BOSS Rc-505 Loop Station

Product Information

The Boss RC-505 Loop Station pairs the legendary looping power of the RC series with a tabletop, hands-friendly design allowing for singers, rappers, and beatboxers to get in the loop. There’s an XLR microphone jack with phantom power, mono/stereo ¼-inch inputs for guitars, synths, or other instruments, and a mini-jack for connecting a smartphone or other stereo device. The RC-505 MkII now housesfour backlit FX buttons beneath each of the large knobs that bookend its upper section. The controls are responsive and intelligently spaced for multitrack manipulations, while the non-performance-related buttons, such as system menus and memory management, are small and discrete to prevent unintended adjustment. The enhanced undo system makes each track go further than ever, and while I’d grown to accept the sound of the older machine, there’s no denying the MkII is cleaner.

Sonic variations help make loop performances more compelling, and the RC‐505mkII provides a greatly expanded FX palette to color your sounds during recording and playback. You can save to a different patch location during playback and therefore build fairly complex structures as you go.Three stereo output pairs, a headphones output, and an output mixer are also available for musicians, complete with assignable routing options and master reverb and compressor effects. Infinitely inspiring, the RC-505 Loop Station has become an essential performance instrument for beatboxers, singers, and club performers around the world. Pressing the Track button pulls up the five pages of parameters that control the finer details of playback and recording: reversing, speed, loop length, fades, input selection and more. Before exploring the extensive behind-the-scenes parameters, every user ought to, and will find it hard not to, play with the five loop tracks’ primary features. Though there are still 99 memory slots they now get to share a total of around 13 hours of recording time at 32-bit 44.

It's impossible to talk about the best looping pedals without Boss – and it doesn't just have one contender but a whole host now, and its Loop Station family just got even bigger with the announcement of the RC-600 and RC-505mk II. Some user configuration is possible for the encoders, too: for instance, you can allocate duties such as memory selection, switching display modes, controlling the rhythm variation and level, and so on.The former can be assigned to a range of tasks such as memory slot navigation, tap tempo, rhythm start/stop, effects control, input mutes and various individual track functions. The control target functions have been greatly expanded as well, providing a wealth of external control options for musicians who loop with guitars, keyboards, and other instruments. Dedicated buttons are offered for key functions, such as starting/stopping the entire machine or the rhythm section — a built‑in ‘super metronome’. There are 49 Input FX and 53 Track FX types to choose from—including powerful new vocal harmony effects—and you can use up to four in each section at once.