Boomerang Phrase Sampler

Very, very easy to use. That's one of the main reasons I chose this over similar products. Great layout, great interface. Operating this becomes second nature in less than a day, even with all the advanced features. Can be completely operated with your feet. This is one of the few digital devices I can honestly say is as straightforward and easy to grasp as analog. It doesn't get in the way of creation at all.

Setting the trim knob is a bit fiddly. Using a Fender Mustang with passive pickups, I had a hard time completely eliminating hiss while avoiding clipping. Get that figured out and the sound quality is good.

Build quality is top notch. No corners have been cut. The unit is expensive, but you do get what you pay for in this case.

I've been using it about 6 months and it's been reliable so far. The company that makes these seems small, run by genuine enthusiasts rather than bean counters that are out to make a fast buck. I get the feeling these guys will stand behind their product if I run into any problems (not that I'm expecting to).

I'm a bit disappointed with the "instantaneous backwards" mode (where everything you feed into the unit automatically gets spit out backwards). I've found this mode almost impossible to use with predictable results (maybe I just haven't nailed the technique). Other than that, the unit works exactly as advertised. It's great for experimental, improvisational music. If you've ever owned an analog tape deck and enjoyed doing sound-on-sound, flipping the tape backwards, messing with the playback speed, etc., you'll have fun with the Boomerang. It also makes an excellent digital delay unit. Better, in fact, than many "dedicated" delay units.

Some folks will also like this as a tool for practicing their instrument. Personally, I find this gets boring, it's a bit monotonous and mechanical to play to. I don't really like it as a songwriting tool either, for much the same reason (it's hard to get the "feeling" or dynamics of a song across when it's exactly the same thing over and over again). I think of this more as a creative tool in its own right, than as a substitute for another musician or a multitrack recorder.

The only thing missing is being able to change the playback speed while a loop is playing. Since this would've been an obvious feature, I figure they must've left it out due to limitations in the hardware.

If you're looking for a quality real-time looper and you don't give a damn about MIDI and all that crap, it doesn't get much better than this.

After reading all of these I just had to post. HAD TO. This is the esaiest looper to use (aside from the line 6 that is). The buttons are self explanitory, and if you just sit with it long enough and play it all becomes quite clear. I do have to agree with most of the flock here about the programming and the manual. Programming takes a bachelors in Comp Sci, and the manual, several languages at your fingertips. Dual funtcions are cool. but not being able to program easily, or on the fly, limits the live applications. Not being a rack piece, it was designed to be a live tool, so this is a dichotomy that cannot be overlooked

SOund quality is alright. Like the fifthe review, those who have noise issues just need to play with the trim pot, and the level selector switch in the rear panel where the jacks are. I will say, what promted the research and posting as of late was my recent exposire to the Gibson Echoplex. which has pristine sound quality, and is far superior to teh Rang in many ways (also double in price, and needs the foot controller to be of any real live use). I bought this one for it's extremely long record time, but htat is at 8khz, that is just too low. So I am littel disapionted (especially since it was following the line 6 whic is also pristine)

Yup, ther rest of teh sheep are right, this fucker's a tank. i dropped it by accident the week I got it, moving to brooklyn, dropped on the cement, not even a scratch. what did they about timex...takes a lickin and keeps on tickin.

These guys (Mike) is a mench beyond all others. Not only timely replies, and good advice, ther is no attitude nor feeling like they suckered you into buying it and then abandoning you.

This is a great looper, and good pedal, thought the instruciton ar not clear and to get the proepr functions you need to learn to prgoram it, it works, is realiable, and offers great features as a practice tool. If you are looking for a live piece or studio recording piece, then for quality of signal to noise, and quality of ad/da converters I would recomend getting the Gibosn Echoplex, it is pircey, but a good studio tool. probably my next purchase.

If it were lost or stolen I would certainly buy one again, but then again I am in the process of getting them all. they all have their pluses and minuses.

After a few sessions,you start learning to get your timming down. That was the real challenge for live use. Other than that, the record and stack features are easy money.

I had a few issues with sound, clicks, hiss at forst, now I have it dialed in, get the clip setting right and it works fine.

I have had mine about three years, not a glitch, even have loaned it out to friends and no one has figured out a way to break it yet.

called them when I first had noise problems, and haven't needed them since.

