Boss BR8

The control surface of the BR8 is dominated by the central track faders and backlit graphical LCD, the rest of the controls being laid out in clusters with related functions on either side.

Boss have released a new guitarist‑friendly digital eight‑track, which includes not only recording, mixing and effects processing, but also guitar tuner, phrase trainer and basic drum machine. Paul White investigates...

Nearly four and a half years since Fostex released their DMT8, ushering in the era of budget portable digital multitrackers, the concept can finally be said to be coming of age. The US division of Roland (who were hot on the DMT8's heels with their VS880 in 1996) announced at the Winter NAMM show that they had now shipped more than 150,000 VS multitrackers — an impressive figure — and the concept has been taken up by Akai, Korg, and Yamaha. What's more, after a slightly shaky start, the manufacturers are finally giving these machines more approachable user interfaces. The latest portable digital multitrackers might still not be as easy to use as the cassette multitrackers they sought to replace, but given the vastly greater number of recording options they offer, most people are prepared to accept the odd press of a shift key here and assignable controls there.

Roland, however, are not satisfied, and are determined to make their digital multitrackers accessible to the vast potential market of recording guitarists worldwide, where they perceive that sales have not been as strong as they could be. To do this, they've hived off much of the technology used in their VS recording workstations, wrapped it up in a still‑further simplified user interface (with not so much as a shift key in sight!), and put it out under the Boss name, which has traditionally been associated with guitarist‑friendly technology.

The BR8 is packed with features. It includes two powerful effects processors capable of guitar preamp modelling as well as the more common studio effects, there's a built‑in drum‑pattern generator. There's even a device for slowing down recordings without changing the pitch (derived from the new Vari‑Pitch technology mentioned in last month's news) so that you can work out those fancy guitar solos more easily. On top of that there's a central image canceller for removing vocals or solos from commercial music, allowing you to do your own version, and if you're still having problems tuning your guitar there's no need to worry because there's a built‑in tuner complete with analogue meter‑style display via the LCD.

The Unit

The BR8 provides two level trim knobs to optimise the individual gains for mic and instrument inputs while a further input level knob sets the actual recording level, regardless of the source.

Housed in a case little larger than a pile of of six SOS mags, the BR8 can record up to two tracks at a time and can play back eight. However, each track has eight virtual tracks so, disk space permitting, you can store alternative versions of your solos and decide which to use when you come to mix. The unit will accept mic, line or guitar inputs directly, though as you might expect on a unit of this price there's no phantom power for capacitor mics. The mic and instrument inputs are on jacks while the line inputs and main stereo outputs are on phono connectors. Power comes from an external adaptor and there are jacks for both a footswitch and an expression pedal. The footswitch may be used either for starting and stopping the machine or for punching in and out, and unlike some hard disk multitrackers the BR8 allows you to punch in and out on the fly any number of times without having to stop the transport after each punch‑in. A MIDI Out connector outputs MTC and MIDI Clock for sync'ing MIDI sequencers to the BR8, and MIDI Machine Control is also supported.

The front panel is raked at a gentle angle and the eight track faders take centre stage beneath the small but adequate display window. There's a tape‑style transport‑control section to the left of the unit, which includes the auto punch‑in/out and marker/locator functions. Whenever you press the Mark button while the song is playing, a marker is created and these may be named if required. Search buttons make it easy to jump directly to the next or previous marker and the track time position is shown in the display. Markers are also used for defining auto punch‑in/out points and for defining regions of audio for editing.

Two level trim knobs are provided to optimise the individual input gains for the mic and instrument inputs while a further input level knob sets the actual recording level, regardless of the source. Each of the mic and instrument inputs have a red clip LED, but with the line inputs you need to keep a careful eye on the on‑screen level meters. Headphone monitoring is provided for by a headphone jack on the rear panel, with an associated level control. This output distorted rather early in the game with the professional studio phones I was using, so it's probably best to either use more sensitive phones or monitor at a low level.

The effects are divided into two types: insert effects and loop effects (such as you'd normally use on an aux send). Insert effects are used while recording and there's a wide range of dynamics and EQ treatments, guitar‑amp simulators and guitar‑style effects (including a wah‑wah which uses that optional expression pedal) that can be called up from a list and used just as they are. The more adventurous can dive in and edit the effects, but the beginner doesn't need to get involved in editing to get a good result. While a number of the treatments are dedicated to processing single guitar, mic or line inputs, there are also some designed for those people recording two tracks at the same time. These tend to come as preset pairs of effects: for example, EQ on one channel and amp simulator on the other. There are loads to choose from, so there should be at least one that'll do the job, and of course you can record via your own effects and pedals if you want to.

