Boss DR-670

This thing is easy to play around with, how ever 2 things after readig the manuel i still do not under stand. 1) When i push A/B it dose not change to pattern A or B it stays the same, on my Aleis Sr 16 there are 2 patterns. Next HOW THE HELL DO YOU TURN THE BASS OF ON THE PRE SET PATTERNS? IF YOU KNOW PLEASE EMAIL ME intotheforest689@yahoo.com i would realy like to know because the bass sounds are realy week.

Has alot of features. Its decent, you can hook it up to a midi device, lote of memory, big screen.

Problems are the beat idecator dose not tell you when the beat starts or finishes, its a light, on the aleis it say 1.2.3.4.est..

next its annoying to have to read so much into it to learn to use it.

The touch senstive pads are realy annoying because you realy have to hit them hard to get any sound.

I play death/ black/ doom and prog metal.
All i need is a steady 2bl bass drum and some blast beats. It dose that ok, how ever the roll button dose not keep the roll at a constent tempo, its all over the place and sounds fake.
The drums are good, i realy wish the would not put the bass on this, it realy ruins it.

I have bought many boss products over the years, and they never broke down on me.

The problem is its imposible to get a hold of boss to ask a question

If i lost it i would be sad, but i wouldnt buy it aggain.
Over all its good, the sounds are ok, i realy hate the bass thought. I would rather have an aleis sr 16

For just playing around with the factory presets, the device could hardly be easier; take it out of the box, power it up, turn it on, plug it into an amp or pa or even head phones, turn the big knob until you hear something you like and go to town. Programing user patterns, however, is a little more tedious than what one might think required.

I've owned an Alessis sr-16 for years now. The 16 has been the standard I judge other machines by. The dr-670 shares some of the same features of the 16, and a few nice new ones of its' own. The ability to change keys for the base WITH OUT having to write a new pattern isn't a feature this machine has and it makes it almost useless for live work as a result. Bummer....

Many of the factory presets are usable as is...not all though. Regretably, too many of the presets sound like they came from an inexpensive midi keyboard. You know what I mean. By the way, I spent a full afternoon doing NOTHING but carefully listening to the presets through a pair of high quality studio headphones, and then through a medium sized pa such as one might see in a 200-300 seat club which includes a powered sub woofer. So I gave the dr-670 a fair chance to impress me. (It didn't quite make though)

Boss has the reputation for making very reliable equipment and I've no doubt that this is true of this machine too.

You'll probably never need them as long as you don't do abusive things to the dr.

I am a professional musician and earn my entire income from music. I had hoped to use the dr-670 to supliment my solo guitar gigs; fatten up my lone guitar sound while playing standards. I've given it a good listen at home and read the manuel carefully. I'm sure it's fine for someone using it to jam on at home or the like; but it just can't do what I needed for live work. As a matter of fact, I can't seem to find any device that meets my need as a solo gigger; a small, reasonably priced (I define a reasonable price as what a device is really worth in terms of it's function. I'm willing to pay alot of money for a truely professional quility device) , programable with enough memory to be usable live, decent sounding out of the box, drum & bass machine. I really would have thought that by now, SOMEBODY would have made a really professional quality machine. I'm tired of paying too much for something that just doesn't cut it. And if it can't do what you need, then any price is too much. Roland, Yamaha, Alessis, Korg....somebody please listen!

its very easy to start playing right out of the box, takes a little bit more
to do advance functions, the menual is great and tell you all you need to know
about this little machine

It has a full midi capability, and you can backup all your data to a sequebcer which
is great, it doesn't have any effects and it does have only two output, so, you can't really
send diffrent drums to diffrent outputs
I find that edit patterns is a breeze once you get it

The sounds are GREAT, really really good drums and when you play with the touch sensitive
it sounds really real, bass sounds are ok, but i bought a real bass for this
with this little machine i fooled a lot of people who thought there was actually a drummer
on the tape

never broke, or failed, looks solid to me

never used it

This is a great little machine, i would buy it again

presets sound o.k, some deeper functions need knowledge from the manual. Manual is decent.

It doesn't have any real inbuilt effects, but you could add 'reverb' by setting the decay of a sample (variable between -31 and +31)
it doesn't have any expansion stuff, it does feature full MIDI implementation (as master or slave)

OF the 50 kickdrums, I found about 5 verry realistic (especially kick #18), ditto with the snares. Most sounds sound too compressed, or too much tailored for dance/R&b. Some rock-sounds are very good. I use it for metal/rock/surf (vintage/lo-fi)/funk.
Cymbals are VERY good, toms are decent. I don't care for the more exotic stuff. I wish it had more cymbals than 17. It only has 1 china, 1 splash and 1 gong.

touch sensitive pads are good. Sensetivity can be set to high/med/low.

