I just recieved the Boss BR 600 in the mail a week ago and am very pleased with the product. The Boss BR 600 is a high quality peice of equipement that is suitable for both those who are novice with digital recording and those who have alot of experience. No matter what your expectations when it comes to ditgital recording, the Boss BR 600 with exceed your standards.

I won't list all the features, as they can be found on the Boss website where you can download the whole manual. Instead, I will explain the features I have used.

First of all the COSM effects are great, and have allowed me to save some space by packing away my old multi-effects unit (Digitech RP300). Many of the guitar patches are quite usable, a few great ones, a few cheesy ones, not too many 'novelty' patches as on some multi-effects. At the moment I just use a couple of hard-rock/thrash sounds and a couple of clean tones. I've also created a few sounds of my own, which is not difficult despite the small screen. It's a fully featured effects unit. A great feature is that you can record a dry guitar signal (i.e. without any effects) and then try out various effects afterwards on playback.

The drums are pretty good, though not as sophisticated as a dedicated drum machine (I will mention a couple of limitations further down). I was going to buy a Zoom RT-223, till I saw the BR-600 and realised the possibilities that digital recording offers. The drum track is in addition to the 8 audio tracks (4 mono and 2 stereo pairs). The drum sounds are realistic, and you can load up your own samples to create a new drum kit (max 13 seconds sample time). There are plenty of built in rhythms, but it is also possible to create your own drum patterns and 'arrange' these patterns into a song.

The first limitation of the drums is one of memory - individual custom patterns can only be a max of two bars long, and if you want a very varied drum arrangement there is a limit to how many times you can change between patterns in one arrangement (it's worth looking at the manual if this is a concern). There are five drum arrangements available for each song, however, so I assume you could bounce two or more drum 'arrangements' one after the other, onto an audio track. If drums are an important feature for you, check the manual before buying (on the Boss website). A further limitation of the drum machine is its max polyphony of 5, which isn't as much as the Zoom RT-223.

Another useful feature is a 'bass emulator' which transposes your guitar down into the bass register. Great for recording a bass line if you don't have a bassist on hand. I can't really judge it against a real bass guitar, but it's fine for my purposes. There's also an 'acoustic emulator' which makes your electric sound like an acoustic; it sounds perfectly useable to me.

The user interface is good - lots of dedicated or dual purpose buttons and dials. The cursor keys and value dial make editing guitar effects and step-recording drum patterns fairly painless.

Through a guitar amp or cheap headphones you lose a lot of sound quality. I use my PC speaker system and some Sennheiser HD201 headphones. Sounds fine.

For the money this is an astounding tool. I can record songs and I can accompany myself during practice. Very handy for a billy-no-mates like me who has no-one to jam with. If you have no-one to play music with, I can't emphasise enough the benefit of being able to record some accompaniment for yourself. In a few minutes I can put together a useful drum track, a bass line and a rhythm part, and then just have some fun!