The effects‑loop effects, on the other hand, are used when mixing or bouncing tracks and there are dedicated front panel buttons to access chorus/delay and reverb. As with the insert effects, there are a number of useable presets and these can be edited in depth if they're not exactly what you need. Settings for the send level from each playback track to each of the two loop effects are accessed by pressing the Chorus/Delay or Reverb buttons located above the faders. The data‑entry wheel and cursor buttons, which reside above the master fader, can then be used to select and tweak a row of virtual knobs that appears in the display window. A similar system is used to manipulate pan controls and settings for each channel's basic two‑band shelving EQ, and it turns out to be very fast.

Working With The BR8

The BR8's tape‑style transport section, with the controls for setting up auto punch‑ins. Markers are also set and edited here. As well as being used to define editing and punch‑in and ‑out points, these are handy for navigating around your song.

Recording tracks onto the BR8 is simplicity itself, with signals always routed to whichever track is selected for the recording. What's more, if you're recording a stereo source, you always get an adjacent odd/even pair of channels to record onto.

The meaning of the track status button lamps, which sit beneath each fader, takes a little remembering, as there are seven possible states. If the button is dark, that means there's no data recorded on that track in the current song, whereas green means some data has already been recorded. A flashing green light means there is data but the track has been muted, whereas a flashing red button means the track is in record ready mode. When recording starts, the red lamp stays on solidly as you'd expect. If the lamp flashes alternately red and green, it means the track is in Record Ready mode, but there's already something recorded on that track — this is the usual situation if you're doing a punch‑in, but it's a useful double check that you're not overwriting a track you thought was empty. Finally, a blinking orange button means the track has been selected for recording, it already has stuff on it and the track has been muted. One thing that may confuse tape recorder users is that one or two tracks are always selected for recording (depending on how many inputs you've routed to tracks). There doesn't seem to be an all‑safe unless you actually deselect all input sources.

It's also worth remembering that when you're overdubbing, there is no way to set the monitor level for the track you're recording without also changing the record level, so you have to work around this by balancing up all the other track faders carefully.

There's one other operational oddity that you need to be aware of if you're not going to be forever wondering where your disk space has gone. Whenever you record over a part, or do a punch‑in, the original data is still held on disk, which means the available recording time plummets drastically if you're doing a lot of patching up. This wasted space can be reclaimed by visiting the Utilities page and scrolling along to the Optimise icon, which evicts all the old stuff and gives you back the missing time. I can understand the unit hanging on to the last incarnation of the last thing you did as there's a very handy Undo/Redo button that lets you backtrack a stage, but why absolutely everything is kept I'm not entirely sure.

The drum pattern section isn't designed to be a fully functional drum machine — it's simply there to provide something better than a metronome, and I have to say it's a lot more fun to play along to than a bleep. There are no count‑ins, fills or other fancy stuff, just 66 basic patterns in various styles (including, if you really want it, a metronome click!) with quite usable sounds — if you want to substitute your own sounds, the patterns are also sent out as MIDI notes, allowing you to trigger an external sound module or sampler. You can set up a tempo map to manage tempo changes, and MIDI clock or MTC can be output to sync up a sequencer should you need it. A handy Tap button allows you to create you own tempo map if you're trying to sync MIDI to an existing recording of varying tempo

Fast winding is best done by jumping between markers, but holding down fast wind will get you through the song reasonably quickly, and pressing the opposite button a moment later will cause the speed to increase, rather like the parameter buttons on some effect units. You can't hear the audio as it fast winds, but the markers are so easy to use that they're by far the best way of setting up navigation points within a song.

Cutting and pasting or erasing chunks of audio is based on setting up markers, then visiting that familiar Utilities section. Most of the menu items have icons that give a clue as to what they're about, and a text description also appears as you pass the cursor over them, so it's pretty hard to get lost. It's still rather slower than on a computer sequencer, but not that difficult: if your timing isn't up to marking edit points on on the fly, there is a scrub mode, similar to that found on Roland's VS‑series workstations, which allows you to set them much more accurately.

Track bouncing is very simple — after switching the record mode to Bounce, you select one or two tracks as destinations (if the selection the BR8 makes for you isn't the one you want), set up a balance of the remaining tracks and hit record. The meters on the destination tracks don't register during the bounce, but once the bounce is done, they play back just like any other tracks. If you select only one track to bounce to, the recording will be in mono whereas if you select two tracks, the pan positions of the source channels may be used to set up the desired stereo image. Any effects applied during the bounce are recorded to the destination tracks

I had quite a bit of fun playing with the effects, and it was surprising to see how powerful they are — for example, a guitar effect might include a chain of compressor, EQ, overdrive, pitch‑shifter and delay (although the order of these blocks cannot be changed). The guitar preamp simulations use Roland's COSM modelling system and deliver quite acceptable emulations of various clean and dirty rock sounds. There's also an acoustic simulation, which is usable but a little metallic, and some very fine monophonic bass sounds can be simulated, including a fretless that sounds absolutely convincing once it's in a mix with other instruments.

