The new Boss RC300 Loop Station Review.

As some of you may already know, I’m a big fan of Roland’s RC50 and last December Roland released it’s latest looper! The RC300.

Right out of the box I had no trouble getting around this unit. The owners manual is so much smaller and easier to understand than the old RC50 manual.

The first big improvement is the amount of recording time. Three hours stereo verses 22 minutes minutes. (44 minutes if recording in mono)

With my old RC50 I had to purchase an external expression pedal that I would use for volume control. The RC300 has an expression pedal built it! The new RC300 also has dedicated pedals for the effects and for an all start/stop.

This brings me to the effects on board. The RC300 has a really nice reverb, however there is only one reverb setting and it lacks a lot of output.

The other effects on board are wonderful such as delay, modulation and distortion. All of which are extremely useful.

There was one big effect disappointment. The transpose feature if applied to my guitar it will take it down an octave to sound like a bass, however I found the effect very glitchy and unusable. (It’s too bad as I was really excited about that feature.

One of the biggest improvement is having 3 independent tracks as opposed to the RC50′s 3 phrase’s. I have found a big improvement recording tracks with new RC. The timing is more accurate and looping is seamless.

Another disappointment with my new RC300 is the time it takes to undo or redo a track or overdub. It’s slow to active even when adding a designated external pedal. Also the pedal has to be press twice to activate the undo/redo. (I’ll look into this a little further as it could be the way my external pedal is configured)

One other… With the old RC50 I could activate the rhythm track with an external pedal. I still haven’t figured out a way to do this with the new RC300. The good thing is that you can have the unit give you a 4 count before recording or play back. However there are times where I like to play with the rhythm track as a soloist and punch in a loop later. Of course you can bend down and hit the on button but it would be way cooler to operate all the features by foot on the fly!

Here’s a tip for recording pre-recorded loops with the RC300…

I found occasionally when recording a loop on track 2 or 3 I would get a “Too Busy” error message after pressing the REC/PLAY pedal at the end of my loop. To eliminate my frustration I found pressing the track stop pedal at the end of the loop recording stopped the error from occurring. *** RC-300 Update***  Boss has now fix the “Too Busy” error with it’s latest firmware update. Here is the link to update your onboard RC300 system software…

http://www.roland.com/support/article/?q=downloads&p=RC-50&id=1812520

Pros…

- 3 hours of stereo looping time
- built in expression pedal
- good reverb & good on board effects
- separate looping tracks

Cons…

- No way to tell how much looping time is left available
- undo & redo is not immediate
- guitar/bass transpose is a great idea however unusable
- no way to activate the drum track via an external pedal

Final thoughts…

Although I have outline a few issues, the bottom line is that I love this new machine. It’s a massive improvement over the original RC50 and I’m using it a lot. I highly recommend it to all the loopers out there!