching of two independent loops. So far, so good, and both of these loops, can be panned in the stereo field with the topmost knobs as well, so… well, we’re still looking at this one pretty closely, especially considering how often we go straight into the DAW to record. Could it be?
We’ll have to see. We’re finishing an EP with Ben Koller that has some of the last bloops our Dynamic Looper was able to reliably bleep, so in a way, we’re excited to send it off with a bang. We’re still weighting our options for the replacement, but we feel a lot better having fully expressed ourselves and having said our piece for a pedal that stuck with us through thick and thin. It was always willing to get as weird as we were, and that’s just not a common quality in the looper department these days – which makes sense of course, in a world of DAW’s, modelers, and IR loaders, the need for competent effects in a looper pedal is a little extra. But extra is how we’ve always liked it.
RIP, VDL-1.
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