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Pro Audio

Singular Sound Aeros Gold Edition: Is this the Best Looper on the Market?

Singular Sound just released the Aeros Gold Edition Loop studio: An intelligent multi-track looper packed with features beyond anything else around. We reviewed it in the studio.

Sure, sure, I say loop pedal and you think busker banging on their acoustic guitar and stacking unnecessary parts — not here, I say Aeros, and loop pedal means a multi-track loop studio packed into a 2-pedal space pedal that has well thought-out footswitches, a mixer mode, MIDI connectivity, SD Card reader and a touch screen.

Singular Sound is a company that focuses on the singular musicians out there, the lone rangers, the people who find it hard to find a drummer (Good drummers are busy, we get it). Their product the BeatBuddy presents as a guitar pedal but it’s a drum machine with 220+ styles and 24 genres, with the ability to add to the already huge library with an SD card slot.

Their latest release, the Aeros Gold Edition Loop studio, is a new standard for loop pedals. Why can’t we have up to 6 independent tracks, and be able to mix them and visually see them? Well, now you can. The Singular Sound Aeros Gold Edition Loop studio is exactly what all loop pedals should be aspiring to be when they grow up.

loop pedal

It’s a fair size — not too much bigger than a Boss twin pedal — with 4 multi-function footswitches, a volume fader (for use with your foot), stereo in and out, expression pedal in, stereo aux audio in and out, MIDI in and out, USB, Wifi and Bluetooth, and an SD Card slot. It comes shipped with a power supply, but it is a standard 9V DC at 300mA.

Upon opening the box and firing it up, we were instantly impressed. Tell me I’ve been living under a rock, but the volume fader — for use with your foot — is genius and supremely practical. The footswitches really are silent as they claim, the touch screen reacts as it should, and the Aeros is clear and easy to navigate.

It’s easy to dive in without a manual, but of course, it’s always recommended to open up the manual and find out all the ‘tricks’ you can do. For example, you’ll find out in the manual about the double tap and hold functions of the switches, along with all the MIDI commands you can send it and what all the colours and icons mean.

aeros loop studio

Speaking of manuals, here’s a first — the Aeros Gold Edition Loop studio has a quick start guide inside it! When you power it up, one of the six menu options is to open the quick start guide and you use the volume fader to scroll through on the screen. Hella cool!

Without getting too bogged down into the menu, I started looping a mono electric guitar — Singular Sound claim you can record up to 10 hours of mono audio! I found the screen and the waveforms on it very useful both with its bar lines/tempo marks, and intuitive to add layers, new tracks and overdubs.

There’s lots of clear labelling on the screen, from the record, play, overdub, next track and when you use the volume fader a meter pops up.

Enough about the look, the sound of the pedal is clean and uncharacteristic. I know that sounds boring, but it’s not. I don’t want my utility pedals like a looper to impart a sound on it. I am curious as to why it’s only 44.1kHz sample rate at 32-bit floating point processing and 24-bit recording.

I would have thought with the incredible features on the pedal you could create a song and bring it into your DAW and then release it, so I find the 44.1kHz a little limiting. But that’s just me being an audio boffin and wanting higher sample rate. (44.1kHz is still the industry standard…for now)

The pedal is a solid build — great components and housing — and it’s really not trying to do anything more than be a highly flexible and expansive looper. It does have a couple of useful effects, like auto-fade in/out, reverse track and loop decay.

It’s also got some great features like auto quantize, auto record and backing tracks. It really is a studio at your feet.

The Singular Sound Aeros Gold Edition Loop studio comes in at $629 USD and you can find out more at Singularsound.com