This is the exact setup Ed Sheeran uses to make one acoustic guitar sound like a full band — and straight out of the box, your Looper X looks nothing like it. Most people unbox this pedal, get hit with a wall of menus, and never get past the surface. These are the ten things I set up first, in the order I'd want a new owner to do them.
Rename your tracks like Ed's stadium rig
Ed's four loop tracks aren't generic — each one is dedicated to a specific element of the performance. That gives you a horizontal workflow instead of the vertical, stack-everything-on-top-of-itself approach you might know from other brands, where things get cluttered fast.
Tap a track name and use the touchscreen keyboard to relabel it. Rename track one to Guitar, track two to Sub, track three to RC20, and track four to Vox. These are the same labels Ed's front-of-house engineers see, and they exist to give the desk maximum flexibility over his sound.
Route your inputs to the right tracks
With your guitar in input one and your microphone in input two, head to Master Menu → Audio Routing → Track Assign and decide which loop track receives which instrument.
Set Guitar to input one and Sub to input one. Set RC20 to input one and input two — this is the clever one. It mirrors Ed's old BOSS RC-20, letting him play guitar and loop vocals simultaneously on that track, which is far more flexible for vocal harmonies over chords. Finally, set Vox to input two only, exclusively for the microphone.
The payoff: you can EQ each loop track differently and hang a different effects rack on each one, so everything sits better in the mix and sounds fuller. Take it a step further and give each track its own physical output — track one to output one, track two to output two, and so on.
Load Ed's effects racks
The Looper X ships with presets so you're not stuck tweaking for hours. Tap the Guitar channel on the touchscreen, open the top dropdown, and press Presets. Ed's own racks sound genuinely good on an acoustic — my picks are Acoustic Rhythm 1 or Acoustic Rhythm 2 for that sparkly tone close to how Ed EQs his.
Do the same on the Sub channel and load Boom Sub, which boosts the lows to make the kick drum off your guitar body sound huge. On the vocal rack, drop down to Vocal Wet, Vocal Chorus or Vocal Verb depending on your voice and the room. Whichever loop track you have selected during a performance enables that track's rack.
Tip: Build your own variant rather than fighting the preset. Mine is just Acoustic Rhythm 1 with a few tweaks for whichever acoustic and speakers I'm using that night.
Build a custom pedal menu
This one was a complete game changer for me. Go to Master Menu → Loop Settings → Custom Pedal Menu, then press Customize Pedal. You choose a block, then the feature it controls — building your own one-page shortcut menu of the functions you actually use.
Normally, reaching your effects racks mid-song means pressing Functions, then loading effects. Reaching Bounce or Multiply means Functions, press-and-hold to page two, then hunt. That's a lot of focus to spare while you're already singing and playing. I have Bounce, Multiply, Effects and Tuner on mine — plus Mute, for the reason below.
Remap Mute so you don't lose it
To reach that custom menu while performing you have to reassign the Mode button from Mute to Custom — and the moment you do, you lose mute mode entirely. That's why Mute goes into the custom menu.
Go to Loop Settings → Custom Pedal → Customize Pedal, enable Mute on a spare button, and press Save. Now it's a double tap: press once for your custom menu, press again for mute mode, and the pedal behaves exactly as it always did. Press again and you're back in record mode. You keep everything you had, and gain a shortcut page on top.
Add an octave for instant sub bass
If you're playing Ed's more recent material, he leans on a keyboard for synth sub bass — think Bad Habits. You can fake it on the acoustic instead of adding an instrument to your setup.
On the Guitar channel, open your effects rack, click Edit, and enable an octave pedal. It adds a sub bass under whatever you play, and because it's an individual effects block you can toggle it in and out — normal guitar one moment, sub bass mode the next as you build layers.
Use Pedal Assign to toggle effects live
Go to Effects Racks → Pedal Assign, choose the rack you want to control, enable Toggle, and pick the footswitch. For the octave above, assign it to a switch and you can drop the sub in and out on the fly. You can toggle several blocks at once too — octave and compressor together, for instance.
I have the same thing set up on track three for my overdrive and amp: one press turns both on, another turns them off. Once a rack is pre-assigned, this is the layer of live control that makes it performable.
Pick the right loop mode
There are five ways to run the Looper X, but two matter for solo performers. Multi mode is the default and it's exactly how Ed runs it — every loop track is the same length. That's perfectly fine, but it can mean waiting a long time to build a performance up.
On a lot of songs I switch to Sync mode instead, which lets you record different-length loops. As long as each is a multiple of the others, they stay locked together — a short drum beat, a longer chord section, a longer vocal part, all resolving back to the same point.
Switch to Wave view
For the best experience in sync mode, come out of Track view and into Wave view. Ed uses Track view, but I prefer Wave because you can actually see each loop's waveform and where it is in its cycle.
This is what makes sync mode fast. Instead of 16 bars to lay a drum beat, I'll do it in about two — a short, tight, accurate master loop with the crown on it that everything else syncs to. Then I build chords and harmonies on top of something rhythmically watertight rather than something that drifted over eight bars.
Assign Bounce and Multiply (and fix After Bounce)
Bounce collapses several loop tracks down into one, freeing the others up to layer more. Open Bounce from your custom menu, choose the tracks to bounce (say RC20 and Vox), pick the destination track, and go — the audio lands on track one and your other tracks are free.
There's a catch worth knowing: if your pedal doesn't clear the bounced tracks automatically, go to Global Settings → After Bounce and change it from Keep to Delete.
Multiply pairs with it beautifully. Open Multiply, expand by ×2, and the loops you already recorded double in length — so you can mute the guitar, keep the doubled drum beat running, and play a breakdown or a longer chord progression over the top.