The Sheeran Looper X is one of the most powerful loop stations you can buy right now, and out of the box that power can feel like a wall of menus. This is the getting-started tour I'd give any new owner — enough to wire it up, understand the layout, and record your first loop with confidence. The deeper performance work comes later; this is the foundation.
Plug in your instruments
Round the back you've got four inputs, and they're combo XLR jacks — so each one takes either a standard guitar jack or an XLR microphone cable. That gives you high-quality audio and a lot of flexibility: guitar into one, a vocal mic into another, and two more spare for whatever your setup needs.
Route your inputs to the right tracks
Open Main Menu → Audio Routing. On the touchscreen you tap the input numbers (1–4) to assign each physical input to the loop tracks that should receive it. For example, send input one to tracks one and two, and input two to tracks three and four.
This matters for more than organisation. Toggling an input off for a track stops unwanted bleed — so your vocal mic can't accidentally record onto a guitar track while you're playing. Decide which instrument belongs on which track first, and everything downstream gets cleaner.
Learn the two function menus
Press the Function footswitch once and the screen shows Functions A — this reassigns the track footswitches to secondary commands: Tuner, FX, Load, Save, Peel, Clear All, Clear Track and Exit.
Press and hold the Function footswitch and you get Functions B, the advanced layer: Bounce, Multiply, Speed, B-Track, Speed/Transpose, Fade, Reverse and Exit. Knowing these two pages exist is half the battle — almost everything you'll reach for mid-performance lives on one of them.
Choose your screen view
The Looper X gives you three touchscreen layouts, reachable from the Main Menu or by holding the Mode footswitch:
Track is the linear view — an audio visualiser with a loop-progression bar, best for seeing where you are in the cycle. Wave shows a DAW-style waveform of the recorded audio, which is invaluable for building different-length loops. Mixer gives you touch-responsive volume sliders per track (double-tap a slider to reset it to neutral), plus mute, solo, FX targeting and panning.
Pick a looper mode
Go to Main Menu → Loop Settings → Looper Mode. This is the single most important behavioural setting. In Multi mode, once you record your first track, every subsequent track automatically matches its exact length — the straightforward, predictable way to loop and how most people should start. Sync mode, by contrast, lets tracks run at different lengths as long as they're multiples of each other.
Tip: Start in Multi mode until the workflow is second nature. Sync mode is more powerful for complex builds, but it's much easier to learn once your hands and feet already know the pedal.
Use the built-in tuner
Press Function, then select Tuner on screen. You can choose which inputs are active (1, 2, 3 or 4) so you tune the right source, and adjust the pitch reference from the default 440 Hz if you need to. Isolating a single input is handy when you want to tune cleanly without picking up the rest of the stage.
Turn on the layers count
Under Main Menu → Global Settings → Bars & Layers Count, toggle it On. This adds a useful readout to the Track view showing exactly how many overdub layers sit on each track — so you always know how deep a loop has got before you add another pass.
Bring tracks in and out with Mute mode
Press the Mode footswitch once to enter Mute mode. Now the track footswitches act as start/stop buttons for their loops, letting you drop individual tracks in and out of the mix while everything else keeps playing. This is the core of arranging a live performance — building tension by muting, then releasing.
Undo overdubs with Peel
Press and hold a track footswitch that has overdubs on it to activate Peel. The screen shows an undo countdown (for example, "Undo Layers 6 → 5") and strips away your most recent overdub layer, one at a time. Worth knowing: this is a destructive edit — a peeled layer can't be brought back, so use it deliberately.
Clear everything at once
Press and hold the master Stop footswitch to start a three-second countdown that clears all recorded audio from every track simultaneously. It's your clean-slate reset between songs — the hold-and-countdown design is there so you can't wipe a performance by accident.
Set your pedal logic
Go to Main Menu → Global Settings → Pedal Logic. The default is Record/Play; switching to Record/Dub/Play changes what the main record footswitch does after your first pass. On Record/Dub/Play, the next press jumps straight into an overdub (the indicator turns orange) rather than dropping into playback (green). Pick whichever matches how you like to build loops.
Jump between tracks while recording
You don't need extra footswitch presses to move on. While you're recording track one, press the track two footswitch before the loop cycle ends — track one will finish its loop and switch to playback automatically, and track two starts recording immediately. That seamless hand-off is what keeps a live build flowing.
Save and recall with the Loop Manager
Finally, Main Menu → Loop Manager is where you load, save and rename whole performances and presets. Loading a preset also recalls its own tempo and metronome settings, so each song can come back exactly as you set it up.