Mark's Hands-on Review
From VG-8.com
Contents |
[edit] Change Log:
05/02/07 - Added Change Log Started COSM Section
05/02/07 - Added PolyFX & First part of A/B Rack Effects. Added missing synth modes to COSM.
05/03/07 - Added rest of non mod group effects.
05/05/07 - Correction to Effects section. Waiting on section return from proofing check to post rest of effects section.
[edit] What this is:
I got a chance to spend quite a bit of time with the VG99 Editor and Hardware for 2 days during the Dallas Guitar Show, thanks to Peter, Paul and John at the Roland Booth. I suggested to Peter the notion of doing an "information dispensation" to help fill in some of the blanks about what the VG99 will be and he thought it was a great idea. As I've written this thing up, I've been sending the chunks back to Peter for a reality check. As mentioned in another post, this is a "snapshot" writeup on where the unit and its editor currently are at in the development cycle. I'll warn you upfront, it's LONG. In fact, it's SO long I'm going to post it in chunks. Stand by to be overwhelmed.
[edit] Preface:
It is VITALLY important that everybody understand this is a snapshot in time of a work in progress. The VG99 has literally several man-years of development work left to do. There's somewhere around 20 people feverishly working on the firmware of the unit itself and the software editor at this point, and they have quite a bit to go.
While I have a ton of screenshots and whatnot, the Roland guys have asked to not post them since, because it IS a work in progress, the final layout details may change by ship. Once they get to gold master with the editor they're going to get me a copy to do a sort of final review/write-up on and I'll post detailed screenshots at that time.
As Aure has conveyed already, we're looking at an August ship time at this point. So, as a result, bear in mind that any of this is subject to change.
However, I think it's safe to say that quite a bit of the core concepts are probably pretty solid at this point. As Peter said, we wouldn't be demoing it if we weren't fairly confident that the direction is solid. Well put. With that out of the way, let's move on to:
[edit] Intro:
First off, this is going to be a HUGE post. Like beyond big. Gynormous. Sorry. As I got into the write-up, it was hard to intentionally leave stuff out for brevity, because at each point of omission I got to thinking, you know, in the next few months, at somepoint I'd wonder if it could do this, so back in it went. Finally it became apparent what I really needed to do was not leave anything out. So yeah, it's big.
I'm going to try to break this up into logical sections that roughly follow the flow through the UI of the editor. I'm going to mostly focus ON the editor because I had more time to spend with the editor than the hardware, AND because practically everything IN the editor exists on the hardware somewhere.
Finally, since I tend to mostly create patches using a tweak, listen and tweak again approach on Ralph's Veditor for the VG88, it's the closest reflection of my existing workflow. The only thing I do on the front panel of the VG88 any more is switch GK setups when I swap guitars and go to the midi section to dump patches for backups and the like.
Now, granted, from my experience on the VG99, it's a WHOLE lot more friendly to work with six pots AND a big knob than just one big knob. After I get through the editor stuff I'll do a section on what the hardware is like to work with.
Nuff said, let's dive into the status of the apparatus as of the Dallas Guitar Show.
[edit] General Editor UI Comments:
Favorite:
In a lot of places where a related group of controls exists, they've implemented something quite along the lines of what Ralph had done in the VEditor, wherein you can save your combination of settings for that group by name and then later apply it again elsewhere. They call it "Favorite" and I'll call out where it exists.
Detail:
This is a common theme throughout the editor, where in you get increasing levels of granularity in the parameters by diving down into the interface. In most cases (as in this one) there will be a little "detail" button that brings up a separate screen for the full boat version of the controls.
Knobs:
Ralph's convention of orbiting the cursor around the knobs has been adopted here as well. I'd personally like a user preference for a pure linear value entry (i.e. drag up down to set or right left but not around), as I find that easier and less error prone.
If you're used to Ralph's value list popups, you'll be missing those. This is drag only.
Let's get into the UI:
[edit] TOP Section:
The very top of the UI is the patch related global and utility functions. Patch selections, names, send from editor to VG, retrieve from VG to Editor and something called "Patch Init", as well as a write button exist on the left side.
