I have a good friend who travels for his company a lot, and I mean a lot. He wanted a nice little processor to use on the road with his "Traveling" guitar. So, after looking around, comparing features and 'Coolness' of a few products I told him he needed the BOSS MICRO BR.

The compact package of the MICRO BR is very appealing, it clocks in at 5-3/8" x 3-3/16"x 7/8". Yep, it's tiny. But don't let the size fool you, the guitar tones and functionality are monstrous!

This device is a 4-track recorder, which will record two tracks simultaneously. It also has 32 V-Tracks for multiples of takes over the same line or progression. This gives great flexibility to record a solo multiples of times over the same changes non-destructively and later you can choose the best take.

As for guitar tones, there are 80 preset guitar patches, 80 user definable patches and 80 song patches which you can write all the tones for your song in. For the guitar signal chain the MICRO BR offers:

• Compressor
• Chorus
• Flanger
• Phaser
• Tremolo/pan

The preamp offers 13 models and the speaker simulator offers 14 options, so somewhere around 180 combinations of amp/speaker setting, this is enough to make almost everyone happy. The delay and tremolo also offer multiple modelings. The tones are great and very tweakable, I was very pleased with the options available.There are mic effects for the mic inputs and effects for the line inputs as well.

Besides offering a direct guitar jack there is also a built in mic, and a stereo line input. No need to haul around a ton of other equipment to lay down scratch vocals or ideas. Just punch the button and start going. The mic is surprisingly good sounding, and was useful for most of my recordings. There is no excuse for when inspiration hits anymore. In a small and compact package you have pretty much everything you need to capture whatever idea or riff you may have and you still have full editing capabilities that include cut, copy, and paste.

BOSS has also included drum loops and beats into the MICRO BR, 293 different patterns to be exact. These can be arranged in the unit as you construct your song. The USB port is great for transferring songs on and off of the unit. There is also a Mastering Tool Kit to finish your songs, and you can convert your songs to .MP3 or .Wav inside the unit for easy sharing of material. One of the cool things that is offered exclusively on this miniature studio is the ability to not only store and play MP3 files, but also to time stretch them. You can jam with these tracks as well because you still have access to the guitar processor while in MP3 mode. BOSS is the first company to offer the ability to slow down MP3s without losing pitch in a hardware unit. You can load up a ton of tunes you want to learn onto the MICRO BR, take it with you one the road and slow down the hard parts of the solo to better learn and practice with, this is very cool. This can be great for songwriters. Band leaders could give the band the MP3's for them to rehearse their parts on their MICRO BR's. Also this could be very cool for instructors. You could record the lesson with the student in real-time using the built in mic, and also give them MP3 assignments to take home.

The MICRO BR uses SD media card to record to and it even comes with one. The included 128mb card can hold 65 minutes of audio using one mono track. Of course, the first thing you want to do is run out and grab a 1gb card to throw in there which would give you over 8 hours of track minutes. SD media is available everywhere and constantly coming down in cost, I appreciate that they used a nice standard media that is easily found.

Once again BOSS has created a real winner with the MICRO BR. A device that is a little bigger than most media players on the market will give musicians most of the tools they need to record mix, edit and keep going, no matter where they are. Recording has truly gone portable thanks to BOSS.

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