OWEN O'MALLEY: Here we can see that there are seven footswitches on the front of this pedal. Al the way on the left here is our main record/play/overdub pedal. That's wht we're going to be using to record, play back, and then later overdubs on top of each of the phrases. This pedal -- this footswitch right here will stop each phrase individually. We set our tempo with this pedal; you can't set it while you're recording but you can set it before recording, and then after you record you can sort of reset it and play the phrase that you just recorded at a different tempo.

Right here, we've got our undo and redo switch. Each phrase has one level of undo and redo, which is very helpful especially when you're dealing with multiple phrases here. You can keep one phrase playing and just undo the last take on whatever phrase you have selected over here so you don't have to kind of, you know, get rid of the baby with the bath water if you screw one thing up while you're recording live.

All the way on the right here are the three phrase selection pedals: phrase 1, phrase 2, phrase 3. Right now, you can see we've got phrase 3 selected. If we press phrase 1 here, now phrase 1 is the active phrase so if we hit play...

[OWEN O'MALLEY TRIGGERS PLAY FOOTSWITCH]

BOSS RC-50: "Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. This is Owen O'Malley."

OWEN O'MALLEY: ...we can get our little thing here to stop that. As you can see there's a blinking green light on the phrase 1 pedal, and this is blinking green to correspond on the record and play and overdub switch. That means that there is a phrase recorded on here and is ready to be played back. If we were to play it back...,

[OWEN O'MALLEY TRIGGERS PLAY FOOTSWITCH]

BOSS RC-50: "Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. This is Owen O'Malley, and today we're going to be taking a look at the Boss RC-50 Loop Station, quite possibly the world's most pow --"

OWEN O'MALLEY: ...you see that [SOUNDS LIKE] LED becomes a solid green light. If we wanted to overdub on that, we [SOUNDS LIKE] push this again and it becomes an orange light. That means overdubbing. Hit it again and it's not overdubbing. Let's stop that. Now, that's just obviously my introduction. If we want to clear that, just that phrase out of the memory, you hold down the stop footswitch until it blinks red, and now there's no phrase in there. I don't think that can be undone. Nope, that can't be undone. And the same thing with all the other phrases; when you switch over here, you can see there's still a phrase in 2 and 3. Let's actually just get rid of all of these right now because we're going to be recording a demo later on.

Now, I don't know if you noticed but on this little LED display, there's phrase , phrase 2, phrase 3, now they're all showing null. They're all showing a dash which means there's nothing recorded. Before I erased them, they had little circles that showed that there was actually something recorded on those phrases. If you're scrolling through patches with this selector right here, you can easily see like now there's phrases recorded on all three of the phrases here for patch 8 and so on when we go to patch 9, it's empty, so you can kind of at a glance see what's recorded where.

These are all of our menu selection buttons. That's how we access parameters like naming the patches, setting the playback options, you can have phrases played back right away or have them play back in sort of sync with the other loops or, you know, it won't start until the next loop is finished. There's a ton of different options here. We're going to explore them all later.

Here's where we select single or multi playback. We're going to look at the differences between those two playback modes in a different video.

Here's our phrase edit section. This display is whether or not reverse or one shot is selected on each of the three phrases. Reverse is reverse; that's pretty self-explanatory. One-shot is a sort of one-shot sampler style, so if you want one of the phrases to be sort of like a "Hey!", well, you know, something cool, you can set it to one shot, and it'll just be a one shot thing; it won't be loop synced with the rest of the phrase.

We've got separate volume controls for each of the phrases so you can kind of pull things in and out of the mix sort of DJ style like that. This is our guide level. There is a drum tempo guide here, which really helps one sort of laying down the first phrase that you're going to record to make sure that that is tempo-synced with whatever tempo you tap in right here.

We've got our input level selectors. We got auxiliary input, microphone input right here, and our instrument input level and the master level here, and then there's a couple of different overdub modes here. We'll take a look at those in a little bit. Auto record, input mode, that's basically all the buttons in the top.

Let's take a look into how to record a basic phrase.