The phenomenon that is Ed Sheeran’s rise to fame has, of course, been mostly down to great songwriting, but his live abilities have also been a big factor. One of the most captivating aspects of these performances is watching him build up tracks with live looping. We’re going to explore this kind of looping in this first tutorial in a new series where we analyse popular processes used by contemporary artists in music today.
Ed creates these loops using hardware loopers on stage, basically recording a loop of, say, his guitar playing, and then adding more loops one by one as the audio cycles around.
He has used a variety of hardware loopers in his time, including a Boss
