Problem with my Boss RC-2 loop station guitar pedal.

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So, I bought a boss rc-2 looper off of a friend of mine at the start of the summer and it has been fine and dandy up until about 2 weeks ago or so. I didn't do anything to it, it has been sitting on my floor, was getting used regularly, not beat up, when one morning I woke up and tried to use it and nothing happened.

It is obviously at least recording what I play into it, because the tempo light flashes the tempo of whatever I just played, even though nothing is coming out of my amp.

Things I have checked:
All cables, in plenty of different arrangements
Power, I tried both battery and straight out of the wall adapter
Memory, I deleted all of the phrases I had saved
Volume, I checked all volume settings on everything

I feel like something could be wrong with the output jack on the pedal itself but if I opened it up I wouldn't know what I was looking for, let alone how to fix it. Someone in se++ suggested I do a factory reset, but I have no idea how to do that, I can't find it in the manual and google fucking sucks because all the results I get for searching are for buying the looper itself.

Any help?

romanqwerty

The output jack should look something like this.

Often one of those connections can break off leaving you with no output. I would sugest opening it up and checking that the output jack has two solid wires attached to it. (Note: This may void a warranty so don't do it if you have one.)

Also check if there are any disconnected wires anywhere else. You could also try taking a few photos of the inside and seeing if anyone online can pick the problem.

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I opened it up, can't get in. The circuit board is like soldered to the body of the pedal as soon as you open up the back.

Also worth noting, because it seems strange to me now that I didn't realize this before, is that even though the loops I record do not play back, what I am actually playing in real time DOES, which means since that has to travel through the pedal, maybe it's not the jack and maybe the pedal itself is just fucked?

Typhoid Manny

here's a link to a pdf of the manual

just so i'm clear, you get no signal with the pedal plugged in?

also are you sure there's no screws keeping the board in place? it doesn't make sense to permanently attach the pcb and i've never heard of anyone doing it, as there's not a lot of ways to do it without fucking up the board itself.

it could either be a wire got knocked loose from one of the jacks, which is unlikely but not impossible, or something got fucked up within the circuit itself, but that generally won't just happen. it didn't get struck by lightning or anything, did it?

also also, boss doesn't use the open jacks like in the photo above. they use box jacks, like this:

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this is what I see when I open the back of the pedal:


this is where it seems to be soldered to the body of the pedal, it is soldered on the other side also:



To be totally clear: when I play with the pedal PLUGGED IN, but not otherwise being used, eg just playing without looping anything, I can hear what I am playing in real time just like I should be, no problems. BUT if I record anything on the looper and try to play it back, there is no sound from the loop station of what should be looping. I can tell the looper HEARD what I played, because the tempo light flashes to the beat of what I recorded.

Typhoid Manny

my god that is horrible. i've never seen anything like that before.

ok, if you pull on that metal tab that's soldered to the circuit board, does it give at all? if it does, you might want to try taking the knobs off, then unscrewing the nuts because the pots might be the main way the guts are attached to the enclosure.

but this is trivial at this point, because if you get a bypass signal the jacks are fine and there's a problem with the active parts of the pedal.

i'd definitely try doing a factory reset, as well as smelling the board to determine if maybe an IC got burned out or something, in which case it's definitely defective and you shouldn't have any trouble collecting on the warranty; boss is really good about that shit.

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Typhoid Manny wrote: »

my god that is horrible. i've never seen anything like that before.

ok, if you pull on that metal tab that's soldered to the circuit board, does it give at all? if it does, you might want to try taking the knobs off, then unscrewing the nuts because the pots might be the main way the guts are attached to the enclosure.

but this is trivial at this point, because if you get a bypass signal the jacks are fine and there's a problem with the active parts of the pedal.

i'd definitely try doing a factory reset, as well as smelling the board to determine if maybe an IC got burned out or something, in which case it's definitely defective and you shouldn't have any trouble collecting on the warranty; boss is really good about that shit.

I have no idea how to do a factory reset, the manual doesn't seem to say. google also does not tell me.

Typhoid Manny

ok, at this point your best bet is to return it to wherever you bought it and getting it exchanged for another, assuming you've still got a receipt. now that i think about it i'm not sure there is a way to flash it back to factory settings, so hardware failure is looking increasingly likely.

this is a longshot, but have you tried just deleting any loops you've got saved? it might be a lack-of-memory issue

edit: also this is a really silly question, but is the phrase volume knob all the way down?

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Typhoid Manny wrote: »

ok, at this point your best bet is to return it to wherever you bought it and getting it exchanged for another, assuming you've still got a receipt. now that i think about it i'm not sure there is a way to flash it back to factory settings, so hardware failure is looking increasingly likely.

this is a longshot, but have you tried just deleting any loops you've got saved? it might be a lack-of-memory issue

edit: also this is a really silly question, but is the phrase volume knob all the way down?

tried both of those things. I also bought it off a friend for 60 dollars so this is too bad. I will ask him if he still has his receipt or something.

thanks for your help, by the way

vicpayne

Did you get it sorted?
I have the same problem! :-(