I play acoustic worship music live with a Behringer pod like thing into the boomerang. I have also connected a Digitech GNX-3 in tandem with the Rang. That is a kick. A whole new world opens up using the two together. I have played the Rang along with cakwalk Drumtrax ( on my laptop) live and timing can be difficult, I have had to stop and restart the Rang after a few measures if it gets out of sync. Thats where the Digitech beats it with it's built in Drumloops. The Effects on the Digitech are cool especially the bass effects with my acoustic. But with the boomerang you can beat/tap a tempo on your acoustic and then start stacking.
It is a great solo jam and prctice tool as well and it will make a better guitar player out of you. You know best what your creations should sound like and it helps when you know all the parts (bass, rhythm, lead) I have even done vocals sung into an acoustic guitar mic/pickup) then stacked a three part harmony into the Rang and sang the fourth directly into the PA mic. Pretty cool, lots of possibilities.
I would like to see the engineers add a third track ( loop "C") (verse, chorus, bridge)and the capability to strip away stacked loops, so you can go back to the begining loop. If I lost it I'd get another, but I really am looking for the next generation!!

The Boomerang does simple things easily, and provides ways of doing many more complicated things. Looping and stacking recordings is simple. It takes me a few pedal steps to change recording from mixing new sounds with old to replacing old sounds with new, but I do it live on stage while playing without a problem. Its versatile and designed for live performance.

I use this most often with my Roland GR-33 synth, which lets me stack a wide combination of sounds live. People love this live, as do I...playing it can put me in a trance. Sometimes use it with my Taylor steel-string acoustic, which provides a whole different sonic environment to play in/with. The sound quality is fine for live performance. If you want better quality for a recording, you can always trade the live playing for looping software. But it's a different aesthetic, and will lead to different music.

I've been using it for 3-4 years, and it has always worked. The switches work as cleanly as the first day I bought it. I don't have a backup, but having one never hurts of course. I find that it is sensitive to input levels if you try to premix several sources. This is just a matter of setting it up correctly though.

I upgraded the pedal to 2.0, and it works fine. I asked for a way to switch live from mixing to replacing sounds, and had an answer (that worked) within a couple of days, from the designer. That's 2 for 2.

I play many styles of music. This is optimized for live performance. It works great. I record long (30 seconds +) loops, and multitrack. I vary from laying down standard pieces (bass, chords, melody) to creating non-standard sonic environments...or I start with one, mutate to the other, and then back, all live. It's simple enough so I can focus on the music, and not the pedal. Wish list: That I could address each instrument I lay down as a separate track, for recording and live erasing/replacing. Would love to have 10 synchronized tracks, all separately addressable live. Until then, this provides a lot of capability.

Depending on what you want to do with this product it's pretty much a no brain. There are several functions that you wouldn't have a clue how to set up if you lost the manual(i.e. changing the settings for the 'delay' in 'program mode') but as far as ease of use goes after you reading the manual this thing is a piece of cake especially when compared to the BOSS.

As long as you know how to set the trim and input setting the sound quality is excellent. Especially if your using it as a deley pedal. I'm convinced those that gave this category an unfarvorable review just didn't how set those levels properly. I play an Ibanez solid body through a Fender Vibrolux and it sounds great.

I've had the Rang just over a year now adn generally speaking the thing is built like a tank. I did have to sent back to get repaired 3 weeks ago but considering I use it EVERDAY in my practice sesssions and on gigs it's been very reliable

These guys are unbelievably awesome when it comes to customer support. When I emailed them about a problem I was having Mike wrote THAT DAY with a list of possible sollutions. When those didn't work I very relluctantly sent it in to get repaired expecting it to take at least a month like everything else does to get repaired. Mike emailed me the day it arrived telling me that they had assessed the problem, would fix it the following day and send it back to me the day after that. Sure enough, just 2 WEEKS! including the time it took get there and back. Mike Nelson is awesome

I play mostly jazz and use the rang mostly as a practice tool for looping chord changes to the tunes I'm working on. It's if there's a difficult 8 bar section to tune, I can isolate them and loop them indefinately for practicing over. It's a phenominal practice tool. In a live setting I use the Rang mostly as a delay pedal which works great along with a Boss OD-3, a BOSS chorus, and a Cry Baby wah. If this product were ever lost or stolen I'd go out and buy a new one the next day

I have been using a Boomerang professionally for 3 years now, and during that time I've amused myself by reading these reviews, especially from the people who complain that the 'Rang is noisy.

