Solid Looper, Disappointing Support

I’ve been using the TC Electronic Ditto X4 for a while now. While I’m generally happy with its functionality, my experience has been overshadowed by a frustrating flaw: its Hold function doesn’t work at all. I tried updating the firmware and resetting to factory settings but nothing helped.

This feature isn’t critical to how I use the pedal, so I didn’t go through the hassle of returning it. But it shook my trust in TC Electronic’s quality control. Reaching out to support didn’t help much either; it took over 10 days to get a response, and when it came, it was just “please contact your dealer.”

Having two independent loop channels is a real advantage. But I honestly find the built-in effects like reverse, half speed, fade, etc., completely unnecessary. And their inclusion makes the pedal noticeably bulkier than it needs to be. I bought the X4 during a discount period when it was cheaper than the X2, which made the choice easy at the time. But knowing what I know now, I would’ve gone with the X2 instead.

Aside from that, the pedal itself works well and delivers on most of what it promises. But given this experience, this will likely be the first and last TC Electronic product I ever buy.

Basics are great, rest of the features half-baked

First things first, The Ditto x4 as a looper makes me happy. It does what you expect well, and it’s intuitive. With some dip-switches in the back you can configure the Ditto to allow different lengths for each loop “track”, and to go into immediate overdub mode when ending a loop (to capture reverb tails). As someone who does a lot of ambient-style music, that's pretty great.

So that’s all neat, but when it comes to the polish, the “extra” features, I can’t help but feel that the product feels a bit half-baked.

The Ditto comes with a bunch of effects such as fade-out, tape stop, reverse, half / double speed which are very nice to have, but it’s SUCH a missed opportunity that you can’t apply these effects to only one of the two loops. The effects apply to everything at once. I’d love to be able to fade out only one loop, for example. Some of these features also behave a bit unexpectedly when you have the immediate overdub setting turned on.

Then there’s MIDI. With default settings I managed to synchronise the loops to the tempo of my DAW as expected, although I occasionally didn’t have my loops sync up as expected, it’s unclear what the looper’s behaviour is in terms of where it matches the loop length to the tempo. The manual is rather brief when it comes to MIDI.

Where the MIDI functionality completely falls apart is with my beloved dip-switch functionalities; When enabling the different loop lengths, it seems to ignore the MIDI tempo altogether, and not syncing to multiples of each measure length.

I also found that using immediate overdub led to unexpected results. I’m not exactly sure what happened anymore.

In more ways than I’m willing/able to recall here, it seems the effects and the MIDI features both kinda fall apart when you use the dip-switches. I’m getting the feeling that this combo wasn’t really thought out as much as it should. This could probably be fixed with a software update, but considering how long the Ditto has been out I doubt this is going to happen.

Good in concept - Flawed in reality

This pedal would be amazing... if it was built well. I used it live for 2 years, and then the switches broke inside and the functions went all over the place. Luckily it was in warranty, and they didn't have any in stock so I didn't have to get a replacement of this unit. I have subsequently searched the internet to see if there have been any updates on the flawed design - but it seems that most people who have owned this pedal have said the same thing - that they had it, it broke and they wont be buying it again. It's crazy that something that is literally designed to be stepped on could be built so poorly. The MIDI IN and THRU features were super useful for syncing with a drum machine, and the fact that it was so simple to operate were my favourite things about this pedal. Finding a replacement for a dual track looper with MIDI was hard work, but I'm now going to try my luck with the new Boss RC-500 instead.

Great Looper

The reason I didn't give it 5 stars is it can be a learning curve. I've seen people do awesome stuff with it. Just takes time I suppose to get the timing down and figure out all the little tips and tricks. Build quality is great everything feels really solid.

I hate this pedal with a passion.

I hate it so much... First of all if you don't have another pedal with a midi clock, don't even waste your money on it. I used to play in a two piece band with a looper (bass+vocals) and used the Boss RC-30 without ANY problems for a very long time. Finally I've swithet to this, bacause everybody seemed to use it and my experience with it was the worst ever.

First of all no metter how hard I tried I coudn't meka the loop seem straight. The loops were seemingly shorter every replay and the pedal glitched (even after the software update), one time it glithed and reseted in a live situation. And the fact the loops were never straight drove me almost to a depressive state of self-doubt.

It is possible I just coudn't make it work. It is just my subjective opinion, but: I hate, hate, hate it.

Lots of people have problems with this, not me.

I read a lot of people have problems updating and yes, the whole TC update system sucks hard and the Music community assistance should seriously s*ck my d**k really hard, bunch of useless, lame motherf*ckers... Back to the pedal: I updated it and it got stuck on the final stage of update so I waited like one hour and then decided I would not have spent my life there and unplugged it with a bestemmia. The pedal works anyway, and man it is a fine looper! The audio quality is awesome, don't let those corksniffers tell you otherwise, the FX section is pretty usable and this thing has MIDI connection, making it actually useful in a band or with a synth or a drummachine, rounding up your sloppy playing. This means your guitar loops will stay on metronome forever, now you have time to go look for each and every Musictribe member and f*ckin' kick their a*ses.

Great performance machine

I had the mini Ditto looper and absolutely loved it's simplicity, quality and it's analog dry-through. The bigger brother just has a bigger leaning-curve, but it's really 4 times better. I can now easily record my stereo effects and export them with great quality to my mac. Only thing I can point out is this: Imagine you record one loop, then another. Now you add a new layer on top of the first loop. You can undo and redo that last layer, BUT if you stop it all and playback again, no more undo for you, it will just delete the whole loop... Maybe a firmware update could allow that. Or else you have to think that once you stop the loop (hitting the stop button) you will merge all the layers inside each loop.

From Gear Setup

Super useful and high quality

Great for layering live or recording, whether it's ambient, shoegaze, Frippertronics, or doom. Works well with any input sounds (e.g., guitar, bass, drums, samples). Very conducive to improvising.