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.
I guess you never tried the roland gr-50 just reading the manual is like a space shuttle launch
Comment by Jon — April 14, 2011 @ 10:41 pm
Actually the DR-5 is NOT that complicated to use. The manual is a bit fragmented but the device is pretty easy to use ONCE you get used to a couple of oddities.
For example one oddity is that often times you when you want to “exit” a mode, you don’t use the “exit” button… instead you just switch to a different mode and switch back again.
For example, say you hit SHIFT-PTN so you are in pattern mode… then you hit use the arrow keys (or whatever) to go into the submenus… now at some point you want to go back to the first screen you saw when you entered pattern mode…. You’d naturally want to hit the Exit button to go back…but it won’t do anything… what you need to do is hit SHIFT-SONG (which takes you to song mode) and then SHIFT-PTN again to go to the first screen of pattern mode.
I know, it’s odd…but it isn’t complicated once you’re used to it.
Additionally , anyone using this for the first time should DEFINITELY just look at the 2-page quick start guide…it covers (step by step) most of the common uses… from creating patterns to creating songs to recording live guitar (with or without effects). The manual is very useful, but does appear to be daunting at first look… On the other hand, the quick start guide is concise, simple and very clear. (Also, both the manual and the quick start guide are downloadable at Boss’s site).
Anyone considering buying one should read the reviews over at HarmonyCentral as well. 99% of them rave about this unit. Even after all these years, people often say that if theirs broke, they would immediately buy another on Ebay (or elsewhere).
Even with some slightly dated sounds, this unit provides a truly portable band-in-a-box, and at the price it goes for now, you can get it for less than the cost of a high-end metronome.
Lastly, if anyone has the tutorial video (that came with the unit) please, please, PLEASE rip it and post it on YouTube. I watched it years ago and it is also a great learning tool for first time DR-5 users. Unfortunately, it is very hard to find and is no longer available from Boss. Therefore, anyone that has it would really be doing the DR-5 community a great service by posting the video on YouTube.
Just my 2 cents.
Comment by Tralornik — August 26, 2011 @ 10:35 pm