The RC-300 Loop Station ($549 street),
which replaces the RC-50 as the flagship
looper of the Boss line, triples the 50’s
recording time to three hours—even in
stereo! The 300’s eight footswitches are
compactly laid out and feel more manage-
able than the 50’s seven. A Record/Play/
Overdub footswitch and the Stop switch
for each of the three loop Tracks (formerly
called Phrases) are placed side-by-side, and
the Undo/Redo switch is gone—holding
the Record/Play/Overdub switch down for
two seconds now undoes the last overdub
on a phrase. Tempos are tapped in with a
small button in the RC-300’s Rhythm sec-
tion or with one of the three Stop buttons.
An All Start/Stop switch starts and stops
the three tracks at once.
The RC-300 also includes effects such
as chorus, delay, slicer, tremolo, distor-
tion, pitch shifting, and more, which can
be placed before or after a loop. Pressing
the Loop FX footswitch for two seconds
lets you scroll up and down through the effects using Track 3’s two footswitches. A
built-in expression pedal controls the effects,
and there are inputs for extra controllers and
footswitches. The expression pedal, or, for
that matter, any of the onboard or external
footswitches, can be programmed to con-
trol a wide variety of functions, including
tap tempo, playback level, level of the built-
in rhythm tracks, etc. This assignment can
be saved to an individual track within a
Phrase Memory, including all three tracks.
Three sliders mix the level from each track
post recording.
If it sounds a bit complicated, it is. While I was able to do basic three-track looping and
blending without peeking at the manual,
plumbing the 300’s considerable depths
required instruction, and the manual was
not as clear as it could be. Should you get
lost in the universe of options, however,
the company’s support line is very helpful.
I have found Boss Loopers to be the
easiest to use when it comes to synch-
ing rhythmic loops, as the switches react
quickly, allowing me to nail the endpoints
with or without a click track. The RC-300
is no exception, and I was soon laying down
funk chords, overdubbing picked parts, and soloing until tendonitis set in. I could also
lay down a bass part using the guitar/bass
effect, which allowed me to drop an octave
with the expression pedal, but also revealed
some heavy artifacts in the pitch-shifting
algorithm. The same was true of the Bend
(whammy) effect.
As most looping guitarists already have a
pedalboard full of effects, I would prefer to
see Boss free up processing power used for
the effects and deploy it toward improving
the sound of what I found to be the most
useful effect—Transpose—which shifts all the
tracks any interval plus or minus one octave.
In conjunction with the track copy feature,
Transpose let me record a loop on Track 1
then copy it to Track 2, where I could create
a new song section by transposing it up one
or two steps (before artifacting became too
noticeable).
The RC-300’s USB connector also lets
you offload loops to your computer, and
use the unit as an interface to record to
your DAW. Though the RC-300 only sends
a mixed stereo signal of all three tracks, I
could solo the tracks one at a time (by pull-
ing down the volume of the other two) and
record each part of my loop to its own DAW
track for further processing.
Once I had a handle on all its possibili-
ties, the RC-300 was easy to use in perfor-
mance, enabling me quickly to create lush,
multi-textured ambiences. Its abundance of
memory and rhythm tracks made it possible
to practice full 12-bar blues or 32-bar stan-
dards, even at medium and slow tempos.
Factor in its high-quality sound and “built
to withstand nuclear holocaust” construc-
tion, and the RC-300 jumps into the short
list of loopers to investigate.
KUDOS A highly flexible, multitrack looper
with great sound.
CONCERNS Artifacts in pitch effects.
CONTACT Boss, bossus.com