Donner Circle Looper Loop Pedal - Full Review

Hi. I've just been sent the Donner Circle Looper, and it's lovely when you get sent things to review. Obviously, if I get sent a looper, I'm quite happy. But this thing intrigues me because it's got a lot to offer, and it doesn't cost a lot. I've done the cheap model things before, but this thing looks potentially like it could be a really good looper. Let's get it unboxed. I'm going to plug it into my system. I'm going to take it to its paces. This is the Circle Looper by Donner.

Here's the box with a nice little pattern on the front, and it's a special box. This is the Donner Circle Looper Guitar Effect Pedal. Let's get this open. We have a cable, USB to Micro USB, and then, there's the looper. We've got Memory, Level, and Fade Out with the looper, and then, Recording on the looper. On the right side, you have Select, Volume, and BPM for the rhythm. At the center is our little screen. Below the screen is the merge button for merging the looper and the rhythm together. At the bottom, we have the Stop/Play/Clear and also Stop/Play again.

I'm taking it that's for the looper, but then that's also for the rhythm. There is a bit of cross there. We'll have to figure that out. On the right side, we've got our left and right inputs and our external control jack. On the left side, is our output to our main PA or mixer. On the back, we've got our USB for our cable, and we've got our DC in. We've also got two little stickers, a little platinum sticker and their logo. We also have our product register thing, which every company has now, and then we've got our user guide for the Donner Circle Looper.

What we've done is we got the Donner Circle Looper plugged into the TC-Helicon VoiceLive Play Acoustic. I do a thing called dual mono looping, and to quickly explain, I've got my microphone and my guitar plugged into the TC-Helicon, and they're coming mono out, so the left is the microphone and the right is the guitar, and that's going into the Circle Looper. You have to ignore the left and right part. They're just two mono signals that are now going out to the speaker. When you look at the Circle Looper, you have to think of it with a line down the middle. On the right hand side, is all the rhythm section stuff, and on the left hand side, is the looper. Right to the UNCLEAR, we're on memory #1, and when I start looping, it creates a circle, and that's why it's called the Circle Looper. It has this little icon that goes around. We're in Record Mode, then we go into Overdub Mode, and then we're going into Play Mode. Let me show you that.

Straight away, I could see that the Donner Circle Looper was recording, and it tells me how many seconds it is. I've got it stopped at the moment. As we were doing dub and playing, the icon was going round. Now, I can overdub many times, and if I want to undo, it's the same as pretty much all loopers. You hold down the button for 2 seconds, it undoes it, and then you hold it down again, and it redoes it.

That's the one phrase looper. It can undo, it can redo, and then you can delete it. But on the top of the Donner Circle Looper, there are two dials there, and those dials are also buttons, which allows you to control three different things: memory, level, and fade out as well. If you click on one of them, we can get to the volume. It's set at 0dB right now, and you can just use that dial to turn it and change the volume. The next one is fade. It's currently set at zero, so if I stop it, it stops instantly. We change that over, I think up to 5 seconds, and then it can fade out when you press the stop button. Let me do that now.

That's a nice little effect. It certainly has a curve on it towards the end, but it's a nice little effect to add on. Going back to memory for a second, there's 40 memories on the Donner Circle Looper, and one thing I've found with other loopers is if you accidentally knock up a memory and then knock back down again, you've lost a loop. This is the other way around, so if I go up a memory and knock it by accident, if I go back down a memory, that loop is still there, which is really useful. In a live environment, mistakes can happen. You could knock that loop by accidents. I've done that with other pedals, and that's it. The entire loop is gone because it doesn't say that you haven't written it to that memory. Having this auto save feature is a real life saver in a live environment.

To completely get rid of the loop on the Donner Circle Looper, what you have to do is hold down the middle button underneath the little display, and that is also the merge button to merge the rhythm with the loop. We're going to get rid of this loop completely and then use memory #1 for the rhythm section. Between 2 and 3 seconds, hold down. It says Clear, and it's gone. The lights at the top show you what you've got selected, so if it's on the left hand side and it's blue, it's the looper. If it's red, then it's the rhythm.

Now, in the rhythm section of the Donner Circle Looper, it says Pop, and there's loads of different rhythms to choose from. It set as 4/4 to begin with, and each style has ten grooves, so at the moment we're in Pop, and there's ten Pop grooves. When you're in the rhythm section, the buttons change slightly. On the right hand side is how you start your rhythm. The left hand side, where you would normally start loop, that's actually your BPM, so you can start clicking that beforehand to get the BPM you want and then hit it. The other two options for rhythm is selecting a rhythm. There's also volume, and there's also the BPM. I've turned the volume down quite a bit because it seems to blast through my speakers. Let's have a listen to some of the different ones.

The other thing we've just done is I've just gone up to memory #2, just for a quick demo, and this is for the rhythm section. When you go through the rhythm section like I have, you'll notice that the tempos are all different, and they're there to show you a demo of what that beat would be like on the Donner Circle Looper. But, I just want to show you what it's like when you personalize it yourself, so let's use the very first one, which is pop #1, and I'm just going to change the BPM. To do this, all you do is tap on the left bottom button. As soon as your foot makes more than two taps, the BPM comes up on the screen, leave it for a couple of seconds, and then that goes away.

