Boss DR-5 Dr. Rhythm Section Review
The Boss DR-5 is essentially a drum machine for guitar players. It features a wealth of famous Roland drum sounds, including the essential TR-808. In addition to the large assortment of drum sounds, the DR-5 also contains various pianos, strings, synths and other instruments.
The pad layout should be comforting to any guitarist, due to the pads being arranged like a fretboard. Basically, there are six strings and six frets, and you can use arrow keys to move up and down the fretboard. This is especially useful for those of us that have specific fretboard patterns we are comfortable with, and the translation from guitar is really quite intuitive.
The DR-5 also features a guitar tuner and amp simulation, both of which work quite well. A rather interesting and quirky bonus is the ability to control the synth banks with any electric guitar. The tracking isn’t phenomenal, but if you have high output pickups and only play single, staccato notes – it’s actually quite usable, and a great feature for those of us who’d like to use synth sounds with our guitars but don’t want to pony up for the Roland guitar synth.
In addition to the guitar-oriented aspects, you can also do multi-track arrangement on the DR-5, and save songs for later use. I haven’t delved too far into this, as it requires extensive manual reading and I don’t really plan to use this feature. From what I can tell, this unit can be used as a 4-track audio recorder, as well.
MIDI is present, so you may use an external midi controller to operate the DR-5, or use the DR-5 as a MIDI out. I plan to use it as the latter, for recording purposes.
With the Turbo Start guide from Roland’s website, I was able to quickly perform all of the functions it described, without any issues. However, I imagine that to truly delve into the total functionality of this unit would be quite a chore – it’s one of the least user friendly pieces of gear I’ve ever owned.
The Boss DR-5 – cool, weird and kinda hard to use.