It's late Tuesday night, and I'm either tired or cranky or just downright annoyed but I can no longer smile and shake my head at this silliness. Listen up people (you know who you are): YOU'RE NOT USING IT RIGHT!!! Proper adjustment of the back panel trimmer and 3-way slide switch will eliminate the noise you hear. Period. End of story.

The Lexicon Jamman? Are you kidding me? 32 seconds of recorded time in a discontinued rack unit with limited footcontrol is considered bliss? Come on!

Okay, now for a legitimate complaint: the manual is not well written at all, especially concerning the multi-task footswitches. But after reading the manual twice I figured out the operation in about 10 minutes of experimenting. Much easier than trying to operate the Ebow for the first time (and less noisy, too. Gee, I wonder what I mean by THAT?)

Nothing is perfect, though. I'll give it a 9.

Acoustic guitars into a p.a. A touch of reverb, chorus, Ebow and the Boomerang.

Built like a tank (except the volume roller has a history of breaking when stepped on by the easily excited, clumsy or Jimi Hendrix-broke-his-stuff-all-the-time-so-I will-too idiots. Mine has never failed).

Can't comment.

I play music and perform by myself, sometimes to standing room only audiences and sometimes to only a handfull, which isn't important. What is important is that I've turned into such a jerk from playing in bands made up of un-disciplined, un-educated, un-coordinated, talentless, gutless, money-motivated, drunken, livin'-in-the-past-and-ain't-it-grand so called musicians. In other words, guys my age. Or, I've had to listen to the new, young fresh faced crop of talentless, gutless, etc etc, playing HORRIBLE MUSIC HORRIBLY! No technique, no style, no class, no intelligence, NO COMMITTMENT! I am so sick of what I hear on the radio these days that all I can do to retaliate is work even harder at my craft and pray that someday someone will leave a mark that is worth leaving. I'm tentatively hoping, but I'm not holding my breath.

Musically, I can only stomach my own company now.

Listen up, because I'm running out of pearls. I bought the Boomerang because it challenged me when the people around me could not or would not. Buy a Boomerang, and you'll discover how good you really are, and what your potential may be. If you are like most guitarists these days, how good you are is moot.

One last thought: shame on all of you who refuse to pursue excellence.

I just Szabo's review on the rang, as I was interested in maybe picking one up, but Hearing these complaints about the noises and the clicking stops me in my tracks with cleats on. He asked if anyone knew of a better sampler, I would be surprised if I am the first to give him this advice, but here it is. GET YO'SELF A JAM MAN!!! Thats right, I was lucky enough to purchase mine right before they got discontinued.The units came stock with a measly 8 seconds of sample (barely usable in my opinion) but..and I do mean BUT.. it is upgradable to a 32 seconds. I have actually had two, the first one I bought with the stock 8 sec and planned to do the upgrade. Not a great idea, as I put great effort into finding the memory chips for it and no-one had it, seems that it was the same memory that some old omega computer used to use. after a long dry spell I finally found one set and purchased it. the upgrade failed, I faulted the chips. I then sold the unit and bought a used one that was already set to 32 sec (this is my recomendation) you can find them here and there on ebay, just type in "lexicon jam man" and make sure that it is already upgraded. this unit is QUIET like a church mouse. quiet enough that I have brought it into the studio many times and saved myself tons of studio time $$ by being able to sample background vocal stacks directly to it from the board, which allowed me to then just offer a feed to the engineer so that he could record them to a single track (very cost and time effective) not to mention the wild tricks I have pulled off for solos. with the unit you can record in either sample mode or loop, the difference is that in sample mode you cannot stack, but at least in live performance you can sacrifice one pass of , lets say, a guitar harmony and load it into the unit allowing you to kick it in at every other similar point inthe song. To stack you must be in loop mode, the only drawback I find to this is that if I wanted to construct lets say a three or four part stack that I could pop into sections of the song at various times, I am out of luck.once you stack the layers your only option is to let them loop until you cancel them out.solution? buy two and hook up in tandem. Use the 1st one to layer your stacks, once you have the construction the way you like (doing this takes practice as you will want to find the most time economical steps to acheiving this, unless you want to just tell your audience to wait while you do this, best to learn to be crafty with the unit) then you simply use your 2nd unit to take a "sample" snapshot of unit #1's single pass loop, voila!! success, and best of all done quietly. You can even decide to reverse your loop before capturing it with unit #2. well, I hope this helps, as for me I was interested in maybe getting a Rang as a second unit but I think I will be buying another lexicon myself. Feel free to check out these tracks recorded I recorded usingthe Lexicon Jam Man. @ http://www.loudenergy.com/Media/browsemedia.asp?Bio=true&Lead_ID=14266

