I was talking to Roland Scandinavia yesterday and they said products will ship to resellers by mid April, and I guess that means world wide. I signed up to pre order a GR-55 and the man said I was not very high on his list

Roland offers the GR-55 PDF manual at their main site. Delicious reading to drool over...

Thanks!

My local will have a GR-55 in store next week, and I hope to try it with my friend's MIDI equipped Polycarb. Looks almost "too good to be true".

Cheers,
Andy

You lucky aussie! We're damned to wait over here...

I'm about to order my first Stick with a MIDI interface ever. I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys about how well this unit works, as I think it will be the sound engine/MIDI output device I end up using.

Whoa, Greg getting into the whole midi synth&fx universe could be quite amazing! His sonic expeditions and space improv will have another texture/dimension to explore.

Oh, and as one of biggest W.O.T.M fans, I found the effects processing was very organic and flowing, and most importantly integrated into the soul of the music. It feels like his mind is integrated into the effects and then equally in tune to the actual Stick.
Maybe he has a secret "direct in jack" hidden inside his brain in which the stick cable output would plug in, and then a direct out to the effects/universe. And a feedback loop somewhere in there haha. Of course if he did have these alien features then it may well be top secret....

OK: Oceans take on MIDI Stick in a nutshell:

In order to integrate and blend the synth tones with the stick sounds:
It can be nice to post process the MIDI synth with the same fx your clean stick is going through. Even having the same reverb at the end of both signal paths really helps bring the sounds together. With delay on both MIDI and clean stick it can actually help cover up any latency. Its a weird type of illusion but appears to work. One abstract thing I like to do is put the same filter on both MIDI and clean stick, usually where it cuts the highs out. That also makes the sound more together and latency is covered up a bit too.

I still think the best route is still a GI-20 (or similar unit which can trigger ext synths "well!"). The most surprising thing I have found is that certain ext synths track way better than others! My Novation k-station tracks super great, the MS-2000 is a smidgen slower but still good. And finally, the softsynths on my labtop are blazing fast! Very weird since it should "theoretically" have more latency. There is a latancy compensation/buffer that is key there. Oh, and the softsynths have WAY less glitches and mistriggers. you can play pianos or flutes and not have that infamous "glarble glitchy thing happen.

Anyhow, there is alot to think about in the MIDI world. With the roland VG fx units(perfect tracking from what I hear), to the types of synth you desire. And then there are all these sick sequencers/arppegiators, quantizing after the fact, and so much other stuff.

My new SG-12 is arriving tomorrow, with a GK3 pickup on the melody side. But I won't have any MIDI until the GR-55 arrives later by April/May. I've had a MIDI guitar since the late eighties, the pioneering Casio MG510. Due to MIDI latency I only used soft attack type sounds layered behind the natural guitar string sound (playing darkish goth stuff in the Sisters of Mercy school). Maybe I'll take a different approach with the faster triggering GR-55 (direct built-in sounds, not using MIDI). I think I will be using MIDI only for feeding external arpeggiators, because in that case the latency doesn't count as the arpeggio output is fetching its timing from the slaving host application on the laptop, which is following my looper, which is following the tempo I'm playing. A very simple and easy to play setup; the whole shebang just starts following what I play after I have snagged the first loop of the STick output.

There is one cool thing I forget that seems to be an untapped frontier. MIDI stick into a nice vocoder. And no, you don't "have to " do the robot sci fi stuff or the unholy autotune. I do have a softspot for Kraftwerk style vocoders though.
When I have tried this I would make basically make sound fx with my voice or beatbox/scatting or even atonal singing, not worrying about vocal pitch, as the notes are chosen by your fretboard haha. And there is no latency this way because the attack is determined at the precise time you sing a note/sfx.

I realize the vocoder isnt really true synthesis, but with enough knobs and controlls it seems to me pretty darn synthesque.

It can get pretty goofy, especially when you are vocoding in headphones and your bandmate only hears your insanley off key voice and weird mouth/facial expressions! Quite hilarious. And then me: "but its perfectly in tune in my headphones, haha"

Dave - thanks for posting this link!
Ruppert truly creates beautiful sounds - so organic. Actually took my mind completely off the Roland synth.

Wouldn't it be nice if Boss, Line 6 & co. had someone this clever demoing their gear instead of the usual NAMM show tragics playing presets with a drum machine?

Cheers,
Andy

Ok I bought a gr 55 and returned it 2 days later.

I just wasn't happy with the roland sounds. What I was hoping for, was the tracking of the vg-99 (wonderful) with more warm synth sounds, i was disappointed.

To me the synth sounds were cold and artificial. And the tracking was no better than my old gr-33. I also like the gr 300 sounds on the vg 99 better than the ones on the 55.

So I will stick to my gi-20 and try to find some new synth modules.

It just wasn't right for me, Others may find it wonderful but I was disappointed.

there were a couple of cool sounds a nice strings and a good flute patch, but it wasn't worth the money to me.

Brett

Hi Brett,
When I saw your post I was surprised that you didn't like it so I thought that I would check
out some YouTube videos to see what other people were saying and to my next surprise
it appears that Roland is trying to combine the VG-99 with the GR-55; guitar modeling and guitar synthesizer in one. Here is an example of something you might appreciate
but would not necessarily associate with a guitar synthesizer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvM8HAcy ... ature=fvwp

This guy does a pretty good cover of PM and I am assuming that the backing track
has been downloaded into the GR-55. Another cool feature...

Admittedly though if you listen to the whole thing the Synth piano sound
is pretty lame but I don't see that as a fault of the GR-55.

I don't have a GR-55 but I do have a VG-99 and using that as a GI-20 to get the
synth sounds does not work very well, unfortunately. So that Roland would
solve the problem by combining the technologies is "surprising" but possibly
they have made a very useful musical tool; is the jury still out?
jRj