Access to Global system, midi, USB, Vlink, GK and Guitar to Midi are made from the top right. These are for the most part just Detail buttons that bring up the screens associated with the parameters in question.
Global Setting
This section handles output assignments and global values for those assignments. At the top is Setting Number and Set Name. This IS interesting as you can have several different sets of main parameters and recall those from a drop down. One usage of this would be to store your "at home" settings for things like EQ and output connections, levels, etc, and then when you hit the studio have a separate set of settings there, and yet another set of settings for live gigs in clubs, larger halls, etc. This functionality is echoed on the hardware's UI as well, so you could set it up in the editor, and not have to have a laptop with you to take advantage of it. Neat touch.
Below this is how you access the various settings. You have a drop down menu which will select each of the outputs (Line/Phones, USB, Digital, etc) and controls for the NS Threshold, Reverb Level, SubOut Levels and the Main and Sub EQ's for that output appear. There's eq's, gains and noise gates at almost every section of the unit.
GK Setting
Like most things on the 99, this is a greatly expanded version of what was on the 88. It supports up to 10 separate presets, up from 5 on the VG88. What's new though is the ability to associate a given GK setup to a given patch via the new Patch Independent/System Common toggle for the setting which, if you're like me and have several GK equipped guitars of varying types (I have RMC and SoundGarage rigs spread out over a bunch of guitars at this point, and more all the time), is great. I tend to want certain guitars on certain songs (and thus their patches) so this is a very slick feature for playing out.
Additionally, the Scale knob now has actual values as WELL as "stock" types. So, if you have an odd scale, you can input it numerically, or just select the LP, Strat, etc values that show up at the end of the knob. There are separate knobs for each string's Pup->Bridge distance, as well as normal/invert S1/S2 assigns and a type menu for GK2, GK-2A, GK-3A and Piezo.
Thankfully, sensitivity has its own detail button that brings up a BIG, easy-to-see window with separate knobs for each string. No more romping up and down with the cursor controls and inadvertently setting the wrong value for the wrong string. Very nice. While the hardware's setup window is greatly improved over the VG88 as well, I'll be using the editor's version, thank you very much!
System Section
There are a number of utility sections that provide access to non-patch-specific operations, which like the VG88, live under the System Section. I'll cover each of these separately.
Midi Section
At the top you have a rotary knob to pick the midi channel the hardware transmits on. The fact that this is in the editor itself suggests that the editor communicates to the unit over a non-midi-based connection. This is a VERY good thing, in that there are some limitations of using midi in conjunction with a PC based editor that can go away if you use another over the wire protocol to communicate with the hardware. If the editor's connection to the box was Midi over USB, this knob couldn't be present in the UI, as the second you changed the connection channel you'd dump the editor's connection as well. This bodes well. Furthermore, the on-screen routing graphic shows the USB connection to the box as being separate from the midi I/O.
You also have a switch for omni mode (on/off), and several switches under program change. There's an on/off for PC out, a fixed/program switch for the Map select transmit mode, and a separate fixed/program switch for fixed/program for receive map select. There's also a dropdown menu select for SyncClock. It defaults to internal (like most stuff does).
Under that is a very extensive midi routing setup:
Midi In Source (defaults to "To Main") MidiOut Source (defaults to "From Main") and another drop down that affects the out, defaults to "Off" which I have no clue what it does. There's separate USB Midi Out & In, both with routing drop downs. Finally you have RRC2 In & Out, again with routing source & destination drop downs and the peculiar 3rd dropdown on out.
And finally at the bottom is an extremely extensive Transmit Control Change section, wherein you can assign outgoing midi CC# channels for a TON of controllers, which include:
GK Vol, GK S1, GK S2, CTL1, CTL2, Exp Pedal, CTL3, CTL4, D Beam H, DBeam V, Ribbon Actuation, Ribbon Position, FC Exp1, FC Exp1 SW, FCExp2, FC EXP2 SW, FC CTL 1, FC CTL2, FC Exp3/CTL3, FC CTL4, FCEXP4/CTL5, FC CTL6, FC EXP5/CTL7, FC CTL8.
