When the first arranger came out that had drums good enough for me to eliminate the external drum machine, I was one happy camper. It used to be an essential component. As I recall the Technics PSR2000 was the one that finally had acceptable drum sounds. Before that I used a procession of drum machines, including several Yamahas and a couple of Alesis. However, all I did was trigger the stop and start from the keyboard and use patterns I created in the drum machine. They were timed to work with bass patterns and guitar and/or piano strums from the keyboard. I basically created styles in which there were no drums. By doing it this way it was quite easy to keep the number of styles down to a manageable number because just a few bass patterns work with a wide variety of drum beats.
What the arranger offered was fills, breaks intros and endings. When the external drums because expendable,I never looked back. The less gear to carry around, the better.
I suppose it could still be done the same way: take existing styles, eliminate the drums and midi to the drum machine.
Too much work and bother for questionable benefit, IMHO.
DonM

Do you know how to record on track 2 of the psr-550 and play it back with track 1 to make a complete song.cus when i record on track one it works and in rehersal for track 2 track 1 plays while i pratice for 2 and track 1 plays as i play but when i save track 2 it does show up on the track 2 button and it wont play with track 1 can you help me please?

Just make sure you set that track to record. Can't remember the exact steps off hand, but you use the same method that you used for recording track one. Make sure you select track two, and set it to record. If you don't set that track to record all you're doing is playing along with track one. I've actually made this mistake a few times in the past. I got so ahead of myself when recording something and went through the entire piece just to find out I forgot to set the current track to record.

Squeak

I have a Boss DR-3, I love the drum sounds, very natural compared to both my P-250 and GEM CD2. I use it in my studio, and live on gigs. I use MIDI IN on the drum machine to trigger both drum and bass sounds. This works great!

Doc-Z

Hey Doc-Z, I'm sure as you can see this was an old post I brought up a while back. I too own the Boss DR-3. It's a great drum machine. Boss did a good job with this unit. I absolutely love the kits on this machine. My only dislike on the unit is I would have preferred longer samples with the open hi hat. The preset hi hats aren't bad, but I think the samples should have been just a tad longer. I use my Boss DR-3 every day. Not just with my keyboard, but also with my guitar as well. I also have a Zoom MRT-3 drum machine. Not completely up to par with the Boss, but a great drum machine for the price.

Squeak