Ed Sheeran fills stadiums with a guitar, two microphones and a loop pedal. This guide breaks his rig down into the two things that matter — the equipment, and the way it's routed — and shows you how to recreate the workflow with gear you can actually buy.
What Ed actually uses: the Chewie Monster
Ed's looper is a custom-built pedal — the Chewie Monster — and it isn't really a pedal at all. It's a foot controller driving Mobius, a free but famously complicated looping application, running inside Ableton Live on a laptop. That combination gives his production team unlimited audio routing and a rig programmed specifically for each song. Powerful, but not something an average performer wants to build or maintain — so let's talk consumer options.
The heart of the workflow: one instrument per track
What makes Ed's looping sound so clean is the routing. The Chewie Monster runs four loop tracks with dedicated jobs: one for guitar, one for percussion (drummed on the guitar body), one for vocals, and a fourth that takes everything at once. Each input records only to its own track — no bleed, no mess. That input-per-track routing is the single feature to look for when choosing your own looper.
Route your inputs like the Chewie Monster
On a looper with flexible routing, the setup looks like this: plug the guitar into input one and assign it exclusively to track one. Assign track two to the guitar as well if you drum your percussion on the guitar body, or to a dedicated mic if not. Put your looping microphone on its own input, assigned to track three. Set the final track to accept all inputs, so you can capture full-band moments in one pass. Name the tracks if your unit allows it — on stage, you want zero doubt about what's where.
The two-microphone trick
Ed performs with two mics, and it's not for show. His main singing mic runs straight to the PA and never touches the looper. The second mic is the looping mic — and the key detail is a kill switch. Flick it on to record a harmony or beatbox layer, flick it off the rest of the time. Without it, every guitar layer you record also captures room noise and crowd sound through the open mic, and the loop turns to mush a layer at a time. An SM57-style mic with a kill switch costs very little and completely solves it.
Tip: If your loops sound progressively muddier as you stack layers, an always-open microphone is almost always the culprit.
Why the tiny guitar matters
The small-bodied acoustic isn't just an image thing. Ed drums his kick and snare on the guitar, and a small body produces a tighter, less resonant thump — a big dreadnought turns every hit into a boomy wash of air and, on festival stages with subwoofers underfoot, a feedback risk. His original Martin LX1E has given way to custom Lowden models, but the small-body principle has never changed.
The 2026 shortcut: the Sheeran Loopers
When I first made the video version of this guide, the closest consumer routes were the BOSS RC-300 (simpler, cheaper, great starting point) or the HeadRush Looperboard (proper input-per-track routing). Both still work — but there's now a much more direct answer: Ed's own Sheeran Looper + and Looper X pedals, built around exactly this workflow out of the box. The Looper X in particular is the closest you can get to a plug-and-play Chewie Monster — four tracks, flexible routing, designed for the loop-a-song-live format Ed made famous.