New BOSS SY-1000. The Hex-pickup is not dead. Long live the 13-pin plug!

Damn I'm actually excited for this. It will mean I need a 13-pin equipped guitar again, but it would be worth putting one on a guitar if it works well.
 
Love the Roland sounds and idea (had a VG-88, VG-99, GR-30)...Hates the 13-pin cable. IMHO, the weak link in the system...I wonder why they haven't moved on to more flexible cable (or wireless) setup to connect?
 
i like the colour of it

i like the idea of it

i don't like boss/roland sounds. never have. they always sound a bit wishy washy to me.
Ditto here, which is funny because their analog synths are absolute classics... but they could never seem to get the right sound even in the VG-99. But from what I've heard of the SY-1000 so far it sounds awesome, I'm definitely going to get one to try. Especially in the above video where he's got the really "rubber" sounding bass arpeggio.... the filtering sounds great... and I'm someone who designs synthesizers for a living so I'm pretty picky :)
 
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“Problem” with guitar synths is they sound like guitar synths....

not really the best traditional guitar tone, and certainly not the most cutting edge synthesizer sound design.... basically it sounds like a guitar synth, which kind of makes it a bit dated by nature....

can be fun and all, but I kind of don’t really see the point in making a guitar sound like other instruments when other instruments already do those sounds and do it better....

Why not let a guitar just be a guitar ?
 
IMO that's a pretty tired argument. We'd all be playing nylon string classical guitars with that kind of mentality. A lot of guitarists are still pushing forward with new sounds and capabilities of the instrument all the time. In a sense an electric guitar is already a kind of synthesizer.. you're not hearing the sounds of the string or moving air, it's a bunch of electrical signals created by the movement of the strings through a magnetic field, and then processed through a bunch of circuitry (or DSP, in the case of the Fractal products). There's already a ton of what is effectively synthesis going on with all the effects, harmonizers, reverbs, "shimmer" etc. This is just another form of that processing which operates on a per-string basis.
 
Why not let a guitar just be a guitar ?

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:)

.. Now ...call me an optimist if you must! ...but this new thing has gotta be better than my Roland GR20 ..'cause that thing was dated about one week after I bought it! ..which was about twelve years ago. :oops:

Time for an upgrade, methinks! :)
 
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IMO that's a pretty tired argument. We'd all be playing nylon string classical guitars with that kind of mentality. A lot of guitarists are still pushing forward with new sounds and capabilities of the instrument all the time. In a sense an electric guitar is already a kind of synthesizer.. you're not hearing the sounds of the string or moving air, it's a bunch of electrical signals created by the movement of the strings through a magnetic field, and then processed through a bunch of circuitry (or DSP, in the case of the Fractal products). There's already a ton of what is effectively synthesis going on with all the effects, harmonizers, reverbs, "shimmer" etc. This is just another form of that processing which operates on a per-string basis.

Okay.... let me relate this a different way....
I have all these Native Insturments bass and guitar instruments...(bought Komplete Ultimate and they were bundled)

anyways, these instruments for their Kontakt sampler have every possible note, trill, gliss, round robin sampling, all this complete key switching scripting to change fingerings etc. gigs and gigs of data.... we can say it’s as good as sampled bass and guitar parts get, right ?

well i can spend 45 minutes arranging a part with that, or I can grab my bass guitar, and play exactly what I wanted, in 30 seconds.

trying to reproduce all the simple stuff that has to do with a stringed instrument via a midi keyboard is horribly difficult.

likewise, stuff that is simple to do with a synth or piano keyboard can be very difficult using a stringed instrument fretboard....

To which, I have to ask if I want a synth sound, say a Moog bass, why not use on of my vst synth plugins or my Behringer Model D ? Works a lot better than trying to use my guitar for that, just as how I wouldn’t use a subtractive analog synth to play a guitar part.
 
You know what would be great? If Jam Origin would make a hardware version of Midi Guitar 2 that is also a VST player...

