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Looper's Delight
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Richard, Not sure how many other people will post on this, and you will probably get a variety of opinions on this topic, so . . . I'll begin unless someone else has. (Side note: You may want to also check out commentary on the looper portion of the GNX3 over on the Digitech site. They have a discussion board for the GNX3). I owned a GNX3 for a few weeks early this summer (then returned it). I also used to own 2 Jam Man rack units, so I can give you some background on how the GNX3 looper compares to the old Jam Man unit . . . The Jam Man looper in the GNX3 is actually quite a different looper than the old Jam Man unit. It is actually set up to work more like an Electrix Repeater than the old Jam Man. It allows you to record 8 tracks per loop, and it stores/records your loops. It is also supposed to be a stereo looper (which it mostly is, unless you loop external sources, then it sometimes isn't), which also makes it quite different than the old Jam Man, which was mono. And, you are not limited to 32 secs of looping time like on the old Jam Man, looping times are flexible based on the size of the SmartMedia card on which you use to record your loops. All these features make it more like the Repeater than the Jam Man, although the Repeater only has 4 tracks per loop (not 8 like on the GNX3). However, the GNX3 does not allow you to do many of the other things that the Repeater does (pitch shift, reverse, switchable effects loop), although the sound quality is comparable to that of the Repeater (both of which have better sound quality bit-wise than the old Jam Man units did). Also, the old Jam Man unit allowed you to do quite seamless live "on the fly" real-time looping--you just clicked on the record switch, and off you went. However, the new GNX3 Jam Man function does not function very effectively as a live looper, in my opinion, because you can't actually do this on the GNX3. You have to set up a tempo time before recording the loop, and then if you don't use quanitize and the count-in function on the GNX3 looper, your loops will often times show up with a very noticable "skipping sound" on the loop (like when a cd skips). If you're timing is absolutely precise, and the material you are playing into the loop is in fact exactly at the tempo you set ahead of time, you will not always get the skip--but there were times I did all that correctly with out count in or quantize set, and still got the skip anyway. So, you will have to use that count-in clock everytime you loop if you want to avoid the skip. Which, basically, makes it kind of suck as a live "on the fly" looper because you can't just "loop and go" with reliably seamless results like you could on the old Jam Man, where this was never a problem. This is why I returned it, because I was hoping it would be a bona-fide Jam Man looper (like the old ones) but with some new features. The lack of true live "on the fly looping" was a problem for me, since I do ambient music half the time, and there is no set tempo in my music, so the quantize/count-in thing reaked havoc on my loops--lots of that skipping sound. So, the long and the short of it is--the Jam Man in the GNX3 is not a bona-fide Jam Man like the original unit. Don't know about if it's quieter or not. There are a few other people here that have used it too, so maybe than can fill in some more details on it in re: your specific questions. Greg--any comments? Hope this info helps you. David Durian >>Does anyone here use the Digitech gnx3? It's supposed to have a JamMan II >>built in to it. Does anyone know if this an honest-to-goodness Lexicon >>JamMan? Is it as quiet as the rack JamMan? >>Richard _________________________________________________________________ Need more e-mail storage? Get 10MB with Hotmail Extra Storage. http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es