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All your looping needs cleverly compacted

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By design a looper takes a piece of audio (live or pre-recorded) and plays it back endlessly in a loop while you sing, dance, or solo over the top.

Boss’s RC-2 compact effects pedal aims to cram in at least some of the technology from the much-lauded RC-50 Loop Station and the smaller Twin Pedal RC-20XL.

It’s certainly well specified with 11 patch memories, a maximum of 16 minutes capture time, loop quantise, 35 drum kit-style rhythm guides, aux input for external music sources and external pedal input to expand performance use.

In use

Initially, the supplied manual seems impenetrable. Eventually, when you get the hang of things, the RC-2 is really quite straightforward – although the various input modes (for example, instant, audio-sensing auto or working to a tapped tempo) all seem to have their own idiosyncrasies: once inputted, the phrase is seamlessly looped and you’re ready to overdub. Huge multi-layered soundscapes are possible, although, as with any sound-on-sound layering, you begin to loose your initial ‘track’ quite quickly.

The drum kit-style rhythm guides are obviously basic, but good sounding and very usable, yet you have to step through one-by-one to find what you like. And indeed there’s a lot crammed into this pedal. The additional footswitches (either two FS-5Us or one FS-6) make things a little easier and allow patch change from your foot not fingers. Most other footswitchable features seem covered although, as you’d expect, the tap-dance skills are required… preferably in time.