Nowadays, you’ll find looper pedals with varying degrees of complexity on the pedalboards of pretty much every kind of player. Some value them as a practice tool, laying down a basic chord progression over which they can work at expanding their lick vocabulary. For others, it's the creative opportunity offered through being able to layer up sounds on top of one another to create complex soundscapes. However they get used, the fact is that for many players, myself included, guitar loopers begin and end with Boss.
After spending some time with the Boss RC-500, the current intermediate looper offering from the company, it’s easy to see why it’s still top of the tree. Sitting above the RC-5 and RC-1 in terms of functionality and size, but not quite as fully featured as the spaceship-like RC-600, the Boss RC-500 offers a decent balance between excited immediacy and progressive functionality.
