I believe I'd need a looper with two separate outputs, one for each amp – a bass amp and a guitar amp.
I've been doing this for well over a decade, and would advise you to look at this a bit differently, based on what's been working for me. No conventional amps involved. You are producing a song, and the looper is very close to the last thing in the chain. You should plan on a full range PA for live stuff, and a recorder for studio play.
My chain:
- Guitar multi effects pedal
- Bass multi effects pedal
>> into
stereo mini-mixer. Sub any other instrumentation above, but run into the mini mixer
prior to looper. This gives you volume, EQ, and most importantly, stereo panning. You are making a composition, so carefully place each new voice in it's own space in the stereo spectrum. Piling on up the center mucks it up fast. All this production really should be taking place before it hits the looper.
>> Stereo A/B pedal on
guitar prior to the looper, so you may
bypass the loop when you get to the
solo stage. This way, you can send separate solo channel to your recording equipment/DAW. If you're not recording yet, you will be inclined to do so the minute you get your system working. Last thing you want is to record your solo work directly over the loop, ruining your chances of post-jam editing.
>> Looper. Key features: stereo operation, ability to punch in/overdub, click track and hopefully, auto quantizing to the click. Separate click output is also a must.
Lots more interjected in between, but again, you're either sending this all to a main PA and/or recording device of some sort. I have recently purchased Studio One, in order to get this more integrated into the computer, but honestly have not converted to it yet. Maybe someone will interject a simpler, DAW based way to do this, but given the years of experience and numerous routing/re-routing that takes place in my setup within the above outline has me stuck outside the DAW. I currently simply run Drums, Solo guitar and loop stereo signals into separate channels of the DAW.(Roland Octacapture). One more mono channel for talkback (I'm doing this through headphones most of the time) and click track to another mono channel for blending into HP mixes. This at least gives us the ability to post-edit further with EQ, effects and levels by direct injection, vs. my old Yamaha aw16g, which required a time consuming, data sensitive printing of a CD to then transfer to the mixing computer.
Enough for this post. Hope that makes
some sense of where to start.
And good luck. I've found myself graduating slowly from 10-15 second riffs to now 3-4 minute compositions for loops. It is an amazingly satisfying way to enjoy making spontaneous original compositions on the fly. Just plain tons of fun, and over the years, my drummer and I have put out about 10 discs of our most magic jams.