Sure. I have it for 8 months now and it never stalled on me.
But the only minor flaw is, that the AC adapter isn't fit tight into the AC input. So, on stage you'd need to duct tape that, if you don't want a jumpy vocalist to tear the power out....

If it were lost or stolen, would you buy it again or get something else? Is it worth what you paid?>
I'd probably would replace it with a DR770 or maybe a secondhanded SR16, because those have 4 outputs.

what do you love about it? What do you hate?>
I like the sounds, the sample-editability, the custom drumkits.
I hate the the lack of 4 audio outputs, and lack of onboard effects

Did you compare it to other products? Which ones? Why did you choose this one?>
I compared it to some Zoom rhythm-track models. The Boss sounded more realistic to me. The Zoom seemed more like a toy.

Anything you wish it had?>
4 AUDIO OUTPUTS!!!!!!!!!!! SO I CAN SEND INDIVIDUAL OUTS FOR KICK, SNARE AND OVERHEADS (L&R)!

Does it help you make music, or does it get in the way?>
It helps me for basic ideas, and I also use it when I finish up my songs. But to emulate a real drummer, it needs a lot of programming (especially fills), so I can imagine it could get in the way.

It isn't incredibly hard to use, but simple procedures take a few more steps than necessary. To set the drum kit to the sound you want, you have to go through a lot of different sounds before you get to the one you want, since it is possible to set any sound to any button. And after I've found the sound I want and program it in to a pattern, the sound goes back to it's default setting when I switch to another pattern and come back to it, which is pointless. Anyone know how to fix this? I bought it without the manual and most of it is pretty straight forward, but the manual would help a lot. If anyone has a manual or could help me out, email me PLEASE! The preset patterns are fun but totally unusable.

There aren't any effects, but a seperate unit for effects is better for my setup anyway. I haven't accessed any features that have blown me away, but how would I know without the manual (I'm a little bitter about that).

The drum sounds are great! I do home recording, and the sounds are perfect for my little acoustic songs. There is a lot of diversity as far as musical styles go, and playing around with them is fun too. The bass is terrible, I won't use it, but the drum sounds are worth it.

Well i've only had it about a week, and nothing's gone wrong yet.

I've been trying to get some information on getting the manual, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to get one through their website. It is hard to even find a way to email them, and as far as i've heard, they don't respond anyway. I've also heard that it's like $100 to order one over the phone, because I'm not the original owner. If ANYONE has a manual I'd gladly pay to get a copy of it. I don't need an original, just a friggin copied version.

If I lost it, I'd probably get another one, or upgrade to the DR-770. The drum sounds are great, and it's worth the price I paid for it. I wish the bass sounded better, but I'll survive without it.

I find the ease of use to be typical. Desired improvements:

Menus could wrap around.

Bass on/off could have a dedicated button at the top level, instead of being a drill-down menu item. Ideally, this would be setable/savable per pattern, with global options for "Bass on, Bass off, Per Pattern".

I do really like the "fretboard" way that bass is programmed on this box. Nice work!

Lot's of good drum sounds, and quite a few bass sounds. I find that having bass available in the drum machine is really great for practicing, composing, and jamming.

200 user patterns is a workable number, much better than 50 or 100.

However, in a major error, Boss neglects to include the transpose parameter at the Song level, offering it only at the individual pattern level. Why is this important? Well, ideally one would like to be able to program a song (a blues, say) using just one pattern and having the bass part be transposed at the appropriate bars. If this were possible, you (or the Factory!) could quickly take each stylistic preset pattern and program a song in that style without even having to create any user patterns at all. Voila, dozens of simple songs could be created from the presets alone, very quickly. All the user patterns would then be available for actual beat/bass variations, and with 200 of them you could complexify (!) all those dozens of songs at your leisure and still not fill up the memory.

Unfortunately, the only way to transpose the bass is to create a completely new pattern in the user pattern space. This starts eating up memory fast, and is alot of extra work. Too bad. By saving one extra byte per song step (i.e. the transposition) we would have had a home run here.

