Hi all,

I'm having trouble with my Gk3-equipped (melody side) Stick running to the Roland GR-55. The stick is only a couple of months old, the correct operation of the GK-3 and the Stick setup have been verified by Emmett himself, but the MIDI tracking is still terrible. I can play a riff using only the magnetic pickup / COSM modeling and it sounds fine, but if I play the same riff using only PCM sounds, it's unrecognisable. Missed notes, ghost notes, false semitone rolls, etc.. (Note: not just an open-string damping problem)

Now I've put the GR-55 in Bass mode so I could configure the scale length correctly (having same problems in Guitar mode though), have configured the bridge-pickup distances, and the channel sensitivities are set up so that hard-tapped notes reach about 80% on the volume scale (as Roland recommends).

Does anybody have experience setting up the GR-55 for Stick use? There's some 'velocity' / 'nuance' settings in there, but I haven't been able to find a setup that makes it playable. Alternatively, do I just have a dud GR-55?

Help!
xalpboy

Hi xalpboy,

I had sort of the same problem when I first started using the pcm sounds from the gr55 (especially the piano sounds).
When you change the 'play feel' setting to a lower value (1,2,3) it should improve dramatically. Also, setting the gr55 to 'chromatic' is needed for certain pcm sounds for them to sound convincing, i.e. bends and slides are not normal for piano sounds, so patches using these should have been set to 'chromatic')

A few tips just in case :
- Google on 'floorboard gr55' and you'll find an amazing editor for the gr55, it runs on mac, pc, linux
- Join the forum on www.vguitarforums.com. Lots of tip & tricks and patches. Great forum, very usefull info there (also for the other roland vguitar products like the vg series).

Cheers,
Bas.

Thanks Bas. I hadn't spotted the 'chromatic' setting before, it certainly does help with pretty much all PCM sounds. The lower 'play feel' setting is preferable also. Unfortunately even with these the triggering is still not reliable enough for me to use.

Now that I've got my cabling set up, I've also noticed that the GK-3 switch doesn't work as expected. With the main switch set to "GK" I get only PCM sounds & modeling, with it set to "mix" I get these as well as the normal pickup, but with the switch at "guitar" I still get both the magnetic pickup and the GK-3 signal coming through; I'd expected the GK-3 signal to be cut. Is this normal, or an I missing something?

xalpboy

I don't know, i dont use the switch yet, i'm not sure if it can be used as a controller in assigns. If that's possible, maybe parch or system settings could have it work differently.
It can be done with the s1 and s2 switches and volume knob on the gk.

Cheers,
Bas


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I also noticed that. But I never looked into it for a solutions because I decided to not use the GK switch but rather plug the electro magnetical stick pickups directly into the mixer/amp as I do with the GR-55's audio outputs and other external MIDI synths.