Boss GM-800 Guitar Synthesizer Pedal Reviews
The BOSS GM-800 is a next-gen guitar synthesizer pedal driven by Roland's Serial GK interface along with an advanced Zen-Core sound engine culled from Roland's flagship synths. The pedal's high-performance DSP elicits a natural playing feel and solid tracking, while its vast onboard sound library gives you plenty of room for inspired creativity. Employ the GM-800's intuitive Scene workflow to freely combine and modify Tones, add color to sounds with a wide range of effects, and discover a world of brand-new content on Roland Cloud. You also get two external control jacks, USB audio/MIDI and standard MIDI connectivity, and a Serial GK expansion jack for connecting to other BOSS guitar synthesizer units. The GM-800 injects your guitar or bass with limitless musical potential. It's small, sleek, adaptable, and primed for boundless creative excursions.
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Highest Rated Reviews
Great Synth
I have the GR33, the GR55, the Sy1000, and now I have the GM800. This is an awesome guitar synth.
It is a pure synth no guitar dsp. The thing has around 1500 different sounds built in. It has 100 presets and 100 extra memory slots. You can have 4 different sounds at once.
You can split the strings per sound by string and by fret, incredibly useful idea. It tracks great and fast.
I have had the device for a couple of months have added some stuff to youtube, I will share some links here.
All the tracks on that example were played with the GM800. You do need to purchase a pickup I put it on my godin freeway. I really enjoy this thing as an addition to other guitar synths.
Boss GM-800
Boss GM-800: First I would like to say overall it is great piece of equipment. It has both good simulations of several musical instruments and some good synths. But it is not a GR-55 replacement on the whole (maybe for some certain sounds). If you have a GR-55 and are using it, you are probably going to want to keep it. The GM-800 has very little latency and great response. In terms of "latency" on low bass notes, there are the laws of physics that are being approached as a limiting factor (low notes take more time to generate and therefore anything digitally processing them has the same issue). The Boss GKC-AD works great because it also has a Guitar Out jack for your regular pickups. So there is an advantage of using a GK-3(13pin) from your guitar in that only one cord is needed from Guitar to Pedalboard (if the use both standard pickups and divided pickup(GK-3) are desired to be used simultaneously). If only GM-800 or additional chained synths being used, then the GK-5 is probably way to go.
The GM-800 is much easier to setup and tweak than the GR-55 and a little more intuitive. But the GM-800 cannot be used as an all-in-one unit. The GR-55 can be used as an all-in-one unit in that it has the synth sounds and analog pedal reproductions. In other words I can play through my standard pickups and still have a fair amount of analog pedalboard sounds by the COSM guitar modeling portion of the GR-55.
Finally I feel there are some issues with the GM-800 that cause playability problems. On some of the "Parts" there tends to be what I call "hanging notes". What I found on these was that the "Decay" is not consistent with other "Parts" [a "Part" in the GM-800 is the mimicked sound (i.e. "0001:Acoustic Piano")]. On some sounds the varying amount of "Decay" is good and provides a smooth desired "Decay". But on other "Parts" the "Decay" adjustment hardly seems to make any difference and the "Part" continues play abnormally long requiring the string to be physically muted by either your hand or finger. I did contact Boss/Roland regarding this as being a "bug", their response was, "not a bug…". It's an annoying issue and I feel that the Decay Rate Adjustment should be consistent across the "Parts". I hope they revisit this issue in a future firmware update, but until then the fix is to use another "Part" instead.
Great for studio
I have owned a number of guitar synths. Too many to list them all. This pedal has some surprises and some disappointments. It is not a replacement for the GR-55. It has no guitar modeling or amp modeling. The GM-800 has a vast and great library of synth tones. There are about 910 synth tones on the GR-55 and there are well over 1200 synth tones on the GM-800. You use these tones when creating presets, but these patches or presets are called scenes on the GM-800. Really, it's the same thing. It has some new synth sounds and the classic electric piano sounds are very good. I have purchased more tones through the Roland cloud, and currently I have around 2,400 Synth tones loaded on this device.
It also works really well as MIDI controller. I have no latency when used as a midi controller. The SY-1000 and the GR-55 both have latency when you try to use it in this fashion. Recording software synths inside a DAW works well with this device. You can layer up to 4 synth tones to create a scene, and you also have access to a drum kit that can be added to your scene. With the GR-55, you can only add two synth tones in one preset. The SY-1000 allows you to add three instruments or synths to a tone. So this thing is pretty cool and it sounds great.
