OWEN O'MALLEY: Hi. Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Owen O'Malley. This is part two of our look at the Boss RC-50 Loop Station. In part one, we looked at the basic controls and the input and output on the back of the pedal. In this part, we're going to look at the difference between the two play modes, which are multi mode and single mode.

Now I've got a phrase here that I've stored at patch 6, just for this demo that I made earlier. All of it was recorded on the pedal. Let's take a listen to everything that's on this patch. We can see that there are -- every phrase in this patch has been recorded on. If we want to play everything at once right away, we can hit phrase 2 and 3 at the same time and that will start playback on all three phrases.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYS PATCH ON RC-50]

Now the cool thing about multi mode here is that we can take each phrase in and out of the mix nondestructively, so we don't have to sort of sacrifice the phrase when you just take it in and out. Let's take the vocals out...

[OWEN O'MALLEY TURNS OFF PHRASE FOR VOCALS]

...so you just got our beatboxing, guitar, and bass. Let's hear just the bass.

[OWEN O'MALLEY SOLOS BASS PHRASE]

I hear there's a little spill in the background. That's spilled over into the mic that I was recording into earlier, so that's definitely something to look out for.

[OWEN O'MALLEY BRINGS BACK GUITAR AND BEATBOXING PHRASES]

Now right now, these phrases are set to play back as soon as I hit play but you can also change it so that the phrases play back when the loop starts, so you don't have to be as exact when you hit the play button. To do that, you hit the phrase select here, move the parameter to where until it says start immediate and change it to -- we can have it fade in. We can have it fade out too. That's phrase 1 here so.

[OWEN O'MALLEY APPLIES FADE OUT FOR PHRASES]

You can hear it slowly fading out...,

[OWEN O'MALLEY APPLIES FADE OUT FOR PHRASES]

...good for the end of a song. Let's have it fade back in.

[OWEN O'MALLEY APPLIES FADE IN FOR PHRASES]

You can have a hands-free alternative to having fade things in and out with the level controls, although that's a fun way of doing it too.

[OWEN O'MALLEY ADJUSTING PARAMETERS ON THE RC-50]

You can also set it to stop at the loop end, so this is the beginning of our loop, let's stop [RC-50 STOPS PLAYING PHRASES EXCEPT FOR BASS], and now it stopped because different playback and stopping options. This is on multi mode remember. Fading back in.

[OWEN O'MALLEY CAUSES THE RC-50 TO FADE IN]

Another cool thing you can do with the phrase edit here is reverse mode. Right now, on phrase 2 reverse is off. Let's start phrase 2.

[OWEN O'MALLEY APPLIES STARTS PLAYING VOCAL LOOP]

That's our little vocal loop. Sound's kind of cool as it is but let's hear what it sounds like when we reverse it.

[OWEN O'MALLEY APPLIES REVERSE ON VOCAL LOOP]

Kind of neat.

[OWEN O'MALLEY STOPS BASS AND VOCAL LOOPS AND STOPS PATCH COMPLETELY]

Okay, now so let's say that you want to change something in the phrase while everything is still playing. You can do that. Let's play everything back.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYS ENTIRE PATCH]

I've got a bass hooked up to our pedal here now. I'm going to re-record the bass line on phrase because I think it's going to [INDISCERNIBLE] the sound. So while everything's playing back, we've got phrase 3 selected.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYS REVISION BASS PARTS LIVE]

Now I stopped it, and I'm playing this live right now.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYS REVISION BASS PARTS LIVE]

Now I'll record it.

[OWEN O'MALLEY RECORDS REVISION BASS PARTS]

I really didn't like that one. Let's undo it and try that again.

[OWEN O'MALLEY RE-RECORDS REVISION BASS PARTS]

There you go. So you can kind of see how with this pedal you can create actually like complex song structures on the fly by taking parts in and out and changing them without having to stop performance.

That was the pedal in multi mode. Now let's check it out in single mode.