It's real easy to use for the basic functions. Looping and stacking etc.. Some of the fancier things where you need to go in and adjust repeat settings for delays are not very intuitive at all. Once you get it though the delays are great to use.

I've read some reviews where they talk about the Boomerang as being very noisy. This seems like they have the trim selector set for mic or line and not instrument. If it's set for instrument (assuming your plugging your guitar in) and the trim is set properly it isn't very noisy at all.

The sampled sound is good.

I haven't had any problems with it.

I've never dealt with them.

Overall I love this thing. It has been really great for practicing over chord progressions, writing tunes by stacking parts etc.. It works really nice as a delay as well.

The one knock I have against it is that it has so many dual use buttons. This is good in the sense that is makes it pretty stripped down but it's not very intuitive for some of the extra features. When you want to change settings the labels on the buttons don't correspond at all to what you're doing. For instance, when you want to set the unit to only repeat once you need to go into program mode by holding down the DIRECTION button for three seconds. Then step on the PLAY button until STACK is lit. If you lose the manual good luck figuring that out. The manual is not very good either.

If I lost this I would go out and buy it again the next day. It's been one of my favorite guitar purchases ever.

The boomerang was very easy to use, after the damn plungers on the BOSS loop station, this thing was a peice of cake. Everything was very easy to get used to.

I run a pretty noisy set up as is, which isn't somthing I'm proud of, but this sure ads hell doesn't help one bit. I plugged the thing into my Fender stage 100, with nothing going into it, and could hear and EXTREMELY audible hiss, hell it was like mud on a corvette, coming through as I played with the volume. Willing to deal with this, I moved on. I didn't really think I would pay much attention to sampling, rate, but I was listening to it, and couldn't beleive it was still my guitar. It sounded like my old epiphone 15 was onn the floor next to it with the bass all the way up and treble all the way down. Maybe not that bad, but I figured, I payed 400 bucks, lets move on.

THIS WAS WHERE I DRAW THE LINE!!!! one reason I bought the 'rang was because of its reverse solos, and I thought it would be fun to play over a forever sustained note. But I quickly found out that pressing record, leaves an audible click when you start the recording, so sampling a sustained note is out. (Although I did find that if you hit record twice over silence, hit stack, and volume swell a note long enough to ride through the sample, it sounds clean enough to work. But lot of good that does me with feedback, or in a live situation.) If you wanna find out why the reverse solo idea is a peice of shit, just hit reverse, then record twice. Then sustain a note, and listen to the click when the sample starts every beat/measure/whatever. This note is not changing, you'd think they could find a way around this(sounds like a tracking problem almost, to me.)

AND ONE MORE THING. Why the hell doesn't the volume dial mute the signal? What am I going to do with that quiet noise? I'd run a volume pedal afterwards, but I'm not sacrifising my signal from my guitar.

Bottom line, Sound quality and noise, I can deal with. I Cannot accept how the pedal doesn't perform the simple tasks I bought it for.

Seems reliable, but I wouldn't know, cause I'm returning it ASAP

While the boomerang is a fun pedal, and I used it a lot, I shouldn't be trying to think about how to get around the problems it came with. I didn't spend 450 bucks to sit around thinking about "Well, maybe if I arrange my pedals differently." If anybody knows a better phrase sampler, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know!

I've already submitted a review; this is just a follow up.
I recently played a solo guitar gig at a fashionable establishment using the 'rang with a Godin LGX-SA guitar and a Roland guitar synth. I played one set of just straight chord/melody arrangments of some standards, which was 'ok'. I then fired up a few tunes by laying down some changes with guitar, (and utilizing the guitar synth) bass guitar and keyboard. I then jammed away while the 'rang sat there happily looping the changes I'd just layed down. It turned some heads and caused a few customers to come sit near me to watch how I was doing this. Way cool!!!