Boss Micro BR ... good for recording practice-sessions?

[JoeJackson]

Hey guys,

lately I'm really interested in the Boss Micro BR and hope, someone here has that thing or at least checked it out before.

I need something to quickly record practise-sessions. One mic should be enough (1 guitar, 1 drummer, 1 bass). We just need some quick recordings to remember what we played 5 minutes before.

On the other hand I want to use that thing as a battery-driven riff-collector slash mobile practise-amp. So, if I understood that correctly I can put pre-programmed drum-tracks as mp3s on the MicroBR and quickly play over them and record that track, right? Does the MicroBR only record with it's built-in amp-models or can I also save the dry tracks?

Are the built in amp-models usable?

The Line6 Backtrack would be the IDEAL equipment for us if it had amp-models built-in. Fuck that, Line6 will never ever come up with something I'm 100% satisfied with
What on earth keeps them from selling a POD Pocket with the functionality of the Backtrack.

 

[John_C]

my bass players got one and we use it for recording practices. It works fine for that with one mic, although ofc you need to have the correct adaptors and preamps (although i think the br has one on one of the inputs.....)

 

[Dogman]

I own one an like it a lot and carry around all the time - looks pretty beaten by now.
I`m not shure if you can record with the amp models and not print them on the recording -never needed to- but of course you can record whatever you want without any fx at all. The built in mic is ok for practice recordings, so that`s handy, nothing else to carry around.

The unit also has a stereo input which you can configure and use in various ways.
Last weekend I configured it as line input and recorded the gig directly out of the mixing board with it. On other occasions I switched it to mic input and connected two Shure BG 4.1 battery powered condensers, SM 58s worked too when I tried them.
The quality of the built in distortion is not too bad, used it on some demos. When you want a super heavy sound try mixing in a little direct signal with the speaker emulated one (you can actually program this within the unit!) works wonders. When holding or bending heavyly distorted notes you hear a kind of aliasing noise in the background but it`s not too annoying and I guess boss had to scimp somewhere...
Oh I btw. I even used it as overdrive/fx unit into a clean amp on a live theater-production that I played recently. The crunchy blues sound I can get this way is actually a favourite of mine...

Haven`t got much bad to say except the aliasing thing and that my first unit died within a few weeks but the replacement is going strong since 1,5 years now, also you can`t put memory cards inside that are bigger than 1 GB (well you can but the unit will only make use of 1 GB then).

It will work as a primitive Mp3-Player too (great for practicing) the Mp3 files for listening are simply accessible/exchangeable by connecting the BR directly to the computer via USB.
But if you want to use your own prerecorded drums (the unit has drumpatterns built in btw.- crappy sounding but handy for recording ideas) to record your guitars over, these have to reside in a different part of the unit, the built in 4 track-recorder. As this recorder does´t use Mp3 but some kind of Boss own compression codec, you have to download the free BRWC200 BR Series Wave Converter Software from Boss (no Mac, PC only) to shove them into this part of the machine. This software also allows to get your recordings via USB out of the unit and into your computer as WAV files.

Hope that helps.

 

[mondocane]

the "old" Zoom H2 is way better for reh. recordings, and less expensive:

http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/products/h2/

no built-in amp models anyway...