The editor sucks balls though, unless I'm missing something major.
Of course you're not missing anything. Any editing, regardless whether it's on the device, through the Mac/PC editor or through the mobile editors (which are an offense towards human intelligence, no less) is as bad as it possibly gets.
Yeah, most operations within a single patch are ok-ish using the desktop editor, but as you say, moving patches and such is plain horrorshow.
And it's not only that, sometimes the editor doesn't properly update all parameters (especially true for assignments, and I'm using all possible 16 slots in pretty much all patches). So you're sitting there, staring at the assigments, thinking "didn't I just assign CC 87 to the mid control of that amp?" And obviously, I did (checking in the hardware proves that), just that it's not reflected (or updated in a remotely timely manner) in the editor. Sometimes I even need to restart the editor to see the actual state. And all that at crawling speed, just because the stupid idiots decided to use "vanilla" MIDI for device communication (as in it not being faster through USB than it would be using a DIN MIDI cable) - in 2018 or so. WTF?
Along these lines, should anyone be interested in a GT, my most important advices would be:
- Check what the unit can do, especially in terms of controls. It's a whole friggin' lot, but utilizing all of it IMO wouldn't be too clever because it's too easy to lose track.
- Clearly define the things you need to operate the unit. Layout of switches and their functions, assignments of whatever it might be, etc.
- In case you're using the global block (aka "Stompbox") functionality, make absolutely sure to remember which slots you're using (there's 10 per each block and IMO it's clever to use no more than 2-3 per block, reserving the rest for block preset copying - or rather not use them at all, because this is where it really gets confusing).
- When done with these decisions, create just 2-3 basic patches that you will from now on use as a reference for any further patches. Creating new patches from an "empty" default preset is defenitely the most time consuming thing you can run into, simply because editing is so horrible.
- Try to get along with just a handful of patches for a start. Because it's very likely that you will find some things you could optimize. And you will very likely want to have these optimized things to be reflected in all patches, so it's clever to not have too many of them until that point. You possibly even want to rinse and repeat. This is where I'm currently at. I am right now revising my "main patch structure" for the 2nd time. I'll change some switch assigments again, use a slightly different routing and use a different delay as my global delay. I will do this on my 2 "master" patches and then recreate all other individual patches again by "save as". Still a lot faster than changing these things on those individual patches.
Once done with all that, the unit is sort of easy to operate. In my case, I basically just alter FX blocks 3 and 4, the Master Delay and on 1-2 patches the Master Reverb. Pretty much anything else will stay identical all throughout.
Fwiw, having said all that, it's a shame how all this went. I still own my GT-10 and onboard editing is such a breeze, really. The plain and simple reason being that there's a dedicated switch for each block. Click once to select (bringing up the 4 most relevant parameters above the encoders), any further clicks will toggle between on/off. Excellent.
I still remember how I was interested in the GT-100 for my musical theatre jobs that I had plenty of back then and could even get a spnsored production unit for one season (could've bought it for cheap after that season). After just two rehearsals I gave it back and went on with the good old GT-10. The 100 was just too much of a shock in terms of usability.
And to anyone saying that having individual block switches would be impossible with the raised amount of blocks: No, it wouldn't. It's still less than 30 blocks overall (plus some utility blocks, such as the dividers, but you really don't need quick access to them). So just give me a little 4x8 switching panel with small knobs, ideally color coded ones, possibly sorted by function. Would perhaps cost 20 extra bucks to make, but it'd be worth 10 times that for any user.