One other really great feature, falling short at the implementation: DPP (Direct Pattern Play). It's very cool to be able to have 16 patterns assigned to the pads and a mode whereby touching each pad calls up a different pattern. It's very galling that there is only one such map available! Arghh! We're talking a handful of bytes per DPP map - WHY NOT HAVE 100 OR MORE DPP MAPS? Each DPP map could represent a song (containing up to 16 patterns), and you could have scores of such available simply by turning the Alpha dial (or sending MIDI program changes).

Hurrah for touch sensitive pads! HOWEVER, touch sensitive pads are not a substitute for being able to numerically edit the velocity of your drum hits. That's right, THERE IS NO WAY TO NUMERICALLY EDIT THE DRUM HIT VELOCITY. Want to tweak your snare just a little hotter (or cooler? - the only way to do it is to bang the pads with your fingers. This is hard to get just right with any subtlety. We are talking major step back here in the evolution of drum machines. Someone should lose their job for this one. All <I> can do is lower the rating on this review!

So far, so good.

Not used, no opinion.

The overall rating includes the price, and the DR-670 is fairly inexpensive, so that places the numerical rating higher than it would have been, considering the flaws noted above.

However, I personally am still waiting for the fabled "DRUM MACHINE DONE RIGHT" - and this one isn't quite it. It really shouldn't be as bad as "Waiting for Godot", but it is. Decades into the electronic music revolution and the newest gear is still just as likely to take steps backwards as forwards. Pity.

The presets sound great, from real sounds till electronic ones. Editing is a piece of cake, ya can hear instantly while tweaking.
The manual covers all very well.

It features a 20-voice polyphony. You can synchronize performances with a digital recorder or MIDI sequencer.I must admit I'm not into that stuff, I'm kinda MIDIot as someone once said.

As said, it covers lot's a kinda music styles. Electronic, realistic...From hardrock to ballades, drum and bass, to afro.
The bass sounds you can choose from are not all of them very realistic, but they are usuable, and some tweaking around makes a difference.

Since I only have it for 4 days (guess I'm the first one in Belgium, beside the importer)it's hard to judge, but I guess it's a piece of gear ya can thrust on, knowing Boss...

Didn't have to deal with them yet.

I must say that I bought it coz I had a credit at the music store, I had to buy a Boss product, so I went for the DR-670. I must say it's great and leaves me no nightrest! hah, It's very easy to use, I only master 35% of it till now and that's a good sign, meaning it has lot's a possibilities. It suits my purpose completely, I'm able to get nice drum sounds with a bass line, I can jam along, our drummer, who's kinda sceptic over these things was very enthusiastic. THe in-real time programming is a killer, using the sensitive keys, for sure, it will improve my guitar playing.
Ya can change several parameters for every "instrument", kick, snare, toms...ya can change sounds by changing the way ya hit them! And so on...

Relatively easy to program patterns and compose rythmn for songs. The presets sound good although they are only patterns and you most likely need to make your own for your songs. The manual is fine, technical enough yet not difficult to follow.

256 drum and percussion sounds derived from the dr-770 model. 20 Velocity-sensitive pads. Rhythm patterns include bass and drums (16 basses for bass lines). Start/Stop & fill with footswitch. Battery or AC powered. Stereo output, headphone jack, volume control, MIDI in/out and footswitch jack. Built in sequencer. AC power jack. Step or real time input.

Sounds to me are good for such a compact device. Drums sound very similiar to the dr-770 unit. While, its less versatile for pure drums sounds as in the dr-770 model, there are many more features for bass programing (16 instruments-fret line interface). The velocity pads react well as they do in the dr-770.

Roland/Boss tends to be very reliable and dependable.

All in all a good solid unit. I also have studio software but I prefer using this because its portable and has programming in real time as opposed to just step. What appealed to me about this unit was that is can be battery powered (some of the other drum machines need to be plugged into the wall.) And the fact thats its primarily made to be used for Bass and Drum programming. Both work well and fit their function. The fretboard layout and velocity sensitive pads are very good features for it to have. There are even some synth bass, drum and bass, and a few groove sounds thrown in. The unit would be a must have if it was more verstaile though, like having all the instruments from the dr-5, groove sounds and knobs like the dr. 202 groove, and a sequencer as big the dr-770. But then again it probally would cost a lot more like the Roland 505. This is a great box to have if you want to record live or just jam with it. Perfect for Punk (I play guitar, and use drum and bass tracks with the dr-670). The velocity sensitive pads are a godsend and very helpful in creating more life-like sounds; without the hassle of re-tweaking the velocity parameters. I was surprised to get the results I got without having to use a exteral controller. The sounds are good enough to fool a listener with very little tweaking on the mixer or software.