Back in the day when I started playing guitar as a teenager, I had a thing for BOSS effect pedals. I loved the sound of the legendary HM-2 Heavy Metal paired with the GE-7 Equalizer, and I picked up one of the chorus pedals just so I could get that sound of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are”.
Thirty-some years later, most my music making happens on a computer with virtual instruments, samples, effect plugins and whatnot, but I still enjoy playing guitar, mostly to unwind. After listening to Justice Der’s Covers, I got interested in using a looper for layering guitar parts.
Checking out different loopers and how to use them, it’s easy to get excited about the possibilities these things offer. Going down the YouTube rabbit hole, you’ll find people who record a bunch of instruments to build amazing songs, or absurdly skillful vocalists and beatboxers… But it’s good to realize that it takes a lot of time and dedication to learn how to use the gear to its full potential, and… many of these people are ridiculously talented!
My goal however was to simply use the looper to record guitar and play various parts to build melodies and work out song ideas. I’m not going into all the details of everything that this looper can do, as others have already done this much better than I could, but rather I just wanted to share some of my thoughts about it.
First impressions
After unboxing the RC-505 mkII and turning it on for the first time, I found it pretty easy to figure out how to make recordings just by messing around a bit.
Fleshing out some of my ideas, it was also immediately evident that it would be a good idea to read the manual and check for tips and tricks online. An incredibly deep piece of gear with so many features and options, it takes quite some time to get to know your way around everything that the RC-505 mkII has to offer.
In use
The build quality of the RC-505 mkII is great. While I haven’t taken it on the road, I’ve moved it around the house quite a bit and it’s both lightweight and solidly built. The buttons and sliders are responsive and seemingly durable, and the visual feedback of the loop tracks and backlit buttons are very handy.
As I mentioned earlier, the RC-505 mkII has a lot of options. With 5 stereo tracks which can record up to 1.5 hours per track, 4 banks of input fx and 4 banks of track fx with a wide range of effect types, and 200 onboard rhythm patterns and 16 drum kits, you can get very creative. There are 99 memory slots with a total of up to 13 hours of audio.
And once you’re familiar with the basics of the looper and start exploring deeper, you’ll find you can bounce multiple tracks to a single track to make space to record additional parts, reassign knobs and use shortcuts, and much more.
Conclusion
The RC-505 mkII is a wonderful piece of gear. I’m probably never going to use it to its full potential, but I very much enjoy using it for my intended purpose of layering guitar parts without having to use a computer or anything else.
Additionally, some of my kids also have lots of fun recording with a microphone and playing around with effects. I’ve only showed them some of the basics and they were able to create some lovely “beats” on their own with little effort.
For those who want to dig deeper, there’s definitely a learning curve and menu diving, but you’ll find lots of tutorial videos on YouTube so you don’t have to figure it all out by yourself.
Check the BOSS website for more information on the RC-505 mkII. It’s priced $599.99 USD (MSRP), though you can find it a bit cheaper at some dealers so make sure to shop around if you’re interested in buying one.
Hey there, I'm Ronnie and I run Rekkerd.org. I'm a bedroom music producer and guitar player, and I love chicken vindaloo & all things glitch.
