Boss GM-800 and GK-5

Working on putting this even more epic guitar synth rig together now. Still waiting on order a couple TRS splitter cables and a MIDI thru splitter box. Features the US-20 mounted on top of the GKC-AD, LVX and Mood MKII in the Key Largo FX loop, and GM-800 thumb drive output converted to a SD card mounted on the side for easier access. Full rig rundown coming soon.


rs=w:1440,h:1440
 
Pickup install instructions suck. The provided spacer/shims are either too low (well beneath 1mm) or too high. I’m assuming you use double sided tape to lock in the spacer in on the guitar, then double sided tape to mount the pickup to spacer. Wondering if closer to 2mm is fine.
 
Made it through the first 30 presets.

Sound quality is very good. Sharp and crisp. I dug the Jazz Trio, Trance, and acoustic piano presets.

The volume is way too low, had to crank my monitors pretty high as well as the volume on the unit. I def need to dial in the output on the pickup, and turn up the output on the lower strings. The high strings trigger easily, the lower strings need a little firmer picking to register. Makes sense because the pickup sits about 1mm lower on the low strings than the high strings. There def will be a learning curve on how to play each preset to make them sound the most natural to instrument in question. On a couple I found finger picking made it sound less guitar’y and more natural.

Promising so far.
 
Whizzinby said:
Made it through the first 30 presets.

Sound quality is very good. Sharp and crisp. I dug the Jazz Trio, Trance, and acoustic piano presets.

The volume is way too low, had to crank my monitors pretty high as well as the volume on the unit. I def need to dial in the output on the pickup, and turn up the output on the lower strings. The high strings trigger easily, the lower strings need a little firmer picking to register. Makes sense because the pickup sits about 1mm lower on the low strings than the high strings. There def will be a learning curve on how to play each preset to make them sound the most natural to instrument in question. On a couple I found finger picking made it sound less guitar’y and more natural.

Promising so far.
Click to expand...

Each part 1 through 4 has a volume that goes from 1 to 127, also if you hit menu and scene edit and master, there's a master volume for the whole scene that can be turned up from 100 to 127, also there is another parameter in there somewhere I forget right now called "pedal pos". I'm assuming pedal position, and some were pretty low and once brought up was louder. So yeah there's a few ways to make things louder when saving scenes.
 
My GM-800 arrives Thursday. No firm date on the GK-5, so I'm going to try using it with Jam Origin's MIDI Guitar through my iPad. I'm thinking it should work with the iPad connected to my Helix and the Helix Out/Thru connected to the GM-800.
 
DanRad said:
My GM-800 arrives Thursday. No firm date on the GK-5, so I'm going to try using it with Jam Origin's MIDI Guitar through my iPad. I'm thinking it should work with the iPad connected to my Helix and the Helix Out/Thru connected to the GM-800.
Click to expand...
Finally giving JO the boot!
 
Powered through the rest of the presets. I’m pretty impressed with the piano stuff. Most of the synth based presets are over the top. I’ll need to experiment building my own synth presets. Also not a lot of strings based presets, need to see what I can build there as well.

I’d say 7-8 of the factory presets I’d come back to.

The lack of a power button kind of sucks.
 
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