That's right, the FC300 also has switches at the toe position for each of the pedals, as well as the ability to host a boatload of external controller inputs, including three of the dual switch/single Expression RTS types and 2 GPI control outs.
All of these are usable in the unit like you could with the VG88, but you can also assign them to transmit via midi CC outbound as well. This opens up a bunch of outboard gear control scenarios and, in conjunction with something like Logic where you have a huge amount of "midi CC wiring" capabilities, could make for some very interesting and useful live control applications. Neat,neat neat.
Output/USB Section
At the top we have a toggle switch which has Patch Independent and System Common modes. This is slick in that you can have separate output routings per patch if you want.
There's a global Patch section, with several outputs:
Digital out. You can set it's source to be any of the following: COSM Guitar A, COSM Guitar B, Normal Pickup, CH A, CH B, Mixer (Dry), Mixer, Main Out, Sub Out
There's Main out and Sub outs, which also have a Level control, and they also have source selects from CH A, CH B, Mixer (Dry) and Mixer.
There's an on-screen graphic that shows the routing configuration as you've set it up. This is ludicrously flexible, and is what Steve was referring to in his note to Aure. For instance, for live use you could set up separate on-stage monitor mixes and main outs for the FOH mix, and change those routings on a patch-by-patch basis if you wanted. You could monitor wet and feed house dry so the house guy can add reverb as needed.
One of the really neat abilities is being able to take just the COSM Guitar outs as a stereo pair for re-amping purposes. I.E. you can monitor wet (in this case wet refers to post amp) but just lay the processed COSM guitar, and ONLY COSM guitar to tape. This allows you to change effects and amp/speaker combinations up POST performance. With the VG88, the only way you could pull this off was to use a GK breakout box to get the raw, single-string stuff onto 6 tracks and then stuff it back through the VG88 at a later time. Most people wouldn't go to this extreme, and this gets you almost that degree of flexibility and uses 1/3 of the tracks to do it.
Finally, at the bottom of this section is the USB routing stuff. You have a USB In (from PC) drop down which you can route to: COSM Guitar A, COSM Guitar B, Normal Pickup, Main Out, Sub Out, or Main & Sub. There's also a USB Out that can go to any of the above mentioned outputs. Both have gain controls.
There's also a "direct monitor" button that gives you a latency-free live output over USB for recording purposes. Finally there's a toggle for Advanced/Standard for USB Driver mode (no clue what the difference is) and a "Recieve Direct Monitor Command" enable/disable switch to allow DAWs and other USB connected software to remotely enable Direct Monitoring mode. I'm not sure how many Apps can effectively take advantage of it, but it's there.
Control/V-Link Section Here we have the section where you set up what each of the myriad of controllers do "by default". Bear in mind that (like the VG88) any controller can have patch specific assignments, so what this section effectively does is determine a controller's behavior if you don't specifically assign it a function within a patch.
The controller list consists of: GK Func Block, which is: GK Volume Knob, GK S1/S2 Switch
"VG99 Rear Panel" CTL/EXP, which is: CTL 1 Button, CTL 2 Button, EXP Pedal, CTL 3 Footswitch, CTL 4 Footswitch
FC-300 Hosted onboard or rear panel stuff: EXP1 Pedal, EXP 2 Pedal, Exp 1 Switch, Exp 2 Switch (both expression pedals on the FC300 also have toe down switches), and separate routings for the externally pluggable CTL 4-8 and CTL Expression 3-5.
For each of these controllers there are the following routings available:
Assignable (Patch). This is the default. PatchLevel (0-100), Patch Level (0-200), AB Balance, Foot Volume(A&B), Foot Volume (A), Foot Volume (B), Wah, Guitar Volume (A), Guitar Volume(B), Guitar Tone (A&B), Guitar Tone (A), Guitar Tone(B), MixerLevel (A&B), Mixer Level (A) and Mixer Level (B). Whew.
And finally at the bottom is an assign section for V-Link, and an assign Hold on/off.
Midi PC Map Editor Now this whole section is something the VG88 needed in a big way. A flexible mapping mechanism to change how the unit responds to midi program change commands.