Ok, so now I will tell you why it only gets three and a half stars. First, I purchased the GK5 pickup with this synth. I installed it on an Ibanez guitar. It has not worked right since the day I purchased it. I get a lot of ghost notes and a lot of notes hang. They don't stop vibrating. The ironic part is that the GK5 pickup works great when it is plugged into the GR-55 and the SY-1000. So the GK5 is not the problem. In fact, it works better than my GK3 pickups and my GK2A pickups when used with older synths. It just does not work well with the GM-800. Fortunately for me, I also purchased the BOSS GKC-AD adaptor. This little gray box allows me to use all my guitars that have other GK pickups, like the GK3. The GM-800 works well with older pickups. It just does not work well with the pickup that was designed to go with it. The tracking is much better on the GM-800 when used with a GK3 than it is in the GR-55. This can be fixed with a firmware update, but when will BOSS put out a firmware update to improve the GK5 performance? Well, that is anyone's guess.
The other thing is you don't have a lot of room when you download tones from the Roland cloud. The tones come in sets. I purchased 9 Sets of tones in packages called EXZ. I was only able to install 4 of those packages because there is not enough memory in the GM-800 for any more than that. So choose your tone packages wisely. The tone packages are not really expensive. I can also uninstall the tone packages and install some of the other ones I purchased, but that is lame. Your scenes are built from these tones. If you uninstall packages in order to install different ones, then the scenes you made will no longer work. There should be a disclaimer on the Roland cloud that says you can only have a total of 4 EXZ packages installed at the same time. Of course, if they told you that, they would not sell as many of them.
In the final analysis, I would buy this again knowing what I know now. But I would not get the GK5 pickup. I would just get the GKC-AD adaptor box. It's cheaper than the pickup anyway.
A major reset
Took delivery of the GM800, GK5 and cable today. I have owned a number of guitar synths, including all of the 13pin Roland's. I would say the first grade is incomplete.
First, the GK5 is potential step forward, with a single trs cable replacing the 13 pin. Although this seems like a standard cable, in fact it is a twisted pair digital cable. In my case, after more than an hour of trying to get the system to operate with the GK5, my best results we closer to ARP Avatar circa 1978 than the current GK system on the Sy1000. It is plagued with substantial mistracking. At this point I'm going to try another guitar installation before rendering final judgement.
I changed to GKC AD 13pin to GK Serial adapter and a Roland GK Strat. The tracking and accuracy improved to match the results I was getting from the Boss SY1000. At this point, the tracking issues appears to be limited to the GK5 or its installation.
The GM800 is based on a major update to the synth section. Most of the current presets are focused on what I would consider keyboard sounds. Although they are generally the high quality programs that represent years of development, they don't seem to have been tuned for guitar performance. There are a couple of presets in the last 10 that reflect the potential of the synth engine as a lead guitar instrument. I believe we will see better offerings soon, either from Roland or the user community.
I have to say there is a lot of sounds that I think are missing. The SY1000 really did a good job of blending the progress of the GR and VG series into a very refined performance package. I really miss the lack of GR300 style sounds from the SY. I also used a lot of the COSM modeled stringed instruments, and there are less than a half dozen attempts in the GM, most layered with the keyboard orient sounds. If you have been using the 12 String or other simulations in your current GK rig, they really are here yet.
Starting with the VG series, I was able to retire the GR300 big blue box. The SY1000, in particular had refined the very expressive model to exceed the original, and now it is gone. At the same time, many of the classic JP, JX, Juno and Jupiter sounds that have been implemented on Roland's flagship versions of this synth engine are missing. I believe we are caught as Roland leaps from one platform to the next. I hope there will be more attention to the COSM style sounds that the SY did so well, and a migration of the latest preset library that the new synth engine can support.
I will update as I learn more on the GK5 and it's installation…
Too much latency for bass, waste of time
I really like guitar synths. I generally play guitar, and use and like the SY 1000 guitar synthesizer. I thought I would give GM-800 a try for my bass playing. I wasted a ton of time trying to get it to sound with no latency. After a ton of time wasted I gave up. I posted on the VG guitar forums etc to no avail. Maybe it works ok with guitar, I don't know - but if you are bass player - look elsewhere, I don't know how boss could release this product. You can probably get away with playing spongy synth effects, but you can never ever play a solid line - the latency is horrendous. The irony is if you chose a bass sound and play bass thru it - you can't. I wanted to like it, but no.