Now, the rhythm section and the looper actually work independently. You could create a loop and then you could create a drum section, and they could be completely independent. If you want them to work together, then the button in the middle underneath of the LCD display on the Donner Circle Looper, you just have to tap it once. Now, it's gone green. What that means is the rhythm and the loop will actually marry up. This changes things again, so the buttons at the bottom now, if I press to record a loop, it will actually give me a 1234 kicking. For this example, I'm using Funk #4, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to press to record a loop, but this time, it's going to kick me in.

I did different things there on the Donner Circle Looper, depending on what you're using, so the two top buttons become really important. If you're on the looper and you press stop, it's going to stop the looper and the rhythm. If you're on the looper mode, which is the blue one, and we press the button on the right below, which is the start/stop, it's going to start the looper and the rhythm at the same time. That's another nice thing as well. When you're using the rhythm and you press stop, things still carry on, which is nice, like cymbals. It doesn't just cut off. I quite like that.

If we're just on the rhythm section, I can just bring the rhythm in, even though I've got a loop recorded. I'm on the rhythm section now, obviously, on the right hand side top, the red icon is there. If I press it, it'll bring the rhythm in, and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to press on the loop side and then bring the loop in. One thing that you have to be aware of is it doesn't pre-roll it. When you press it, it goes back to bar one, B1 straight away, no matter where you are, unfortunately. But, if you can get your timing right, you can bring it in almost like an intro. One thing that's also really cool as well with the Donner Circle Looper is that it still remembers the undo/redo. Let's go to a different memory.

Let's assume we just knocked it down to memory #40 just for a second. I'm going to put it back to memory one. It says memory #1 recorded, and it still remembers the undo redo for that, which is really useful. Not only has it remembered the recording itself, I haven't had to save it myself. The Donner Circle Looper just does auto save. Let's just play it, and I can still do undo/redo. Imagine you're creating a verse, and then you add some harmonies on. You could take those harmonies off and put them back on again. You could save an entire set list like this.

What do I think of the Donner Circle Looper? Well, I like it. I think it's brilliant. I love the colors. Whoever designed this is seriously into Tron, and I love the fact it's just, like white in this lovely turquoise blue color. It's stereo in with an external control, which is great. You've got your looper on the left side and everything to do with the rhythm on the right side. It's really simple, and the control in the middle, you just press that to merge the rhythm with the looper. Downside wise, these knobs are plastic, but they've got a nice click to them and a nice internal click as well as you cycle through the different options. But, yeah, they're plastic. I could see me pinging that off if I kicked it too hard in a gig. The bottom knobs are metal, and they feel really nice to actually hit. They're a good space between each other, so you don't misfire between the two pedals.

The Donner Circle Looper is a one phrase looper, but that's what it's meant to be. It's not a multi-phrase looper. You're not paying for a multi-phrase looper. Talking about pay, and that's the thing I haven't discussed yet, this thing is pretty cool, and it's around £73 (prices may change) from the Donner website. That's around €84 (prices may change) from the Donner website. The other thing that Donner has done, which I didn't realize we were going to do, is they've set up a code, and the code is John Paul. Now. It's just my name. Use that on the checkout and you're going to get 5% off this. So you're already going to get 5% off something that's £73.

The Donner Circle Looper is punching its weight way above the £150 pound mark in my eyes. The reason I say that is older loopers are 16-bit. This thing is 24-bit by standard, so it's a higher quality looper right from the get-go. The rhythm section might not be to everyone's taste, and I think this was designed a little bit with the RC-10R idea in mind. But, the drums aren't obviously like the drums of the RC-10R. You've got things like a UNCLEAR, a chorus, and a bridge. You can section the drum patterns out. This is ten musical styles with ten grooves for each one, which is 100 patterns, and it's got 40 presets. I know a lot of them all got 99. I've never used 99 presets, if I'm honest. 40 is way more than I need, and I think that's perfect.

The Donner Circle Looper comes with 160 minutes of internal recording time total, and there's a four-minute limit on the recording time for each loop. Another thing as well, USB. Before I forget, the USB plugs in and you can get your loops directly off and on this looper over to a computer. It's nice and simple. It's just basically which slots you've got 40 slots, and then, you can drop loops in or take loops out. My only tiny gripe and it's the tiniest of gripes with this, is I wish it had a battery option. It would be nice if you could take that busking with you or you just want to take it without having to plug it into 9 volts.

But, it is the standard 9-volt plug. If you want to plug it into your daisy-chain for your pedal board, then shouldn't have a problem. A big thank you to Donner for sending this out to me. I think it's a great little looper, and as I say, I've got a link in the description box here. It is an affiliate link, which means I do get a little bit of money my way if you are picking one up, but at no extra cost to you. In fact, you're going to get 5% off if you use my name in the checkout. That is the Circle Looper by Donner. Thank you very much for watching. We'll see you on the next one.