You have 4 complete maps (labled bank 0-3) and for each map have a separate assignment available for midi PC #'s 1-128. For each of these 128 slots, you can pick any of the 200 user presets or 400 factory presets to get triggered by the incoming PC channel. For ease of setup (and to avoid having to scroll through hundreds or presets), the menus are broken into 50 slot banks, i.e. User 1-50, 51-100, 101-150, and so on.
One really cool use of this would be for re-amping purposes. You could have your DAW puke out Midi CC#'s at specific points in the song and have the VG99 change patches on the fly as a result. Nifty.
Global "Quick Setup" dropdown. In addition to all the other global sections, the editor (and hardware) have a user-created and nameable setup function to the right of the Global Settings detail button. This is a drop-down menu of user-created I/O assignments, master levels, EQs and effects settings to allow you to quickly reconfigure the hardware. It allows you to store "setups" for various purposes. Examples: the editor had Small Amp, Combo Amp, Stack Amp, JC-120 return, Stack Return, Line/Phones. I'm not sure how much sense this makes as most of us have probably graduated to a full range flat response rig instead of an amp by this point, but I could see it being handy for quick reconfiguring between home studio, live with monitors as monitors and separate house feeds, or live with monitors as ONLY source for house and stage (like a small club), PA Only, and that sort of application. At any rate, it's there and I'm sure everybody will find a good use for it.
"Categories" This is something totally new to the VG99. The notion is the ability to create user-defined category types, and then assign patches TO those categories. With having some 600 possible patches to pick from, the notion of scrolling through all of those to find a specific patch gets about halfway daunting. What "Categories" does is give you another level of filing hierarchy to use. Since it's possible to have multiple categories, and have a given patch belong to more than one category, you could then have a patch belong to both "70's" and "Beatles" and find it under either. Or you could just create categories by genre (metal, hard rock, jazz, etc). On the hardware itself, you can use one rotary knob to scroll through the patch categories and another to drill down into the patches assigned to that category. It makes it VERY fast to find a particular patch compared to the S1/S2 switch or the old bank select up/down 1-4 combo on the VG88.
nb there are 200 preset and 200 user patches. Each patch can only belong to one category
[edit] COSM Guitar
This section will cover all the various aspects of the COSM guitar modeling.
COSM A/B Section As you've probably seen in the posted screen shots, the two cosm engines are exposed via the left half of the screen, with A on top and B on bottom. Depending on the type of model you have selected for either A or B, a "practical subset" of the most used controls for that type shows up to the right of the graphic depiction of it's type.
Below each a/b section is a fixed frequency 4 band eq and level control with an in out toggle. There's yet another EQ in the detail section with parametric mids.
At the top right of each A/B section you have a drop down for Main Type (Acoustic, Electric, Bass or Synth) and a second drop down for the models for each of those types. They've implemented this philosophy in a lot of the UI, where there's a hierarchy to drilling into things rather than a huge long list. That was a good call.
To the left of each COSM section is the tuning controls, which is a marked departure from how things were done on the VG88, and I'll cover that entire business separately since it's a lot to get your head around. Let's take a look at the depths of the COSM Modeler, which is accessed via a Detail button at the top of each section.
COSM Modeler Detail View
There is a single screen that you set the parameters on for the COSM section, with a top portion that changes out depending on the mode (Acoustic, Bass etc) and a static bottom section that contains the parameters present regardless of model type.
Favorite is present here, as are CHA CHB selects, exchange and copy A->B
The other control that is always present is a 4 band eq with full parametric on the 2 mids. To the left an onscreen eq curve is drawn that reflects your changes to the knobs.
Below this are COSM Guitar/Normal Pup mix controls, A noise gate (one of many in the chain now, btw) with in/out toggle and threshold & release pots. Finally on the right bottom is the individual string pan and level controls in two rows.
The COSM modeling section has now been broken up into 4 sections, E Guitar, Acoustic, Bass, and Synth. I'll cover each separately.
