Labels:text | screenshot | font | number OCR: AM/FM Boss Dr-550 Beatbox Reviewed by Kon Wilms AM/FM First things first... this little beatbox has been out on the market for some time but I felt it was necessary to do a short review on it... mainly because its a budget drum machine and most amiga musicians who have equipment and synths etc are more interested in a good buy. You can pick up a second hand Dr550 for a really cheap price if you just look hard enough... and if you're serious about making music there is NO WAY you can simply just keep going with a setup consisting of a synth and the amiga. A dedicated beatbox is a GOOD investment! So lets get on with the essentials Exteriors The Dr550 comes as a small black box with the usual 12 pads for entering the drum sounds. It measures approx. 7" x 6" x 1" and weighs near to nothing. Its so handy you can just carry it in your hand. The unit is plastic and has rubber keys. It can either take an AC power input or 6 AA batteries... which makes it very portable. Ports in the rear include a tape save/load MIC jack: MIDI IN: headphone socket and two outputs for left(mono)/right jacks. It has a LCD display which amongst other things is divided into a number of panels to show pattern data, some general info (tempo etc), song/pattern number, bank number and other info: all very nicely set out. Sounds The sampling/DAC bit resolution of the Dr550 is 16/16... which means it's quite acceptable. The only problem I found was that it didn't sample too well onto the Amiga. Generally the sounds are quite good. There are 48 in total; including 5 bass drums and 6 snare drums. Quite a few 808 sounds are also present here... like the much-used 808 cowbell and the 808 hihat Sounds sounds. There are some really solid tom sounds and also some record scratches and other effects. All in all I was quite impressed with the sounds (a VERY good selection); you won't find any dud or obsolete sounds in this drum machine, so hats (excuse the pun) off to Boss for this! The sounds are divided into 4 user-programmable banks and can be freely assigned to whichever pad you like. All the 48 sounds are accessible over MIDI and respond to note on/off and velocity. Unfortunately there is NO tuning range for the instruments... although I think it is possible to change the pitch/octave in some way. This unit does NOT accept new sounds. So that's a major setback for expandability. Voices can also be edited but the editing is primitive and simple to say the least. Panning of voices, polyphony and a few other features are available. Pads The pads measure about 1" x 0.8" and have a very good reponse. There is NO velocity sensitivity though... but it is possible to add a bit of attack volume to the instruments by holding down an "accent" button while playing. The unit is 12-voice polyphonic... that means you can play all the pads at the same time (if you're that way inclined) :-) Patterns & Songs 8 songs are supported by the Dr550. Big hassle is that Boss dumped some demo songs into 6 of 6 of the 8 song-areas so you are well LIMITED to the max. BAD MOVE. Best option is to dump all the demo songs onto a tape and wipe em if you would like to start creating your own songs. Oh and while you're at it don't forget to wipe nearly all the user-programmable patterns because the demosongs use nearly most of these patterns. This dud feature on the Dr550 didn't impress me at all... demo songs are NOT supposed tohinder operation of the unit... no matter what it might be! There are 64 user patterns and 64 preset patterns available to fiddle with. The preset patterns are generally quite good... but very strangely some of the demo-patterns are better than the built-in ones. why did Boss do this? Who knows! Anyhow styles range from Techno to 6-beat to House to Rap to just about anything you could imagine. Some very solid and tight rhythms are included which are well... impressive! As far as recording goes the general process is to select a patch bank; select a tempo: select a pattern number and start tapping. Songs are built up from a built up from a set of patterns. set of patterns. If you know how protracker works then this is a doodle to use. Very simple, very easy! In General Well what about the MIDI options? The Dr550 has a few MIDI options but nothing too special. It has no MIDI-out so already it's SEVERELY limited. (No sysex dumps, etc etc) On top of you can only trigger whole songs through MIDI and not a sequence of patterns. But however its possible to trigger the sounds themselves through MIDI and the sounds do respond to velocity sensitivity when triggered by external controlling devices. However... forget about popping this device into your THRU-chained setup; coz it wont work. I found the tape save-load option irritating.. after all we're no longer in the age of the ZX Spectrum, even if this is a drum machine. A sysex mode would have been a good addition along with a MIDI OUT port and why Boss did not add these I just can't understand; as it would have made very little difference in price in any case. Otherwise there is not much more I can say about the Dr550. Its good value for money but compared to other slightly more expensive beatboxes it fails in certain aspects. To use the cliche'd expression... try before you buy! AM/FM
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