Loop station

As a kind of delayed birthday treat for myself, I recently splashed out on a Boss RC20XL loop station. This is a really cool toy that allows you to record short pieces of music and have them play back. I've been having a lot of fun laying down rhythms and playing lead over them (all the old favourites have been trotted out: Fade To Black, Stairway To Heaven, Sultans Of Swing, ...); it's also great for playing two-part sight-reading pieces. 

It's got a basic drum machine built-in and a very clever "loop quantizing" feature that truncates your riff to the nearest measure. This is handy since getting the timing right without it is a bit of an art form. There are a few other bells and whistles that I haven't yet explored fully: you can adjust the tempo of loops after recording them (which has a potentially useful application in slowing down songs to figure them out; you can record songs via the "aux in" input); there is also a "reverse" feature that allows you to play loops backward (this seems a little gimicky: apart from figuring out the opening of Metallica's "Blackened", I can't think of much other use I'd have for this for the time being).

Having previously dabbled in GarageBand and Logic Express, I was initially reluctant to fork out for a loop station since, in principle, you can get the same functionality on the computer. However, having used it for just under a week, I can attest that it's night and day: having the pedal on the floor makes it so much quicker to record and have it start playing back.