Guitar Essentials: Why You Need a Looper Pedal

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PHOTO: Stefan W | Flickr Creative Commons

What’s the most important practice tool a guitar can have? A metronome? A tuner?

If you ask Sean Daniel, the answer would be a looper pedal.

“The number-one most important tool you can have for practicing is a looper pedal,” Sean says, and in this video, he presents a few different examples of how you can incorporate a looper into practice to develop your understanding of the relationship between chords and scales.

Sean goes over some of the finer points of creating loops—including timing and volume—and then demonstrates how you can use the pedal to help you practice. For his first example, he loops a chord progression of Am–C–G–Em and plays scales over it.

This is a lead-up to what Sean considers the most important way you can use a looper pedal—as a way to help your ears become better at picking out melodies within a scale.

“Something like this is a great way to learn how to move around inside of a scale intend of reading TAB,” he says. “It’s really going to be much more beneficial to you in the long term to get inside a scale shape and to learn where there notes are in a scale.”

Eventually, after trial and error, he says, your ears will become better at making the connections and you’ll be able to find your way within scales more organically.

“And to me,” Sean says, “that is the number one helpful way that at you can use a looper pedal.”

When you’re finished, visit Sean’s YouTube channel for more of his informative videos.