III Phrase Sampler

Since 1995, the Boomerang has been one of the more popular loopers out on the market, road- and studio-tested by such respected guitarists such as Andrew Belew and Daniel Lanois, as well as plenty of bedroom experimenters all over. Mike Nelson and Lee Hardesty of Boomerang Musical Products have taken their original creation to a much higher level with the III Phase Sampler.

First off, the Phase III Sampler now offers you 4 different play styles, each with its own benefit to your creativity side. The Serial Play Style allows you to create one loop after the other, while the Serial Master Play Style is for serial style loopers who like to lay down rhythmic backgrounds behind their melodic loops, perfect for creating verse, chorus, and bridge parts while maintaining a consistent rhythm under all three looped parts. You can even stack on each of the different initial loops for truly intricate soundscapes. Sync Play Style plays all loops simultaneously and in sync while Free Play Style plays all loops simultaneously but not in sync, ideal for those who like to experiment with no boundaries. The Phase III Looper even lets you stutter your start loops for a DJ-scratch like effect or stack loops at half speeds.

There are six knobs to let you control Decay, Volume, Vol 2, Vol 3, Vol 4, and Fade Time, the final 4 being available with a simple tap or hold of one of the two Bonus footswitches. The Bonus footswitches also open up your ability to unlock a plethora of options, including stacking unlimited loops; undo/redo; erasing loops one at a time or all at once; copying a complete loop; Copy Live to enable resampling so the pedal's output is routed to a new loop; Octave for playing a loop at half speed and octave lower; Reverse for playing a loop backwards, Once to play a loop one time through, or if it's already playing, stop it at its end; Stutter gives you a record scratching like effect by repeatedly starting a loop over before it plays all the way through; Fade to fade a loop in or out from 3 to 43 seconds; Reverse Solo enabling you to create reverse leads live; and even a panic button which will stop all recording, stacking & playback, and will cancel all active functions without erasing or altering your loops. An expression pedal jack gives you the option of connecting an expression pedal for foot control of overall playback volume or Decay Rate.

The Phase III Sampler offers two sample rates: 48kHz or 24kHz (both use 20-bit samples; through signal is always 48kHz/24-bit), so you will never have to worry about losing tone or signal loss no matter how intricate your stacking gets. At that sampling rate, you get up over 8 minutes of recording time in mono or 4 minutes-plus in stereo, or drop it down to 24kHz but recording and plying at half speed (12kHz) and you can get a whopping 35 minutes of recording in mono and over 17 minutes in stereo.

Before you mess around with the ready-to-use-out-of-the-box Phase III Sampler, be sure to read the manual to get the most out of this versatile looping machine, and for some great one liners from the Boomerang team.