BOSS RC-600 Loop Station Floor-Based Looper Pedal

Customizable but Not Intuitive

My assessment of the Rc-600 after 2 month of learning, programming, editing, and using it for live band performances as a guitar front person. I have a baseline comparison as an owner of Headrush FX Looper, Digitech Jamman, Dittox4, and Ditto loopers. The scale is 1 to 5 for each. 1=the worst or very unfavorable, 5=the best or very favorable.

Sound Quality = 5

Size = 3

Flexibility = 4.5

User Interface = 1

Display screen and ergonomics = 2

Ease of use = 1

I didn’t expect to have to learn software (a separate purchase) to even scale the management of my loops and memories.

Now I have become loopy a looper of worlds.

This thing is truly amazing and can do more than I'll probably ever be able to use. The design and layout of everything is good. There's a learning curve that I believe alot of people may not be willing to cross but it seems like once you cross that bridge you got yourself a world of sound at your foot step. I picked it up at a good price so I have no regrets on my purchase. The included power supply is good so I didn't have to spend extra on that. It's a powerful looper. I've had fun tinkering with it and have at times scratched my head wondering if I could really understand such a thing but with time and patience there's no reason why I can't.

THE BEST LOOPER!

This is by far, my favorite live looper, and the only piece of gear I need to take alongside of guitar and microphone to perform all types of events. It works as a live blooper, a mixer, an audio interface, and a multi effects pedal all in one. Highly recommend it to all live performers.

1:05

Amazingly Powerful. Please update your firmware

The RC 600 is incredibly powerful. It has three stereo pairs of inputs and three stereo pairs of outputs, which allow you to use it almost as a live mixer for your whole set up if you’re into looping. The controls can be customized anyway you want them to be, you can make any pedal on the front of the device control any looping function. The looping functions are smooth and easy and it can even do a little bit of quantizing to keep everything locked together. There are dedicated foot switches for any function you would normally use.

there are powerful built-in effects, everything from a base simulator for Guitar to your standard reverbs delays compression, etc. You can completely re-organize the control scheme as I mentioned above, which is amazing.

The only caveat is be prepared to update this device right out of the box. You will need to connect it to a computer and install the new firmware. I personally recommend doing a factory reset right off the bat, and then installing it. If you don’t, you will likely get errors, the current firmware is rock solid and I have had zero issues performing on stage with this. Someone would subtract a star for this, but this is cutting edge technology still. Roland/Boss does an amazing job supporting their gear and if you have any issue, they will get in touch with you immediately for follow up.

By the way, this thing is definitely roadworthy everything (besides, the screen) is made out of steel.

Be warned there is a learning curve as far as getting into the advanced functions, but as soon as updated, you can start making loop music with this.

Even though it is totally customizable, I love the fact that out of the box, it has separate petals for recording your loops and stopping your loops in the heat of the moment, pressing and holding to erase stuff and starting stop loops is a little bit cumbersome, and this allows you the space and layout to make it simple and easy

I did an extensive amount of research before buying this and I do not regret this purchase at all. Check out my video for example of how I’m using it with my drums.

It greatly helps with not sliding around on the pedals.

1:15

An unfinished product

Very disheartening to see Boss going the same way as other tech companies, releasing incomplete products and counting on patches and firmware updates to fix all the bugs. I've used the boss rc 50, and 300 basically since they came out and I can't recall a time that any of them just up and crashed on me. Not once. The 600 just crashed three times during one gig tonight.

In addition to being completely unreliable, if you're trying to sync it with other things via midi (drum machines, etc), they made it so if you turn loop sync off, tempo sync also stops working... essentially if you want to sync the tempo via midi, your loops have to be the same length or else its a mess. They won't start in the right place when you switch between them, they'll jump in mid way through. Its very very dumb. Its not a bug or a misunderstanding of the functionality. They changed the way this works at some point between the rc-300 and the rc-505, and I can't believe they carried this design over to the new floor looper. There's not room to go into more detail about this in review, just go check the facebook groups and and or forums for the loop sync / serial mode issues and you'll see people discussing it in depth.

Maybe they'll at least get the crashes sorted out with a patch but people definitely deserve fair warning that this is basically still in beta and not at all professional gear.

Edit: Initial review was from May. Its now almost september. There have been firmware updates and it is moving in the right direction but still a work in progress. The loop sync ALMOST works but you still can't record straight from one loop to the next. Either bad programming or not enough processing power because now they clearly know what people want and just can't quite get it there.

Random crashes are still common (I play out 3 or 4 times a week and practice with it at home... I'd say at this point its maybe a crash a week?)

I've been reporting error codes to support and the response every single time is to make sure we've done factory resets after the firmware update. That's it. Beyond that they said I could send it in for repair. Not sure what good that would do, would be my third unit, hasn't even been out a year.

Update #2: I'm on my third unit in a year, but this one seems stable. The firmware updates have sorted out the loop sync problems as far as I can tell and I have not yet had a crash on this unit. Functionally its good to go now, IMO, but time will tell as far as stability.

Another update: still going strong. I don’t know if it was all firmware updates or if they had a bad run of units but it works now. To be honest it’s a fantastic piece of gear, they just should’ve tested it for another year instead of making us do it.

New update: crashing again. Just a bad product.