Ed Sheeran has reportedly moved north of 170 million records. He could bankroll a touring band the size of a small army. Instead, he walks onstage at sold-out arenas with a guitar, his voice, and a slab of plastic and metal at his feet, then builds entire songs in real time by stacking layer on layer.
That slab now has his name on it. The Sheeran Looper X is the flagship of a small lineup, and it costs $1,300. The pitch is blunt: buy the same machine the famous guy uses, and you too can be a one-person show.
Whether $1,300 is the right number for that fantasy is the whole question.
What you're actually buying
First, the physical thing. The Looper X weighs 16 pounds and eats a 13-by-22-inch chunk of floor, which is a fairly standard pedalboard footprint. The chassis mixes plastic and metal and feels solid enough to survive being chucked in a van.
The eight foot pedals sit in a four-by-two grid, rubberized and angled slightly upward. That tilt matters more than it sounds. You can stomp one without clipping its neighbor, and anyone who's ever fat-fingered a pedal mid-song knows how much grief that one design choice saves.
Up top there's a touchscreen, which is easily the fastest way through the menus. There's also a rotary push dial that does the same job the slow way. Around the back you'll find four hybrid XLR/quarter-inch inputs, each with its own gain knob, plus separate volume controls for the main and headphone outputs.
There's a catch hiding back there, too. The eighth-inch auxiliary input has a gain knob but doesn't route to any of the actual looper tracks. It's a pass-through, nothing more. As WIRED noted in its review, that's one of several small quirks that nag at you the longer you use the thing.
Getting a sound going, though, is refreshingly painless. Plug in a mic, a guitar, a synth, whatever. Hit Record and Play and the halo around the dial glows red. Press again and it turns orange for overdub. Press once more and it goes green, meaning playback. Pick a fresh track, repeat, and your arrangement starts taking shape. You don't need the manual for the basics, which is a low bar that plenty of gear still trips over.
Learning to speak Looper
The basics are easy. The depth is where you'll lose a weekend.
The Looper X uses "loop" to mean what other pedals call a preset, a song, or a project. So switching from one tune to another isn't a vibe shift, it's a file load: tap Function, choose load, pick the loop by name. Slightly clunky vocabulary. You adjust.
The real learning curve lives in the sync settings, tucked behind a little grid icon in the screen's top corner. There are five of them, and they completely change how your layers behave.
The default is Multi, which the company says is Sheeran's own go-to. Here, your first loop sets the ceiling. Lay down two bars and every subsequent loop on that track caps out at two bars, dropping into playback automatically once it hits the limit. Tidy and predictable.
Sync mode treats your first track as the boss and lets other tracks run in multiples or fractions of it. Start with two bars and you can build a four-bar layer on top, or a one-bar one underneath. Song mode cuts the leash entirely: each track keeps its own length. Band mode splits the difference between the two.
Then there's Free, where nothing is locked to anything. That's the one for drifting off into ambient soundscapes instead of, you know, writing actual structured songs. Nice to have. Most players will live in the first two or three modes.
Three ways to watch your loops
Keeping track of all those layers is its own small art, and the Looper X gives you three screens for it. Track view shows each loop and input as a vertical bar that changes color depending on what it's doing. Mixer view looks similar but adds mute and solo buttons. Wave view, the genuinely useful one, draws a horizontal waveform with a scrolling marker that follows each loop in real time. Any of the three can be your home screen.
The routing options deserve real credit. By default every input feeds every track, but you can rewire that any way you like, and the system for doing it manages to be both deep and easy to read. There's also a customizable "Mode" switch, which lets you tune how that footswitch behaves. That's the kind of touch working performers notice.
Where it gets frustrating
Now the parts that keep this from being an easy recommendation.
You can't stop tracks one at a time. You can only mute them. For a lot of looping styles that's a real limitation, because muting and stopping are not the same gesture, and anyone building dynamic arrangements live will feel the difference. Linking inputs together, meanwhile, is more awkward than it should be on a machine that otherwise gets routing right.
The built-in effects are the bigger letdown. They're inflexible and, frankly, a touch cheap-feeling for a pedal that costs as much as a decent used car payment's worth of gear. On a $1,300 box, chintzy FX sting more than they would on something half the price.
Which gets to the core issue. A looper this expensive is making an implicit promise that it's worth the premium over the dozens of cheaper options out there. The Looper X earns part of that with its build, its pedals, and its routing brain. It loses ground on the effects, the muting-not-stopping quirk, and that dead-end aux input from earlier. WIRED landed on a 6 out of 10, which feels about right: a capable instrument carrying a price tag that asks a lot.
Looping itself is a deeply personal thing. Robert Fripp built endless tape-loop drones. Ian Williams of Don Caballero stacked tangled guitar lines into math-rock. Dave Knudson of Minus the Bear bent a Line 6 DL-4 into a glitchy sampler. No two players want the same workflow, which means a truly universal looper is basically impossible to build. The Looper X tries to be that anyway, and it gets closer than most.
Who it's really for
Here's the honest read. If you're a serious solo performer who plays out regularly, who needs four inputs, robust routing, and a build that won't quit on you mid-set, the Sheeran Looper X makes a real case. The touchscreen setup is fast, the pedals feel great underfoot, and the sync modes give you room to grow.
If you're a bedroom looper, or just curious whether you can sound like a band, $1,300 is a steep entry fee for hardware that fumbles its effects and won't let you stop a single track cleanly. There are cheaper, simpler loopers that'll get you 80 percent of the way for a fraction of the cost.
The name on the box is doing a lot of selling here. Whether the machine underneath justifies the markup depends entirely on how many nights a year you actually plan to stand alone on a stage and build a song from nothing. For Sheeran, the math clearly works. For the rest of us, it's worth doing the arithmetic before you reach for the credit card.