Re: Boss DR880?

["^|>^m" <will.it.go.round@gmail.com>]

If you are in the market for one I have one I'd part with.

I used to use it in my loopage.  I would slave it to my Echoplex.  I would program a whole song with bass and drum parts.  To start the song and determine the tempo I would create a loop that was 1 bar in length and the song would begin when the clocks were sent.  I could then play along and create loops in time with the beats.  It worked pretty well for what I was doing at the time.

I can see how it might be a convenient tool if you want to use it for a simple rhythmic backing to sync with a looper.  It's great for that.  You can loop to your heart's content over a nice steady beat.  If you are thinking of taking it to the stage with song based verse, chorus, bridge stuff I would think again and look at using a computer.  At one point the unit ran out of memory and I had to start deleting patterns.  I think you can dump/backup the memory onto a computer and load stuff in, but when you do that you are loading in everything, not individual songs or patterns. This is problematic if you are building up a big set list of songs and relying on this thing to save all of them.  If this is a tool more for practice and fun then maybe not a huge deal.

The kits sound fairly decent and you can mix and match your own kits, mess with the pitch and eq of each drum with some interesting results.  Ultimately though a computer allows greater control over the sound of the drums, and of course you can get a wider variety of kits on a computer. The computer interface is much easier to work with than the tiny LCD screen of the DR 880.  Now that I use Logic Pro I can also control my Echoplex from Logic so that I don't have to worry about hitting the record or multiply or next loop (or whatever) button at the wrong time and botching the whole song.  I can focus on playing now instead of pedal tap dancing.  I also found that stringing together each drum pattern for each part of the song was difficult and time consuming, and it was time consuming to edit parts of the song. Again, much easier with a computer.

The guitar/bass input, multi-effects, COSM amp models never sounded that great to me, so I never utilized that. 

So yeah, if you are still thinking about using one and are in the market for one, I would be willing to part with mine for below market price. Contact me off list whenever if you are ever interested.

Adam

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 5:52 PM, Jeff Shirkey <jcshirke@frontier.com> wrote:

Do any of you boys and girls use the Boss DR880 in your loopage? And, if so, how are you using it?

This inquiring mind wants to know and would appreciate any feedback pro or con.

Thank you,

Jeff