Re: $280 Midi Guitar Coming from Fender

[Dustbunnies <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 9:24 AM +0000 11/8/10, andy butler wrote:
>
>I have experimented with pitch bend range, but not with a whammy,
>just with bends and with fretless bass.
>It seemed to work as expected.

I can pretty much confirm Andy's results.  I've got a cheap lap steel 
onto which I've mounted a GK-3 (yes, I am actually crazy enough to 
put a GK pickup on a lap steel).  I've been using it with the VG-99, 
which sounds really really (no, really!) good.  But after reading 
this thread a few minutes ago, I went downstairs and plugged it into 
my GR-20 just to test it out on a piece of MIDI-driven gear.

Some of the patches sound beautiful, and track slides and bends with 
no problem.  Others have varying degrees of difficulty.  Some -- like 
several of the piano-ish patches -- are impossible, but you'd expect 
that (one doesn't normally pitch-bend piano).  I was able to test 
full octave "dive bombs" using the slide, though, and some patches 
held up just fine.  I would occasionally get some glitching, but that 
was almost exclusively due to the fact that the lap steel is tuned 
several semi-tones off from standard EADGBE tuning, which is the 
tuning the GR-20 expects to see.

This leads me to believe that the problem is not in the architecture 
itself but in the programming on the individual patches.  I wish I 
could explore further to find exactly which parameters most affect 
this.  However, the GR-20 is essentially a "preset" box with a lot of 
patches but limited tweak-ability (mostly only basic envelope and 
filter settings).

Still, the very fact that some patches respond very well points to 
the possibility that the Roland boxes should handle whammy bar with 
little problem if programmed properly.  As always, however, YMMV.

        --m.
-- 
_____
"I want to keep you alive so there is always the possibility of 
murder... later"