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Looper's Delight
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> On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 8:31 PM, mark francombe <mark@markfrancombe.com> > wrote: >> get playing with the f***ing >> guitar synth... some of us wanna know what you think... OK? > Ok, the short answer is I think it is very good. Great value for its price. Here's the long story. It offers four simultaneous sounds: (1) Your guitar's magnetic PU, "Normal Sound", that can be cabled through the GK PU, (2) the modeling sound (Cosm) and two synth tones. There is one set of optional effects to slap over the two synth tones and another set of more "global" effects (reverb, delay etc) that affects everything, if used. You can control parameters by a control button/pad and an expression pedal. A third control option is pressing the expression pedal hard toe down (like enabling a wha pedal). It seems like most parameters can be controlled; so far I tried to set up the delay at maximum delay time (3400 ms or one whole note) and binding its on/off state to the control pad and delay feedback to the expression pedal (set to range zero to full feedback), worked well for simple delay live looping. Another interesting thing, I haven't tried out yet, is that you can connect it to a laptop by USB and pipe the audio through the lappy for further processing etc. On a Mac there is a way to set up an "aggregate device" so you can use two audio interfaced and this means the GR-55 can be set as the audio input for an application while the usual interface is used as the output. I'm not sure about how it sounds yet, since the best listening I have access to where I am now is my in-ear headphones. But as I said, tweaking options are massive! All amp/cab sims have parameters for gain, bass, mid, treble and presence. The cosm sounds all sound a bit lamish but I think they can be useful if layered behind the real PU sound. Synth sounds are good. My feeling though is that I get a better clean PU sound with plugins on my laptop than with the GR-55, but that is personal taste and also biased by the fact that I use the GR-55 with a Stick and not with a guitar. There are a lot of tempo synced effects that I have fully not tried out yet, so you can MIDI slave sync the GR-55 from a looper and overdub "rhythmic pads" and such as audio into the looper. Oh, almost forgot... a bank has three sounds that are instantly accessible by just one kick against a pedal. Then you may also scroll the program list upwards or downwards by the two hand buttons on the GK PU. Stuff I have not checked out yet is the Phrase Looper and the USB audio file player. You may read up on them in the PDF manual that can be downloaded from Roland. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se www.perboysen.com www.looproom.com internet music hub