E. Guitar
The list has been expanded from the VG88 to now include Classic Strat, Modern Strat, Telecaster, Les Paul, P-90, Lipstick, Rickenbacher, 335, L4 and Vari.
Aside from the new "canned types", Vari Guitar has been seriously beefed up. The pickup's volume pots can now be switched between audio & log tapered curves, and the strings can either be roundwound or flatwound.
One difference from the 88 is that you no longer have all the body types available for the electic vari guitar type, rather these have been broken out under separate groupings, so round and banjo, etc aren't available in E. Guitar Variable Mode.
Unlike Ralph's Veditor you have onscreen controls for both pups at the same time always visible. You can either set the pup position and angle via on screen knobs or by dragging on the graphic of the guitar. The cursor changes to indicate if you'll be modifying position or angle depending on where you click on the pickup.
As with the VG88 you still have Acoustic, Piezo, Double & Single types available for each pup. One of my first indications that they'd done more than just copy the code over from the 88 was as I moved the bridge pup closer to the bridge it's output gain didn't fall off nearly as quickly or as much as it used to in the VG88.
Acoustic The acoustic section has been massively expanded from the VG88. It now has it's own section, with Steel, Nylon, Sitar, Banjo, Resonator & Variable Types.
Furthermore, when you select steel, a "body type" dropdown menu becomes available where you can choose Martin D28, Gibson 45, Gibson Small, Guild F40, an an archtop TRP-O type. These types are available under the Variable mode as well.
The Nylon variety has Body, Attack, Tone & Level controls.
The Sitar has piezo, front, rear or rear & front as selectable pups. Exposed controls are Sensativity , Body, Color, Decay, Buzz, Attack Level, Tone & Level.
Banjo has properties exposed as well, but again, I didn't get a screen grab.
Bass The Bass section consists of Jazz Bass and P Bass types, with exposed controls for Rear, Front, Master & Tone for each.
Synth The synth group consists of: GR-300, Bowed, Dual, Solo, Pipe, PWM, Crystal, Organ, Brass, Wave & Filter Bass. Poly distortion has been relocated to poly FX in a separate section and is available simultaneously to anything you do in the entire COSM Modeling section (as are all the Poly FX).
As announced at Namm there's a full on GR-300 here. It can run distortion, VCO or both. Separate pitch & fine controls for both OSC's are present. The filter section has cutoff, res, envelope modulation (on/off/invert), attack time & sensitivity modes. There's also a sweep toggle with Rise & Fall Times, and VIbrato toggle with rate & depth.
The Bowed Synth type consists of Filter Cutoff, Resonance, Touch Sensitivity, Power Bend and corresponding Q, and a sustain control.
The Dual Synth type has Filter Cutoff, Resonance, Touch Sensitivity and sustain. In addition it has portamento with glide time and glide sensitivity controls. I have no idea how they pulled that off, and didn't get a chance to muck with it but Peter said it is Polyphonic. Amazing.
At this point i got sidetracked, so I didn't get grabs of Wave or Solo. From what I remember Wave looked pretty similar to what we had in the 88, and I don't remember anything about solo.
[edit] Poly FX
Centered between the two "big picture" COSM guitar views is the new home of the Poly FX from the VG88. For the VG99, the PolyFX has become a first class citizen. WIth the VG88 you could Either use a Poly FX like Poly Distortion OR a COSM guitar but you couldn't completely do both. In the VG99, you now can, and furthermore do so separately for channel A & B. There are channel A&B buttons that allow you to see which (if any) Poly FX is applied to the currently highlighted channel, a drop down to select the Poly FX type, and then the detail button to bring up that type's parameters.
The Effect types are Compression, Distortion, Octave, and Slow Gear. This is the same selection we had on the VG88, but differs as mentioned above in that they can be used in CONJUNCTION with the COSM modeling.
[edit] Effect Chain A & B
To the right of each COSM Guitar Global window for Channel's A&B is the corresponding FX A & B chain graphic, which is represented by a graphic of a rack of processing gear. Clicking the rack will bring up that channel's copy of the FX Chain.
