I tried it out yesterday in SONAR 6.2, coming in directly over USB, and going out to my Roland VariOS w/the VC-1 D50 sound module emulator card inserted: it tracked perfectly, even going thru the computer FIRST!! Man, Dude, I swear to the Goddess: may She strike me dead if it isn't the truth: you would not BELIEVE the tracking on this thing!!!. I am probably going to get a better multi effects unit in the near future and will probably at least consider this one so this is nice to have a first hand account of it's quality. I am always having to tweak my sensitivity settings and just can't help but wonder if this new unit is similarly tricky? Of course a lot of my problem could be my lack of experience in getting a reliable setting between the guitar and the unit. I am using my GR20 experience as a basis for that question. I can't remember, does this unit connect via standard guitar cable and 13 pin? Or just one or the other? If it is 13 pin, I wonder about the quality of the tracking. You guys have got to try this thing out!! Sorry to sound like a poster girl for Roland, but I just can't be happier with this thing. You guys, both live artists and computer recording afficianados both, I can't recommend this unit highly enough. Oh, there have been FX units and modeling units here and there that promise this and that, but IMHO, I have never ever heard one actually deliver the way this unit does.Īnd that's without even going into the possible synth sounds, the D-Beam (a controller that lets you activate a parameter with a wave of the hand or by moving the guitar neck over it) and the Ribbon controller. I can not only model any rig in the world, but also a few from several neighboring paralell universes- vintage rigs costing tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and do so accurately, confident that the sound I'm getting is real. Some folks think I spent a lot of money on this rig, and I tell them that people spend tens of thousands of dollars on speaker cabs and ampheads to get the kind of sounds that are programmed into this thing, and then, they are locked into one single rig. THIS UNIT IS PERFECT!! The models, the sounds, I can't even begin to describe, but they are so real and so accuarate it's almost scary. Take this to heart: it isn't the artificial silence of a noise gate (although the unit, of course, has multiple noise gates should you require them) so there's no unnatural-sounding cutoff when the gate kicks in: the unit is naturally silent like this. A mistaken touch of the wrong pedal on stage, and the audience would wince at the howls and hums and feedback that would be produced. I once owned the unit's earlier evolutionary ancestor, the VG-88, and there was no end to the howls, hums, and horrid noises that would be produced when you cranked up the distortion enough to allow the sort of effortless hammering and pulloffs that I do in many of my tunes. NO amp noise, NO ground hum, no distortion howl that one tends to get with pedals, particularly multi-FX pedals, in general, and THE UNIT IS COMPLETELY SILENT WHEN YOU AREN'T PLAYING. The (mixing keyboard, roland KC-350) amp is at about 60% volume, but I'm not playing, and, guess what: I can't HEAR A BLOODY THING. I'm sure many of you other guitarists want to know, was it worth the wait and the rather steep price tag?ĭrum roll please: the answer is an unequivocal YYEESSSS!!!Ĭase in point: as I sit here and type this, the unit is ON and the distortion is cranked.
Now I'm broke, especially after I had to pay top dollar for the MIDI foot pedal so I could use the manual Wah and other CC functions, which IMHO should have come with the thing, considering how steep the price was.īUT. 28, and I had to scramble to get the $$, quite a bit of which I had spent back in June when they missed the 2nd release date. They promised that I would have it in my hot little hands by May and May came and then they promised June, then early July, therefore I didn't believe them when they promised Sept. Roland VG-99 It's here!! First Impressions!!Īfter a loooonnnggg wait for me, I've been waiting on this thing since the dealers returned from the last NAMM show and put it up on their websites (I think it was in February- Roland US has had it up on their site since the first of the year), anyway, I've had my name in the bucket at Guitar Center Nashville since early March, and I struggled, but I was able to set aside the rather steep $$ they were asking for it.