Yesterday I purchased the Roland GR-55 guitar synthesizer, after fretting (pun intended) about it for awhile. I've decided to keep a blog to document my experience of coming up to speed on the unit and hopefully getting the most out of it. As of this moment, I'm a bit conflicted; I may end up loving the thing, or I may find myself returning it before my 30-day return window closes.
I am not new to guitar synthesis - I own a GR-30, which is a previous generation guitar synthesizer released last century - 1997 to be specific. I gigged with the GR-30 and did some home studio recording, but eventually the unit was relegated to very sporadic use as I would occasionally use it as a midi controller for recording sequenced tracks. I abandoned using its on-board sounds all together.
I play a Godin LGX-SA (perhaps I'll post a picture soon) which has been a great guitar, and one of its "voices" is the 13-pin guitar synthesizer output. The fact that I regularly play this guitar synth-ready guitar factored highly into my decision to try the new GR-55.
First Impressions
After reading the manual and going through the divided pick-up set up process, my very first impression was "Hmm, this might not even be tracking as well as the 15-year-old GR-30!" I'm a pretty notey player so I quickly found myself burning through a few barrages of 16th notes to see what happened, and the initial impression was lukewarm. I was on a challenging patch - a saxophone with note-bending and attack/legato enabled. But I didn't want to jump to a conclusion too quickly; I knew I hadn't spent any time really tweaking the divided pick-up setup.
While fiddling around I stumbled upon a 12-string/Organ combination patch, and inadvertently was very inspired. In a matter of minutes I had a whole guitar rhythm part worked out and was suddenly very excited to hook the unit up to Sonar to record the idea before it seeped out of my brain. There I ran into my second stumbling block, where after installing the GR-55 USB driver I wasn't able to enable it in Sonar! Since I had the song idea in my head (isn't this the whole reason I play music? Not just to fiddle with technology, but to PLAY and COMPOSE) I side-stepped the issue and recorded the GR-55 through the analog outputs.
I updated the GR-55 SW version to 1.02; no problems there, and it kept all the configuration settings.
I'm really excited to dig more into the COSM features. The 12-string guitar was quite enjoyable.
My first pass through a smattering of the default patches resulted in some frustration. I wanted to quickly hear just a piano. Or just the COSM modeling. the default patches seem randomly strewn about the memory of the unit, with the three rough Lead/Rhythm/Other categories the only guide.
Configuring for the Godin LGX-SA
I found the following settings on the web at http://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php?topic=3965.0, and have applied them. They definitely are helping with the tracking performance, but I have spent almost no time whatsoever playing with the unit once I applied these changes. I tweaked the nuance settings to "4", but I'm not convinced I could really feel/hear a difference.
These are RMC's suggested settings for GR-55 with RMC Piezo pickups:
Richard McClish wrote>
"Thanks for your interest in RMC products.
Since you're using an RMC-equipped instrument, please find below a list of my current GK settings for your reference.
_____________________________________
GK SETTINGS as of 4/05/11
"PU"
PU type ; PIEZO R
Scale : 650 MM
PU phase : NORMAL
PU direction : NORMAL
S1/S2 position : NORMAL
MORM PU gain : 0 dB
PIEZO TONE LOW : 0
PIEZO TONE HIGH : +5
"DIS"
10.0 mm all strings
"SEN"
0 all strings
"VEL"
Velocity Dynamics : 6
Play-Feel : 4
Low-Velocity Cut : 5
"NUA"
Nuance Dynamics : 5
Nuance Trim : 5
"DOW"
Shift : 0
__________________________________
Plan of Attack
I need to organize my thoughts to make sure I'm effectively using my time with the unit. Here are few ideas I want to explore.
- Create a cello patch that is suitable for playing Bach Cello Suite. The default patch I tried last night had way to much attack.
- Create a series of patches to isolate specific features such as
- COSM guitars and amps
- tracking under various conditions (chromatic, legato, bend type, velocity, nuance)
- play-through of the guitar's voices (midi, modeling, standard pick-ups)
- use of volume pedal for mixing, wah, synth parameters
- various PCM synth voices and combinations not found or not satisfactory in the default patches
- Explore why on most patches (but not all!) the bottom two strings seem to be way too high in the mix.
- Compose a little song that layers 3 parts and perform it "live" using the looper
- Arrange the D minor composition for the GR-55, utilizing a variety of patches to make it really sonically interesting. Perhaps include a looper/solo section in the arrangement.
- Troubleshoot Audio USB driver
- Try out GR-55 as a midi controller using the USB driver and the standard midi cable. Especially see if it tracks low notes significantly better than the GR-30
- Work on the melody of the 12-string idea I recorded last night
- Just play with the dang thing!
Okay, I should stop typing and see if I can get a little GR-55 time in before the end of the day!
