Boss RC-50 question

[philipzahnd]

Hello. I recently bought the boss RC-50. The unit comes programmed with a ton of different useful beats (guide). However, for my live set, I am wanting to start from scratch and play my own acoustic drum set for the backing beat. I'm trying to figure out how to just have the guide in my headphones and not in the main and/or sub outputs. I want to use the guide as a metronome which only I can hear. Did not see an obvious solution in the manual. Thanks!

[GoldJim]

If you can pan the guide to beat hard left, then you can take the left to it's own channel on your board and send that to monitor only and not in the main. That's assuming that you can do that on your board.

[WRGKMC]

There are many ways of doing this and it wouldn't be in the manual because they have no idea how you intend on using the pedal.

Most of its likely to be used as a guitar pedal so the manual likely gives standard options for that application.

Since you're using it in as a drum machine then you'd have to factor in all the possible scenarios for that application.

 

The problem is you haven't given us an idea of what gear you'd be using this unit with beyond the unit itself. I'm guessing you have some kind of PA rig for live. Do you currently listen to the band with headphones some how, are all the players miced? Do you use speaker monitors?

 

Unless the other players can hear the same thing you do they aren't going to lock they're tempo to the loop. Live bands typically have they're tempo drift as certain breaks and changes occur. What do you do when you come up to a break, and you lock to the pedal and the rest of the band feels the musically differently, do you just plow ahead and make everyone else catch up with you or do you stop wait for the loop to catch up.

 

I can see using a drum loop as a metronome recording. I can even see it when you have a bunch of midi gear synced to it (usually a keyboard thing)

If you're playing drums live, shouldn't you be the drum machine when you play? I'm not getting it without more details.

 

Also how do you plan on recording the drum loops. Wouldn't you need to mic the set then record it into the pedal? I'd think a DAW of some sort would be better then a low fidelity loop pedal for that where you'd have the ability to mix the various drums and edit parts to fix mistakes or add parts to build a song.

 

As far as actually hearing the pedal it likely outputs an instrument/line level signal so you'd need some kind of mixing device or summing amp with a headphone output which can be adjusted. Most drummers prefer to have control over whatever monitor mix sitting next to them so they can tweak the sound as needed. If you use headphones and normally monitor the mix then taking a line level send from the main mixer then using a small personal mixer you'd be able to blend your pedal and the PA together.

 

If you use a powered monitor you could do the same thing but others would be able to hear it and may become distracted by it.