Ditto Looper Pause Mod

We all love this budget looper pedal. It&apso;s great for practicing different guitar parts by yourself.

It has a really simple interface. But it really doesn't. I call this kind of thing "false simplicity."

There is a single footswitch, but it performs all of the functions by either holding it down or tapping one or more times. It takes one press to start recording. It takes another press to stop recording and start looping. The limitation that everyone eventually discovers is that if you want to pause the playback, you have to tap the footswitch twice. It&aspos;s an unreasonable thing to expect to be keeping time playing the guitar and also tap twice on beat to pause the looping. That makes it a no-go for any kind of live situation.

Ah! So what&aspos;s the answer? I noticed that if the pedal loses power and then regains power, it starts up with the previous loop in memory in a paused state. So all we need to do is temporarily cut the power!

I added a footswitch that connects a transistor before the power that shorts the power to ground when pressed.

I wanted to rehouse the whole pedal to add the new features but I didn't have an enclosure the size that I wanted. I bolted a 1590A which was pretty close in size to the existing enclosure and matched the paint the best I could with the spray paint I had.

(click an image to uncrop and embiggen)