The BOSS RC-600 is a lot of looper to meet on day one — nine footswitches, six tracks, two XLR inputs and a menu system that renames things you thought you already knew. This is the order I'd walk any new owner through it: what the switches do, where the settings actually live, and — the part most people learn the hard way — how to save your work before it disappears.
Learn the three pedal modes first
Everything else makes more sense once you understand that the RC-600's footswitch layout changes underneath you. In pedal mode 1 — the default, and the light is white — you have track one, track two and track three, with a record/play switch and a stop switch for each. It's the same layout as a BOSS RC-300.
Press the track select switch and the light goes from white to red: you're in pedal mode 2, which is effectively a second bank giving you tracks four, five and six with that identical layout. You can press track select freely mid-performance to move between the two banks depending on which tracks you need at that moment. Press and hold track select and the light turns blue for pedal mode 3, which by default enables and disables the input and track effects — and which you can customise later into a shortcut layer once you know the pedal properly.
The all start/stop switch at the top right sits outside all of this and starts or kills every loop at once.
Plug in around the back
The RC-600 gives you two XLR inputs, which is a real change — that's far more flexibility for microphones, or for taking a submix from an external mixer if you're expanding your inputs. Alongside them are four input jacks: instrument one and instrument two, both supporting stereo.
On the output side you have the master left and right out plus a set of subouts. The subouts replicate what the RC-300 offered, but the way you route audio to them is completely different now — that's all handled in the new menu system rather than physically.
Understand which menu you're actually in
This trips people up more than anything else on the pedal. BOSS products have several different types of menu — system settings, track settings, rhythm settings and memory bank settings — and the new generation renamed some of them.
On both the RC-600 and the RC-505, Menu is your system settings. These are global parameters, so anything you change in there applies across the board to every patch, and you don't need to save it. The mixer lives here, adjusting your input and output levels by default.
Loop is your track settings — independent parameters for each of the six tracks. Scroll to the track you want with knob 1, then press the knobs in to get at the record settings (what a record press actually triggers, whether auto record is on) and the play settings (whether the track loops continuously or plays once in single-shot mode).
Find the rhythm settings
Getting to the rhythm section is genuinely unintuitive, so save yourself the ten minutes I lost. Pressing the rhythm control just turns rhythm on and off. Holding it does nothing useful. Triple-tapping it does nothing at all.
You get there through Loop → page 2 → knob 3 — scroll all the way over to the second page and press knob 3 in. That opens the rhythm settings, and it's a huge section: the drum variation, the kit sound for whichever genre you're in, and a long list of patterns to choose from.
Set the tempo three different ways
You can tap the tempo in, dial it manually with knob 4, or press and hold knob 4 to move in steps of ten when you want to travel further, faster.
If you tap it in and get it wrong, press and hold for a couple of seconds and it resets to the patch BPM. On a blank patch with nothing saved to it that's 120, but if you've saved the patch at 105 it will drop back to 105 instead.
The ENTER button is your mixer
Press ENTER and you're straight into the mixer, adjusting your instrument outputs and levels. The alternative route is Menu → Mixer, which is simply too many clicks when you're standing on a stage.
I'll be honest about this one: it's my least favourite thing about the RC-600. My favourite feature of the RC-300 was the physical track faders — I gigged with that pedal from about the age of fourteen, for over ten years, and being able to reach down and pull a loop track back when it was feeding back or just louder than the room wanted was invaluable. Room acoustics change constantly. On the RC-600 all of that lives on the screen instead, so the ENTER shortcut is the closest thing you have to a fader, and it's worth burning into muscle memory.
Tip: Practise reaching the mixer with a single ENTER press without looking down. Fast access to your loop levels is the difference between fixing a problem and being stuck with it for the rest of the song.
Fix the loop light before it annoys you
The big loop light indicator was inherited from the BOSS RC-10R and it's genuinely useful for beginners — but the default behaviour is maddening. Out of the box the light flashes the tempo at you, which is a lot of flashing.
Head to Menu → Setup and you'll find two separate settings: the orb in the centre and the loop light indicator ring around it. You have control over both, which I rate ten out of ten.
I set my orb to loop. That gives me the loop progression — how much is left before it cycles round — plus the record state by colour: red is recording, yellow is overdubbing, green is playing. That is all I need to know, and I can read it with a glance mid-song. It also shows me how short one loop is relative to a longer one still completing its cycle.
The outer ring I'll set to rhythm, so I can see whether my rhythm track, metronome or drum beat is running. If you're a beginner struggling with timing, set it to beat instead and you've got a one-two-three-four you can watch. What you don't want is the default, with the whole light flashing like crazy.
Know that external footswitches are waiting for you
Also in the setup menu is the control function area, and the RC-600 has more control functions than previous models. You can run multiple expression pedals and multiple external footswitches — useful for triggering effects, for all-clear and quick-clear commands, or for putting extra switches elsewhere in your performance area. It's not a day-one job, but it's worth knowing the capability is there before you outgrow the nine switches you have.
Learn how to save before you change anything else
This is the most important thing in this guide. You can spend an hour setting the pedal up exactly how you want it, and the second you turn the memory/value encoder into a new memory bank, it's gone forever.
To save, press EXIT and ENTER at the same time. That takes you to the write page, where you can either write to a memory bank or clear one — clearing erases all the settings and returns it to default. Choose Write, pick which memory patch you're saving to, and press enter.
Don't use the pages button for this, tempting as it looks. That locks the screen so nothing responds — which is actually a great thing to have during a performance so you can't trigger anything by accident, but it isn't what you want here.
Name the patch so you can find it again
Once it's saved, go into the Loop menu — your memory bank settings — and use the page buttons to scroll to the final page. Press knob 4, which corresponds to the fourth icon on the screen, and you can rename the patch using knobs one through four. Click write again and it's stored on your loop station.
That's the whole loop, in both senses: you now know what the switches do, where the settings live, how to make the light tell you something useful, and how to keep any of it. Everything else on this pedal is built on those four things.