The RC-505mkII hides some of its most useful tricks in menus the manual barely touches. These are the ones I actually reach for in a performance — the markback feature, per-track output routing, external and MIDI footswitch control, and the one effects setting most people never change. If you've already read my rundown of what makes the mkII worth the upgrade, this is the next layer down: the workflow features, not the spec sheet.
Use markback to save and recall a loop state
Markback is one of the genuinely new features on the mkII and the RC-600, and it changes how you handle overdubs. On the older RC-505 the undo/redo behaviour was linear — you could only remove the most recent overdub and bring it back, and the moment you recorded another layer the previous one was gone for good. Markback works more like a save as on a computer. You save a snapshot of the loop to onboard memory, carry on stacking as many overdubs as you like, then recall the loop exactly as it was at that saved point — no matter how many layers you added afterwards.
You set a markback point from the undo/redo display by pressing track, which stores that moment. Later, pressing the recall button takes you straight back to the marked state. It's ideal for more complex arrangements where you want to drop back to an earlier section without burning extra loop tracks — in the past you'd have had to stack copies onto other tracks to fake the same thing.
Give each loop track its own output
The expanded output options are, for me, the biggest performance upgrade on the mkII. Head into Menu → Output → Routing and you can set the end destination of both your inputs and each individual loop track. There are six physical outputs to work with — main left and right, sub 1 left and right, and sub 2 left and right — plus the headphone out as a seventh (I keep that one for my in-ear monitor, metronome and cue audio).
Inside routing you choose where each track is sent. Send loop track one to sub 1 and disable every other track on that output, and a cable plugged into sub 1 on the back becomes a dedicated feed for just that track. Hand that to your front-of-house engineer and they get full control over its volume, EQ, compression and effects, independent of everything else. You can do this for every track if you want, and with track panning you can push mono tracks to the left or right of any output.
Tip: Route your percussion track to its own output. Drums want completely different EQ from a guitar loop — more low-end weight, a sharper snare — and giving them a separate cable lets the engineer treat them properly instead of squashing everything through one channel.
Assign track functions to footswitches and pedals
The mkII lets you assign almost any function to external buttons, footswitches, expression pedals or a MIDI foot controller. You'll find the two ways to do it under the master menu — scroll right to Assign, where there's both Control Function and Control Assign. Control functions are the quicker route and are the right choice for a BOSS FS-6 or FS-7 footswitch or an expression pedal plugged into the jacks on the back.
Press into knob one and you can open Control Pedal Functions, covering Control Pedal 1 and expression pedals one and two. Because the mkII takes two external footswitches and two expression pedals, each gets its own setup. Inside Control Pedal 1 you pick the track function — record, play, stop, clear, mark, back, clear the loop track, double speed, edit the track, loop track effects on and off. Effectively any parameter on the unit can be driven from a switch.
Layer hold and press commands onto one switch
Each assignment can carry more than one command depending on how you hit the switch. A footswitch set to play/stop plays on the first press and stops on the next — but you can add extra behaviour for a hold or a different press type. Hold the same switch in and it could trigger an undo on the loop track, or a clear, and so on. Whether you tap it, click it, press it or hold it can each fire a different function, which lets one physical switch do the work of several.
Build a hybrid tabletop-and-floor rig
Take the external control a step further with a MIDI foot controller — my personal pick is the Nektar Pacer — and you turn the RC-505mkII into a hybrid looper. You keep the tabletop unit under your hands and put a footswitch on the floor for when you're playing guitar. It's the perfect setup for multi-instrumentalists, and it's exactly how I've run my 505 for years; I carried the same rig straight over to the mkII because if it isn't broke, don't fix it.
Use a TRS cable for two footswitches
If you're running two external footswitches down one cable, you need a balanced TRS jack — the guitar-style cable with two rings on the tip. Put simply, each ring carries one pedal's signal: one ring for footswitch A, the other for footswitch B, so the RC-505mkII knows which switch it's hearing. Use an ordinary single-ring cable and only one footswitch will register — the second has no path to send its signal down, so it simply won't respond.
Switch effects between multi and single mode
The mkII carries nine input effects and 53 track effect types, and you can run up to four input effects and four track effects at once — but only if one setting is right. Go to your loop settings and scroll to the final page for the input and track effects. On the second page of the input effects you choose multi or single mode. In single mode only one effect can be on at a time, so switching to B turns A off automatically. In multi mode you can stack several at once. Track effects work exactly the same way.
Because this is set per memory bank, you can have one song's patch running multi mode for lush layered effects and another set to single so effects toggle cleanly as you switch between them. Match it to how you're actually performing that particular song.