Hey all - just heard from CE that the Roland GK3 MIDI pickups were no longer available for instruments. Anyone else hear this? Is it a temporary supply issue or is it being replaced? Thanks.

No idea but my guess as it's just another in a long sad story of badly disrupted supply chains. Sweetwater Sound still shows it as an active item but out of stock.

well..no PASV-4..no MIDI..no railboard pickup

doesn't look good..

... no Wenge

I called and talked to the powers that be... they are looking @ Fishman and a few other options.

It will be interesting to see if hexaphonic pickups for MIDI triggering will even be necessary in the near future - there's already software that can do polyphonic pitch detection with standard pickup output (Jam Origin), and there seems to be a lot of current developments in audio processing with machine learning based technology.

My understanding is that they're shipping 10-string Railboards with the new EMG R-block. At least that's my hope (waiting for mine... ).



Yeah - I was just watching a video demo of the new Boss guitar MIDI pedal - the SY-1. Pretty amazing triggering capabilities straight off the pickups for a ~$200 pedal. Not sure if it would work with a Stick though, assuming limitations in the range of tones that the circuitry may detect.

i got the sy-1-very nice but no replacement for MIDI like the GR-55

Would love to get your evaluation of that pedal from a Stickist's perspective. Is it responsive to the entire tonal range of the Stick? How is the latency?

My thinking was that the Boss SY-1's limitation is that you're stuck with the patches that are in-the-box (and why the GR-55 would be superior). It would seem that if the technology is good enough, it could be turned into simply MIDI interface for triggering a synth - hardware or software/VST.

I put the sy-300 on melody side and sy-1 on bass side
The latency is zero. They are both designed for guitar and bass so it works well on the stick.
Yes. The story-1 is limited compared to sy-300 but still has 121 sounds.
The gr-55 is completely different technology-it can make “real instruments” sounds like saxophone, harmonica, piano etc..(more than 800) and not just synth sounds.