The Centre Cancel and Phrase Trainer facilities are only available for sounds recorded on tracks seven and eight. How well the centre‑cancelling function works is dependant on the type of material it's used on: even though you may eliminate the direct sound from an instrument or voice, any reverb or other stereo effects which it feeds will still remain. The time‑compressing Phrase trainer can sound a little lumpy when the audio is significantly reduced in speed, though it's still great for figuring out those impossible guitar solos.

One thing to take care of when recording line‑level signals is that the insert effects section is bypassed if not required. The bypass status is shown in the display window if you press the Effect button, though the meaning of the word 'On' next to Bypass isn't quite as obvious as it could be — 'On' means the effects are off, in case you were wondering.

As I'd expected, the audio quality of the recording was excellent. I'd have no worries about making an album using this little box, though with my meandering style of hippy music I wouldn't get more than one song on a Zip disk. The two longer‑play modes are a little less hi‑fi, though they're still fine for demo work providing you don't plan to do much in the way of track bouncing. Another plus for those working in a small room is that the unit is pretty quiet — the Zip drive is much quieter than any computer hard drive, and of course there's no fan to add to the racket and no monitor to play havoc with your guitar pickups.

Final Thoughts

The BR8's Centre Cancel and Phrase Trainer controls are located below the LCD window, and are only available for sounds recorded on tracks seven and eight. Centre Cancelling is used to remove vocals or centre‑panned instruments from a stereo track. The Phrase Trainer reduces the audio playback speed without affecting the pitch — great for figuring out those impossible guitar solos.

Roland have tried to think of everything to make this little box easy to use and although realistically you do need to study the manual for a couple of hours to get the best out of it, you probably won't need to refer back to it very often. In fact, once I had sussed out the basics, pretty much everything else was where I expected it to be.

The limited capacity of the disk drive may be a problem for those people who like to write musical epics — I'd have happily paid the extra for a 250Mb Zip drive. It would also have made more sense if the disk format could have been readable by a PC or Mac for backing up, but the manual warns you not to put the disk into anything else, do I didn't try. As it is, backing up to a second Zip drive is so long‑winded that I can't imagine many people doing it more than once.

In addition to the good recording quality and the tape recorder‑like interface, the effects are really very good, and basic cut/paste editing is as intuitive and free from hassle as it can be on a non‑computer system. The drum patterns are also good enough to use for basic demos, though for release‑quality material you'd probably want to replace them later — this is easy if you have sequencer or an external programmable drum machine. The guitar tuner, phrase trainer and centre‑cancelling functions are also useful bonuses.

In short, at this price, this little box is a technological wonder. I wouldn't go as far as say that it's perfect — it couldn't be at this price — but it's hugely attractive and capable of some first‑rate results.

Packing It In And Backing It Up

In addition to its analogue I/O, the BR8 boasts an optical digital output, footswitch and expression‑pedal jack inputs for hands‑free control of transport and selected effects functions. MIDI output is provided for the purposes of synchronising external sequencers.

One problem with hard disk recorders is that when the disk is full you need some way to back it up. The Boss BR8 gets around that by using a 100Mbyte Zip disk as the storage medium, so when it's full, you can put it on the shelf and start another one if you don't want to erase the original. Though the manual carefully avoids the words 'data compression', the BR8 uses a similar form of data reduction to that used in the Roland VS‑series recorders in order to extend the playing time available from a given size of hard drive. The conversion system is 20‑bit when both inputs are being used or 24‑bit when a single input is being used — the manual is a little hazy about how the extra resolution is created when recording just one input, but it seems to involve using both converters at the same time. The sample rate is 44.1kHz and the audio bandwidth extends from 20Hz to 20kHz (+1/‑3dB).

There are three levels of compression available, the best quality being MT2, which provides a total of 50 minutes recording time divided dynamically amongst the eight tracks. The two other modes, LV1 and LV2, provide a maximum of 60 and 75 minutes respectively, but with more compromises in the audio quality. Data compression has become a big issue in the minds of some people, but Roland's system compares very favourably with MiniDisc and most users can tell no real difference between recordings in MT2 mode and uncompressed digital audio. When you consider the problems we used to endure from tape noise reduction in the analogue days, the compression issue seems to have been blown out of all proportion, and though the BR8 is designed as an affordable musicians tool you could make master quality recordings on it very easily using no more than a mic and a pair of headphones.

Before you can use a Zip disk with the BR8, it must be formatted to work with the machine and this format is incompatible with desktop computers, which is rather a shame as it precludes backing up your Zips to a big hard drive or to data CD‑R. You can back up one Zip disk to another using only the BR8, because it has enough internal RAM to allow this to be done in stages by swapping disks every few seconds. However, a full Zip disk, which will typically hold one or two songs, takes around 100 disk swaps to back up, so it's not something you'll probably want to do a lot of! Song data is saved when you switch off the unit via the rear panel power switch, or you can save via the Utility menu, but if you have a power cut or switch off at the wall, you lose everything you did since the last time you saved.