When you look at the Boss RC-3 Loop Station you’ll notice it lacks the dead-simple interface that the TC Electronic Ditto has, but in turn it adds some pretty great features. That, plus the Boss build-quality, reliability, and experience in making loop pedals make the RC-3 a very strong contender.

The tiny buttons placed close together might seem intimidating at first, but rest assured that operating the Boss RC-3 is pretty simple. In fact, you can ignore the buttons and get straight to looping by hitting the footswitch once, and the red light in the top-left corner indicates you’re in record mode. Hit it again and both green and red LEDs light up meaning you’re in playback AND recording mode. Hit it yet again, and just the green one stays lit, meaning you’re playing back your loop. Double-tap the footswitch to stop looping. The RC-3 also has the handy feature of starting and stopping the recording on the measure, so you don't have to have perfect timing with the footswitch.

The Boss RC-3 has quite the impressive set of features. You get a whopping 3 hours of loop time, and 99 presets to store your loops in. And speaking of storing loops, the RC-3 has a USB port so you can save your loops to a computer, or load WAV files into this pedal to be part of your loops, and have those be saved (no special software required, which is great). As a side note , this works great not just for looping, but just for storing any kind of sound effects. Say a song of yours needs a sound effect like a clap of thunder. Find that sound sample online, load it up into one of the 99 slots of the RC-3, and boom, you’ve got a mini sampler!

Moving on, you get a AUX IN 1/8" jack so you can plug in an iPhone, iPad, or other media player and have that be part of your loops as well. You also have the option of mono or stereo inputs and outputs, which is handy. If operating this loop pedal with the single Boss footswitch seems too difficult, the RC-3 has the option of an external footswitch, which takes some of the functionality of the RC-3 and expands it out to it (Boss recommends using the Boss FS-5U Non-latching Footswitch).

One more feature worth mentioning is the Rhythm feature, essentially a built-in drum machine , which you can use as a metronome (with a handy tap tempo button). The rhythm portion also comes with its own volume knob. This is a great feature for practicing, but we wouldn’t recommend using the built-in drum tracks in recordings or live; they sound a bit thin, cheap, and overall not that great. The RC-3 also comes with 9 pre-recorded loops to jam along with, complete with bass, drums, and piano parts. A fun feature to practice and play with, but by no means essential.

In terms of sound quality, it’s a notch below the TC Electronic Ditto in terms of clarity. This is due to the loops being in 16-bit audio, as opposed to 24-bit. The RC-3 also introduces an ever-so-slight bit of noise to the signal chain, and when switched off it is unfortunately not true bypass. These are minor annoyances, and only the most sensitive ears will be able to tell.

Bottom Line: Despite some drawbacks, the Boss RC-3 is a great little loop pedal. It holds its own against the significantly more expensive Boss RC-30 Loop Station, in a much more compact package. If the loop times and lack of loop storage of the TC Ditto and DigiTech JamMan Express XT are too limiting, the Boss RC-3 is the one to get. The drum machine functionality - while not the best quality - is good for practicing your chops, but what we really love is the AUX IN, and the ability to hook it up to your computer via USB and transfer your loops. The price is a little on the high end, but you’re getting a lot of great features and recording capacity with the price still far lower than some of the premium $300 looper pedals out there.