Boss RC-50 Loop Station: YYZ=Subjectively Cool
Last time on Gearwire: Owen O'Malley demos a phase on the Boss RC-50 Loop Station which featured a different instrument assigned to each footswitch. This time, he shows how to use the footswitches a little differently, recording entire passages on each of the three pedals to switch from verse to chorus to verse to chorus to bridge.
In summation, the versatility of the RC-50 allows any musician willing to put the time into really exploring its features and functions to do far more than is imaginable playing solo on stage.
OWEN O'MALLEY: So I've got a phrase that I record in single mode, so we're going to switch over to that, but before we do I'm going to save the changes, save that new bass line that I recorded to this phrase. All we do is press the write button right here. It says, "Write to number 6?" which is already named "Owen's Patch", hit write again, and now it's saving all the changes that you just made to that patch. It's pretty easy. You can store tons of patches on this. There's 49 minutes of record time in CD quality recording time available. That's in mono. That's 49 minutes of mono by the way, but it's still just a ton of information.
All right. Let's switch over to our single phrase. Now, playback is a little different on this one. Let's hear --
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYS PATCH IN SINGLE MODE]
This is my ode to TV and the Radio. Please, please don't take offense TV and the Radio.
Okay, so all of that is recorded on phrase 1. If we want to start playback on phrase 2, we just hit phrase 2. Let's wait for the end of the loop to come.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYS PHRASE 2]
So this is the second part of our song.
So right now this is set at "phrase start immediately" which means that my timing has to be perfect when we hit these phrase buttons and switch between them; otherwise, it sounds, well, a little disjointed. Well, the cool thing you can do though in this mode is [OWEN O'MALLEY KEEPS ON PRESSING PHRASE 1 FOOTSWITCH]. I don't know how cool that is; that's kind of subjective.
But let's say you want to have actual tempo syncing when you switch between these phrases. Go to our overall phrase parameters, we go to patch right here, we got to our parameter. Right now it's on phrase change immediate. Let's change that to loop end and see how that changes things. Now I'm going to hit phrase 2, so now we've got a perfect tempo matched phrase change. Yeah, I'm digging it.
Now let's listen to our third phrase here.
[OWEN O'MALLEY SWITCHES TO PHRASE 3]
You can hear there's a little bit of flutter in there. There's probably 20 vocal overdubs on that one phrase right there. Let's have it come back to phrase 1.
[OWEN O'MALLEY SWITCHES TO PHRASE 1]
So those are the basic playback modes we've got on the RC-50. Again, there's a ton more to explore on this pedal. This could be, you know, a 10-part video series but we just want to go over the basics of recording and playback with this pedal. I haven’t even touched MIDI sync. I haven’t even touched, you know, setting up external expression pedals with this thing but you get an idea of how flexible and how powerful this thing is.
Well thanks for checking us out. This has been Gearwire.Com with Owen O'Malley and we've been looking at the Boss RC-50 Loop Station. See you later.
BOSS RC-50 videos
Hey guys,
Thanks a million for doing such a great job showing off the RC-50, I really learned a lot. However, I'd like to make a quick suggestion: I've read a lot of reviews about this looping station and it seems that the only real gripe that almost everyone has is that it does not sync successfully with external MIDI devices (i.e. problems with slowing, speeding up, and distortion). This is supposed to be a working feature of the station, but it seems like Boss REALLY dropped the ball. It would be cool if you guys could do a Part VI exploring the MIDI sync capabilities, and find out what it can and can't do. This would be extremely useful for musicians such as myself who are looking into buying a loop station (and don't have the pocketbook to buy any old looper), but if your main goal is to make a "promotional" video perhaps its a shortcoming that should best be avoided. Just some food for thought!
Thanks,
Cameron
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