Boss GT 1000 question

[dave8456]

hi there,
thinking of buying a Boss GT 1000
question....
the patches that you can buy e.g

saw these.....
juca nery guitar patches ( premium pack )
lots of sounds , srv, gary moore etc etc.

can you load them all into the unit ?

and assign them to banks etc
or are there only a certain amount you can load at a time ?

and can you preview them before you load them in ?

Im an oldie ( 68 years old ) but I think i can manage my way around the unit.......

many thank

 

[mrchevy]

Don't have the gt1000 but had the gt 10 and gt100, along with other boss products. You can load patches into it via the boss tone studio editor, then try them out and organize them how you want. I personally would never pay for patches, theres just to many sources for free ones and, they rarely sound the same as the demo due to so many variables.

 

[Sascha Franck]

Late reply, but: Are you new to this? In that case I'd recommend getting something else.
The GT-1000 requires quite some fooling around to edit patches and there's way easier to handle units.
I just bought one - but a) for very specific reasons and b) I'm quite experienced with modeling in general and the Boss way specifically.

 

[JCW308]

Late reply, but: Are you new to this? In that case I'd recommend getting something else.
The GT-1000 requires quite some fooling around to edit patches and there's way easier to handle units.
I just bought one - but a) for very specific reasons and b) I'm quite experienced with modeling in general and the Boss way specifically.

GT-1000 is pretty simple to use for anyone. You can find easier units like the Headrush, but you will sacrifice sound quality.

If you want a decent modeler with a GREAT user interface as well as a built-in expression pedal, check out the new Hotone Ampero II.

 

[Sascha Franck]

GT-1000 is pretty simple to use for anyone.

I beg to disagree. And I'm saying that as someone very familiar with their GT devices. It's possibly easy for someone with experience, for newbies, it's extremely tough. Just watch the main FB group - gazillions of easy questions that wouldn't even show up if it was another device.

 

[JCW308]

I beg to disagree. And I'm saying that as someone very familiar with their GT devices. It's possibly easy for someone with experience, for newbies, it's extremely tough. Just watch the main FB group - gazillions of easy questions that wouldn't even show up if it was another device.

Honestly you'd have to have less than half a brain and be wearing adult diapers to say the GT-1000 is hard to use. I mean get a grip.

 

[Sascha Franck]

Honestly you'd have to have less than half a brain and be wearing adult diapers to say the GT-1000 is hard to use. I mean get a grip.

Dude, I have more of a grip than you might be able to realize. Feel free to read my dedicated GT-1000 thread.

 

[Frodebro]

I have owned a GT1000 since 2016 or so. Although I had no problem navigating around it, I will agree that it is not the most intuitive unit out there for people just dipping their toes into the modeling world.

 

[paisleywookiee]

The GT1000 isn’t at all intuitive, and the UI is worse than Fractal’s.

 

[Sascha Franck]

The GT1000 isn’t at all intuitive, and the UI is worse than Fractal’s.

IMO the thing is, it's not necessarily complicated in case you just stick with a basic layout, but it's incredibly slow to use. If you, for whatever reasons (and there might be quite some) need to edit a block early in the signal chain and another one close to the end sort of simultaneously, you're in for a seizure. I've never been in such a scrolling horrorshow.
And it's only getting worse once you need to deal with assignments. No improvement there in over one decade - tough to believe.
I'd be able to forgive them some of that in case the editors were decent. But they're not. Especially the mobile editor is an ugly piece of utter bullshit, and no, there's no other words for it, it's just wrong in any aspect.

All that is a shame, because once in use, the device is quite decent.

 

[JCW308]

The GT1000 isn’t at all intuitive, and the UI is worse than Fractal’s.

It's dead simple really.

 

[Sascha Franck]

It's dead simple really.

The main UI is.
But it's still horribly slow, the parameter order is dead wrong and there's tons of options wasted (such as making good use of the switch function of the encoders, higher value increments have to be considered a joke).

Anything advanced isn't simple anymore. The assignment functionalities are plain horror. You have 3 pages (control function, manual function and assign) instead of one. That's just utter shite as it's not allowing for any kind of decent overview.
Assignments further can't be done via any method halfway displaying that we're in 2024 and not in 1987 anymore, such as modulation source/target drag and drop, MIDI/source/target learn or whatsoever.

Add to this that all of the editors suck. Proveably.

 

[Sascha Franck]

To illustrate the assign drama:

In the HX units, to assign the bypass of whatever block, you just select the block, hold the switch, press OK and be done.

