VG-99 and the Chapman Stick suggestions

Started by Elantric, February 10, 2008, 08:56:08 PM

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Elantric

robmartino wrote>

QuoteHi guys, nice to see this new forum.

I am quite excited about the VG-99 and think it might be the direction I go for all my Stick processing. I've been using a dual effects path approach with my current Boss processors (a pair of SE-70s and GX-700s for each side of the Stick) to get interesting layered sounds, and it's great to see this possibility in new effects units (as well as breaking the strings into smaller groups and having different processing on each- this is HUGE).

The VG-99 and the Stick is kind of like a niche market within another niche market, so Roland may not be that interested in feedback like this, but some observations:

Ideally, a pair of VG-99s would be great (using a GK-3 for each side of the Stick). Roland support told me that only one VG-99 can be hooked up to a computer at a time via USB, which means that audio could not be streamed to and from more than one unit simulteneously. Not a deal breaker, but this would make for a more flexible recording setup.

Already people have suggested being able to set their string pitches below the standard guitar tuning... apparently pitch shifting and possibly synth algorithms don't work well with lower pitches. Don't know if Roland has plans for a bass VG-99, but I'd rather see a more general purpose unit that can be used for any range instrument, and also allow a scale length more than 660mm to be specified (current Sticks have a 36" scale length, and a pitch range that covers both bass and guitar ranges). If pitch shifting doesn't work, at least being able to use the COSM guitar modeling for bass strings would be useful, so I can split my 6 bass strings into groups of 3 and have separate processing on each (I've been wanting to do this kind of thing for a while!).
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Rob
http://myspace.com/robmartino

vanceg

As has been said in some other threads, the COSM guitar, amp and effect modeling seems to work quite well with instruments with "lower than normal" pitch.  I've used a VG-99 on my Baritone and on a Warr guitar-like instrument (tuned much like a stick) and everything that DOESN'T use pitch tracking of some sort works well.

I do think you'd need some form of mixer to combine the signals from two VG-99s. There is not a good way to run an aux stereo signal from one into another.  But, you could easily use a laptop interface with 4 inputs to run the two VG-99s into a laptop...better still, two SPDIF interfaces so you could run digital into the laptop.

I suspect that Roland will someday come out with a Bass version of the VG-99, but I base this only on the fact that they came out with the V-Bass after the VG-88 and the fact that they say specifically that the VG-99 doesn't support lower tuned instruments...it just makes sense that they would someday come out with a VG-99Bass unit..

Vance