Synth Site |  Roland | GR-33 |
GR-33 At a Glance |
|
Released: 2000
| Specifications
User rating: 4.0/5 | Read reviews (12) Roland News(756) Streaming Video (123) |
|
Jason Champion writes: |
It's a guitar synthesizer - no keys. This thing is ridiculously easy to use if you give the manual a once-over. If you don't, you're going to have a hard time getting it to sound right. Unfortunately it is made of plastic. It is the most solid-looking plastic I have ever seen, but still plastic. Roland should have known better than to make something that would get stepped on a lot out of plastic. It has a decent selection of 384 internal voices, but to get the most power out of it you should connect it to an external synthesizer. It can transmit each guitar string on a different channel for excellent multi-timbral combinations. Less-than-perfect technique really shows on this thing when you get blips and squawks from fingers brushing against adjacent strings. Owning one of these will force you to clean up your technique, but you'll be glad that you did - and you won't be stuck with that same old guitar sound. Comments About the Sounds: Almost all of the sounds are usable/presentable, but the strings, pads, and organs really shine. Gives you the ability to use synth sounds only, guitar sounds only, or blend the two. The Brass sounds are decent, but nowhere near as good as the Yamaha VL70M. The guitar sound can be routed to an external unit for processing and then back to the outputs. You can blend together combinations of two sounds for a patch and the wah, arpeggio, hold, and pitch shift functions can be linked to pedals for great expressive control. Being a newer unit, the sounds are very clean and noise-free. However, most of the |
Links for the Roland GR-33
Try the Roland links page for more..
|
The Avila Brothers talk about their journey to the recent Super Bowl Halftime Show
Older Music Machines & the People Who Still Use Them