Or a VST version that I could run in someone else's VST player.

I abhor having to have a 13 pin setup and MG2 pitch to midi is IMO as good or better than the Roland stuff as far as tracking and accuracy... And I can get better sounds from whatever soft synths I want.
 
Okay.... let me relate this a different way....
I have all these Native Insturments bass and guitar instruments...(bought Komplete Ultimate and they were bundled)

anyways, these instruments for their Kontakt sampler have every possible note, trill, gliss, round robin sampling, all this complete key switching scripting to change fingerings etc. gigs and gigs of data.... we can say it’s as good as sampled bass and guitar parts get, right ?

well i can spend 45 minutes arranging a part with that, or I can grab my bass guitar, and play exactly what I wanted, in 30 seconds.

trying to reproduce all the simple stuff that has to do with a stringed instrument via a midi keyboard is horribly difficult.

likewise, stuff that is simple to do with a synth or piano keyboard can be very difficult using a stringed instrument fretboard....

To which, I have to ask if I want a synth sound, say a Moog bass, why not use on of my vst synth plugins or my Behringer Model D ? Works a lot better than trying to use my guitar for that, just as how I wouldn’t use a subtractive analog synth to play a guitar part.

I can't play a keyboard anywhere near at the level that I can play guitar. I can improvise pretty freely on a guitar but playing a keyboard I sound like a complete amateur. So being able to get a more diverse range of sounds from a guitar, which I can freely use to express my music ideas, is a good thing.

Also it doesn't have to sound like a Moog base, there's lots of other sound possibilities with the palette. I already make a lot of non-traditional sounds with my guitars using an ebow, volume pedal, and a crap-ton of effects processing from the Axe-FX III. The Roland stuff would just be another tool in that toolbox.

Some guitarists are fine with sticking to playing classical guitar, or blues licks on a strat... that's fine too, and I enjoy that sometimes. But from an artistic standpoint I like being able to access a wider range of sounds. I have all sorts of synths too.. a Moog Voyager, Buchla Easel, a ton of Eurorack modular (that's what I do for a living) and a crap ton of VST plugins. Those all have their place too. But ultimately my primary instrument will always be a guitar and that's what I can play most expressively without getting too intellectual about it.

"Just let a guitar be a guitar" just comes off as being really curmudgeonly. That argument has been made ad-infinitum by people in regards to guitar synths, fuzz pedals, delays, etc.
 
“Problem” with guitar synths is they sound like guitar synths....

not really the best traditional guitar tone, and certainly not the most cutting edge synthesizer sound design.... basically it sounds like a guitar synth, which kind of makes it a bit dated by nature....

can be fun and all, but I kind of don’t really see the point in making a guitar sound like other instruments when other instruments already do those sounds and do it better....

Why not let a guitar just be a guitar ?

Okay.... let me relate this a different way....
I have all these Native Insturments bass and guitar instruments...(bought Komplete Ultimate and they were bundled)

anyways, these instruments for their Kontakt sampler have every possible note, trill, gliss, round robin sampling, all this complete key switching scripting to change fingerings etc. gigs and gigs of data.... we can say it’s as good as sampled bass and guitar parts get, right ?

well i can spend 45 minutes arranging a part with that, or I can grab my bass guitar, and play exactly what I wanted, in 30 seconds.

trying to reproduce all the simple stuff that has to do with a stringed instrument via a midi keyboard is horribly difficult.

likewise, stuff that is simple to do with a synth or piano keyboard can be very difficult using a stringed instrument fretboard....

To which, I have to ask if I want a synth sound, say a Moog bass, why not use on of my vst synth plugins or my Behringer Model D ? Works a lot better than trying to use my guitar for that, just as how I wouldn’t use a subtractive analog synth to play a guitar part.


It fun.
 