"MOST" of the stuff in the "Rack" are the processor modules off the GT-Pro from which the Effect Chain section was derived. In fact, the primary difference between this AND a GT-Pro is the COSM guitar module, which is really just the UI's mechanism to allow you to control where in the chain the COSM Guitar model shows up.
For each side you can drag and drop to reorder the order that specific modules appear in.
Each module has an on/off switch for the module, a Detail button to bring up that module's full controls, and in most cases will also have a dropdown menu to select the "type" for that module, i.e. WHICH distortion pedal. In most cases there is a minimal subset of controls displayed as well, although for any degree of tweezing you'll want to pop the detail button.
I'll talk about the amp models separately, as while you can access them from the rack view, they also have their own dedicated section in the main window, so it makes more sense to discuss them there.
Overdrive/Distortion One thing the VG88 was missing was a separate overdrive/distortion from the COSM amp. Granted, you had Poly Distortion, but you had to use that at the expense of not having full access to the COSM Guitar Model if you did.
Now you can have your cake and eat it too. As mentioned earlier, Poly Distortion is it's own animal, and is even complete separate from the Effect Chain/Rack, and in addition you can ALSO use a Overdrive/Distortion in the Effect Chain.
And there is a MASSIVE offering of well over 30 to pick from, which have been broken down into 10 categories:
Booster, Natural, Over Drive, Distortion, Classic, Solid, Modern, Metal, Loud, and Fuzz. In addition there is a Custom type wherein you can build your own by picking a base "parent" type pedal, and then tweezing the low and high frequency shelving centers and the "bottom" and "top" emphasis curves. The custom types also have all the normal controls that the rest of the distortions have.
Delay Here again we get a veritable plethora of delay types compared to the VG88. The types include: Single, Pan, Stereo, Dual-S, Dual-P, Dual-L/R, Reverse, Analog, Tape, Warp, Mod and Hold. The rack controls consist of Time, Feedback and Level as well as the on/off and detail button.
In detail mode you get the full controls, which will vary depending upon delay type. Time will be displayed in MS, until you hit the extreme of the dial wherein it switches to the global BMP of the patch as a whole. For the types with taps, the tap time is expressed as a % of the main time.
Chorus Here we get a rate & depth knob, and a drop down for type selection. Types are a mono and 2 stereo types. The detail view provides rate, depth, pre delay, low cut filter, high cut filter and level knobs.
Reverb One of the VG88's weaker points (in my view) was it's fairly limited reverb offerings. That's been rectified here. In addition to the Room, Hall 1, 2 and Plate we had on the VG88, we finally have a spring, as well as a modulate and ambience type. Rack panel controls are the type drop down and time & level controls.
The detail mode gives you Reverb Time, Pre Delay, Low Cut Filter, High Cut Filter, Density, Effect Level and Direct Level controls.
The addition of the Spring mode was really the missing link here. For everything else I'll still be using my DAW's convolution based reverb.
Bear in mind there's yet ANOTHER reverb at the master level, which is independent of this one.
Comp Here we have your basic mode switchable compressor/limiter. Front panel controls are the mode switch, Sustain (or Threshold), Attack and Level controls. In Compressor mode, detail view exposes sustain, attack, tone & level controls. In Limiter mode, detail view exposes threshold, release, tone & level controls.
There's also another compressor available in the Mod 1 & 2 sections, and yet another under Poly FX.
Wah No front panel controls aside from the type drop down Types are: Cry, Vox, Fat, Light, 7 String, Resonator and Custom Exposed controls in detail view are Pedal Position and Level. In custom mode you can modify the Q, low and high range limits and presence for each of the basic 5 types supported.
Foot Volume Front panel controls for Level and Curve Drop down menu. Curves are Slow 1, Slow 2, Normal, and Fast
NS Front Panel Noise Suppressor controls for Threshold, Release & Detect Type Drop Down Menu Detect Types are Input, NS Input and FV Out.
EQ Front Panel Controls for Low, Lo Mid, Hi Mid, High & Level. Detail view provides graphic view of curve, and adds the Frequency & Q controls for the 2 parametric mid range sections, as well as an overall Low Cut filter.
-- to be continued --
