Looping adds a new dimension to playing. Ed Alleyne-Johnson is probably the best known for this. He's written quite a few tunes, and also adapted several albums-full of pop songs. I chose this tune though because the nature of doing this completely live with nothing pre recorded requires either some very expensive equipment or a tune that repeats.

Pachelbel's Cannon in D does exactly this. A look at the original score shows that the instruments mostly play the same tunes as each other, but offset by 8 bars. This means that an 8 bar loop can be built up. The score above is my arrangement of this, with indications to help show where the loops are recorded and where they play back.

The Boss RC20xl only allows one loop to be recorded/played at once. You can add to this loop as you wish, but can only undo the last layer you added. Its bigger brother the RC50 allows much more flexibility, but costs lots, lots more money.

Essentially then, working through the score the process is as follows. The loop pedal is set up to
a) Auto Start
b) Fade out when stopped
then the pedal is pressed which causes it to wait until it gets some input before recording. I also used a Zoom GFX-3 for some effects on the violin. There were two settings used, one which drops the violin down 1 octave and adds some reverb. This makes the violin sound more (but not entirely convincingly) like a cello. The second effect is just some chorus and some reverb, which I like.

So with the Loop Station waiting for some sound and the Effect pedal set to octave I played the first 8 bars. The timimg is critical, and at the end of the 8 bars the record pedal is pressed, precicely on the first beat of the next bar. The pedal then plays back what you just played, and keeps doing it over and over again.

Now you have 8 bars (you only really need 4 - If you wait the full 8 then the Cello intro is too long) to set the pedal to chorus/reverb and press record again. It now starts to overlay what you play over what you previously recorded. The next section (indicated by the blue lines) is 16 bars long, but because your loop is only 8 bars, by the time you get to the 9th of these bars it's already playing the first back. It the end of this section press record again, and continue to play.

It's plain sailing from here. Keep playing over the top of the layers already laid down until 4 bars from the end, when you press stop. The backing loop will fade out leaving you playing the last bar alone. With a little practice it starts to sound quite good.

You can download a printable copy of the score in Word/PDF format.