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E-H make some kick-ass pedals - most of which are analogue and owe much to their powers of distortion. This one, however, is as clean as a whistle and has a pile of digitalia within, all bent to the task of creating a dedicated looping machine.

Not a delay machine that also loops, you'll notice - just a looper. A looper with so much memory (Flash Card permitting) that you could record a whole song's worth of multi-track on it in CD quality stereo sound.
In creating this beast, a significant evolution from the recently re-released 16 Second Delay (originally from 1983), E-H have solved a lot of the inherent niggles that looping delays always had, and also created a groovy sound mangler, from which some very strange and wonderful sounds can be extruded. Better than jamming with the only other musician in the world that completely understands them - namely: themselves. Or even better, a whole bunch of themselveses.

The 2880 is not designed to sit on the beer sodden stage and be operated by your foot. It is the brain, and is all about fingers and sports eleven neat little buttons along with seven sliders and nine little pots. It looks funky, feels solid and the layout seems self-explanatory, so in the long-standing musician's tradition of wasting time and developing bad habits, we decided to ignore the manual and pile straight in too suss it out 'intuitively'.

In use
Within a couple of minutes we had a rocking loop of about ten guitarists going - some going backwards and some playing at double speed! Great fun. A stompbox remote controller is also available, and connects to the brain using a standard 1/4" jack lead. Using the feet to start, stop and otherwise control the 2880 makes for a far more seamless investigation of it's surprising depths, and is also essential for the whole 'be your own band' bit.

The 2880 has four 'tracks' upon which to lay your loops. Each of these tracks has a volume slider and a pan pot. Next to these first four tracks is a fifth mixdown track to which you can mix down the contents of the first four tracks - complete with volume and pan changes. Here's how you do a basic loop, assuming the 2880 is occupying a position between your guitar and amplifier and the input levels are set nicely.

You turn the 'dry out' fader up so you can hear yourself, hit record and start playing. When you get to the end of what will be your loop you either hit record and the machine stops, or you hit play, the machine returns to the beginning and starts recording straight away on track 2. After doing something else on track 2 you could stop, adjust the volumes of your two parts on tracks 1 and 2, then select track 3 hit record and so on until you have four parts. These parts can then be bounced down to the mixdown, making a stereo mix of all four tracks whose level is controlled by the mixdown fader. This is the basic operation of the 2880 - but there's a lot more.