Recording - March 2012 - 21

Readers familiar with Roland/BOSS recorders will know what V-Tracks are, and the BR-80 has a full complement. For each of the eight playback Tracks, the BR80 can store up to eight distinct takes, called V-Tracks, and the user can then specify which V-Track is playing back at any given time. The BR-80 provides a simple but complete set of editing tools. You can select audio data in a specific spot on a specific Track/V-Track, and then copy it to a new location on the same or another Track/VTrack, move it while leaving silence where it had been, exchange entire Tracks’ data, or import audio into a V-Track from an outside source (an audio file on your computer, or a Track from another Song). There’s one level of Undo/Redo for all destructive recording and edit operations. Rhythms and effects The Rhythm menu lets you build up a song structure (Intro, Verse, Fill, Break, etc.) of various preset drum patterns, each with its own tempo and length in bars; again, it’s a bit fiddly to do with the menus, but it’s something you can get pretty quick at with practice. When you set up a drum part, and lay down your tracks over the guide rhythm (even if it’s just a simple timekeeping percussion part that you mute later), later edits become much easier to do accurately because you can specify start and end points with precision. The BR-80 does allow you to set edit points on the fly with the A/B button, which is fine for punch in/out, but it’s tricky to get spot-on accuracy that way and I’m not sure I’d want to be cutting and pasting audio without knowing precisely where my bar lines were. The Rhythm sounds themselves are very usable for finished songs, with nine different kit styles available—standard, with ambience, jazz, reggae, 808, etc.. You can also import Standard MIDI Files for use as drum patterns in addition to the many preset ones provided with the BR-80. As usual for a BOSS recorder, the insert effects for the BR-80 are widely varied and good-sounding. The electric guitar effects are organized by musical genre with some extra categories for bass, vocals, acoustic guitar, and stereo miking. There are lots of choices and tweakable settings, and you can name and store your own presets in a global User menu or keep them within the Song where they’re used. If I were travelling light and needed a very portable effects system for running my guitars into a laptop, I wouldn’t hesitate to use the BR-80. Mastering and more Once you’ve recorded your tracks and set up a mix the way you want it, you can use the built-in Bounce function to render your chosen Tracks down to a single pair of

V-Tracks, which can then be Mastered. The BR-80 provides a special Mastering Effect which can control Track levels, dynamics, and overall “tilt control” eq. There aren’t a lot of parameters to tweak here, but once you get a set you like, they can be stored as a User preset or with a particular Song. You can have up to ten Mastering Effect settings per Song, so you can do (for example) an eq pass followed by a dynamics pass for better-sounding results. Live Rec mode turns the BR-80 into a stereo field recorder. It records 16bit/44.1 kHz audio as WAV or MP3 (64/128/192/320). You can record with a metronome click in your headphones if desired. In eBand mode, you can play along with prerecorded songs you’ve imported from a computer, with the ability to independently change the pitch and tempo of the audio, cancel the centerchannel signal, add effects to your guitar, and so forth. But eBand mode is good for recording too; you can use its tools to combine a pitch/time-shifted track with your playing, record the result as a WAV file, and bring it into MTR mode as a Song Track for editing and overdubbing. Using the BR-80 with a computer is a cinch. The factory-supplied SD card has USB drivers for audio interface use and installers for two utility programs for Mac or Windows—one for managing eBand Song Lists, and one for converting MTR Track data to and from WAV/AIFF. The unit also comes with Cakewalk SONAR X1 LE, a solid entry-level DAW that gets you working right away. You can easily import and export multitrack audio, eBand Songs, AIFF and WAV audio, and SMFs for Rhythm use. The BR-80 makes a dandy guitar effects box/interface for computer recording with all insert and reverb effects available at the input. Final thoughts I lived with the BR-80 for several weeks, tossing it into my laptop bag for trips to the office, my home studio, and jam sessions, and it quickly became something I missed when I didn’t have it. It was a fantastic way to quickly capture ideas in Live Rec mode with the onboard mics; in MTR mode it let me combine strings, keyboards, and soft synths in sketch ideas I could easily move to my computer; and as a USB interface for capturing guitar tracks and vocals and hearing computer audio it worked seamlessly and well. BOSS has raised the bar with this little gem. If you’re a songwriter or recording musician who wants a powerful composition tool that’s always at hand (and that keeps working while you take a phone call!), you should check it out. Price: $399 More from: BOSS, www.bossus.com
RECORDING MARCH 2012

21
http://WWW.T-FUNK.COM http://www.bossus.com http://WWW.T-FUNK.COM
Recording - March 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2012