I’m a bad keyboard player too, and that is where the draw of guitar synths has always been for me. I can play some basic chords and stuff, but I can’t move around nearly as quickly or with the same phrasing as I can on guitar.

so the hope always was using the guitar fretboard to play those parts, but it just doesn’t translate the same way. Totally different fingerings and positions etc.

What it usually comes off as is like a GM midi file of a known piece, opposed to the sound of a skilled pianist flying around the ivories.

ive has far more success with things like isomorphic keyboards and just putting the keyboard to a fixed scale, so then there are no bad notes. Makes it sound quite like I have some chops lol.

What would be cool is if there was a way to translate the guitar inputs into proper keyboard voicing, but obviously a strummed G on a guitar and a G on a piano keyboard aren’t the same; so you need to approach things totally different. Really need to have a clean technic, no vibrato etc, have to think about how the notes would be played on the piano, not the fretboard.

I feel it makes me feel/sound like an even worse keyboard player than I already am lol

Then on top of that there is the typically cliche sounds, which is more a reflection of Boss demos, than the instrument, but still.....

a “warm brass” pad with an exp pedal sweeping a low pass filter.....that is like the dictionary definition of generic “synth” sound, right ? Up there with “vibes”, “mallets”, “dx piano” and “clav” sounds. Kind of original in 1983,not so much for decades after.
 
Guitar synths are fun but do not expect them to be used for all keyboard synth parts, maybe pads/strings but the rest is all about keyboard fingering versus guitar fingering. I would also use them for synth bass lines.
 
There is no law saying synth sounds must be played like a keyboard would do it!

After all, consider that many synth sounds are other instrument sounds like violin, cello, flute, trumpet, sax, etc. Why is a keyboard better than a guitar for that?

Obviously, trying to nail a piano isn't going to be great... But I'd argue that single note based instruments might be better served by a guitar as the source.

Further consider that it can be very cool to play guitar "parts" with a piano "sound", or some other instruments.

And keyboardists often imitate guitarists when soloing...

I'm currently enjoying using a dual voice monophonic synth in the Axe Fx with both envelope and pedal controlled modifiers to get some very funky solo lines.
 
...can be fun and all, but I kind of don’t really see the point in making a guitar sound like other instruments when other instruments already do those sounds and do it better....

Why not let a guitar just be a guitar ?

Speaking for my own use case (as a ham 'n egger playing cover gigs in small pubs on one or two weekends per month), the GR-55 is far from perfect for either guitar or synth tones, but seeing the look on faces in the audience when they all of a sudden hear string parts on Grand Funk's Closer to Home, or piano parts on Fastball's The Way, or flute parts on Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill is priceless. (And on all of those songs I'm also playing electric or acoustic guitar parts. They're facsimiles of the real thing, but close enough.) We're a 4-piece with acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and me on electric guitar (and occasional guitar synth). Some of the stages we play on couldn't fit a 5th member on keys, and a 5-way split on the pay would make it more meager than it already is. I can get passable strings, keys, acoustic guitars, and even electric guitars out of the GR-55. I wouldn't want to play a whole gig with it, but then again I don't play a whole gig with any single guitar. (I bring 5, including the one I use with the GR-55.)
 
“Problem” with guitar synths is they sound like guitar synths....

not really the best traditional guitar tone, and certainly not the most cutting edge synthesizer sound design.... basically it sounds like a guitar synth, which kind of makes it a bit dated by nature....

can be fun and all, but I kind of don’t really see the point in making a guitar sound like other instruments when other instruments already do those sounds and do it better....

Why not let a guitar just be a guitar ?

Listen carefully to this, without using your eyes. Does it sound like a guitar synth?



Do not confuse MIDI Guitar with Guitar Modeling (Roland calls it V-Guitar). Modeling reshapes the original waveform that comes from the pickup, like the Axe-FX does, not to trigger a synth using MIDI conversion. The first Roland VG8 didn't even had guitar-to-midi capabilities. Modeling is not limited to AMPs and CABs; you can model other instruments, different pickups, or weird things - if you process the 6 strings separatelly
 
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