To do the very same on the GT, you need to open the assign menu (and be damned already, should you do it on the unit...), try to find out which option to use (controls directly, manual mode or assignment mode), look around on 3 pages whether the switch you plan to use isn't reserved for something else already. Oh sure, you could switch to manual mode and see things displayed, but that's only the onboard switches - and, even worse, you need to go all the way back to the control or assign menu once you're done looking.
And as if all that wasn't enough already, to do any assignments, you have to scroll through an almost *endless* list of parameters. Miss the one you want to control (because you might not have the order internalized yet) and you'll have to scroll all the way back.

So, you're really telling me that this is "dead simple", @JCW308? To me it rather seems that you've never really used any advanced form of assignments, because this is an area even the most avid Boss fanboys criticize a whole lot.

 

[paisleywookiee]

It's dead simple really.

I mean, it’s subjective. But having used it quite a bit, and owning Fractal and Line 6 stuff, I definitely disagree with you.

 

[Sascha Franck]

which probably did not improve on the GT10.

Defenitely not. While the assignment nonsense was just that, the GT-10 was very quick to edit in all other aspects, simply because each block had it's own button. That was just excellent. I'd possibly buy a unit working like that (plus maybe 2 blocks more and a better assignment solution) with updated algorithms in a heartbeat. Sure, you can't build a kitchen sink preset with that little blocks, but in case there's gapless switching, reverb/delay spillover and global blocks, I simply wouldn't ever need it (and I'd guess most people wouldn't, unless they're deep into creating sound collages and what not).

I already said so elsewhere: Boss could at least have used their click-encoders to select the most important (user definable) items with one single click. With 6 encoders you could assign, say, 2 drives, 2 amps, your main delay and your main reverb to them (just as an example), and would be able to adjust patches 10 x quicker than right now. But no, not in Boss land. Let's rather use the click function for larger value in/decrements - because we're too stupid to get encoder acceleration done properly.

Really, for a unit released in 2018, all things UI are astonishingly bad.

Fortunately, I was familiar with all that nonsense already (still a little shocked about their abysmally bad editors, though), so I knew what I was buying and I also knew the right "tactics" to design a bank of patches. And once that initial hassle is done, you can make it to work just great. But that doesn't change anything, the UI designers need to be fired.

 

[laxu]

the GT-10 was very quick to edit in all other aspects, simply because each block had it's own button.

It's a shame manufacturers have been going for less and less dedicated buttons like that.

It's alright if you can see your entire preset at once and tap blocks on a touchscreen like on the Ampero 2, or the capacitive footswitches on Helix. But if you need to scroll like on the GT-1000 or even GX-100, then it's just bad.

Even Fractal, when they added the doubleclick quick jumps to blocks, messed it up when you have to return back to the Home view to select another block instead of doubleclicking from one block to another in the block editor.

Fast editing is something I wish modelers manufacturers looked at more. The yardstick is amp + pedals, and the closer you get to that experience the better.

 

[JCW308]

Guys we've been using the GT-1000 literally for YEARS now. Without problems. Why all of a sudden are we all brain dead about how to use it? Is everyone being dumbed-down with the latest stuff or what? Even for a beginner, the GT-1000 is easy. The software makes it even easier. To say the GT-1000 is even remotely as hard to use as a Fractal unit is just mind-boggling.

 

[Sascha Franck]

Even for a beginner, the GT-1000 is easy.

As quite many folks, you seem to have a problem to distinguish between easy and efficient.
Nobody said GT-1000 editing was complicated (the assign issue is somewhat tricky, though), but it's unnecessarily convoluted, hence making editing an incredibly cumbersome process.

 

[Frodebro]

As quite many folks, you seem to have a problem to distinguish between easy and efficient.
Nobody said GT-1000 editing was complicated (the assign issue is somewhat tricky, though), but it's unnecessarily convoluted, hence making editing an incredibly cumbersome process.

Programming my GT1000 to send MIDI PC messages left me wondering what in the fuck BOSS was thinking. And then I bought a Helix, which really hammered home the clunkiness of the BOSS UI. It's not that I can't figure it out, I can move around on it quite well, but it just doesn't work intuitively. I can take a year hiatus from Helix and jump right back in with zero issues. Take some time away from the GT1000 and you're back to referencing the manual to remember how to do deeper things.

 

[paisleywookiee]

Guys we've been using the GT-1000 literally for YEARS now. Without problems. Why all of a sudden are we all brain dead about how to use it? Is everyone being dumbed-down with the latest stuff or what? Even for a beginner, the GT-1000 is easy. The software makes it even easier. To say the GT-1000 is even remotely as hard to use as a Fractal unit is just mind-boggling.

Again, we’re debating something subjective. But as someone who’s made a few hundred bucks dialing in people’s GT-1000 and GT-1000 Core rigs, I can tell you from experience dealing with beginners it’s not easy, nor intuitive.
I’m happy you’re happy with it; it’s a cool device. But there’s most definitely room for improvement in the GUI game.