Guitar MIDI vs. newer expressive MIDI keyboards

fisherro

The new GK-5 pickup appears to digitize the output of the hex-pickup to go over a TRS cable (which they’re calling “serial GK”) instead of a 13-pin cable. It does not appear to be able to also carry the conventional pickups signal and remote buttons that the 13-pin cable does.

They have a box that you can plug the serial GK cable into and convert it to a 13-pin output to work with older/used gear.

The GM-800 looks to be entirely about pitch-to-MIDI. So probably not something I’m interested in, but might be interesting for those of you interested in that.

Glancing through the manuals, it doesn’t look like you can do sound design directly on the unit. It looks like you’d have to use Zenology on a computer and then transfer the “tone” to the GM-800. (Which may be for the best, but might mean you need a lifetime license or Roland Cloud subscription?)

GovernorSilver

The internal ZenCore engine will probably track better than external MIDI devices, although Boss of course claims external MIDI tracking will be better than earlier Boss guitar-MIDI products. I like ZenCore enough that state-of-the-art tracking of external MIDI is not a concern for me. Thus the GM-800 is more interesting to me than the SY-1000.

Some version of Boss Tone Studio will be provided for editing. No idea if it will be stripped down access to ZenCore like the MC-101 was on initial release.

https://www.boss.info/global/products/gm-800/

espiegel123

@fisherro said:
The new GK-5 pickup appears to digitize the output of the hex-pickup to go over a TRS cable (which they’re calling “serial GK”) instead of a 13-pin cable. It does not appear to be able to also carry the conventional pickups signal and remote buttons that the 13-pin cable does.

They have a box that you can plug the serial GK cable into and convert it to a 13-pin output to work with older/used gear.

The GM-800 looks to be entirely about pitch-to-MIDI. So probably not something I’m interested in, but might be interesting for those of you interested in that.

Glancing through the manuals, it doesn’t look like you can do sound design directly on the unit. It looks like you’d have to use Zenology on a computer and then transfer the “tone” to the GM-800. (Which may be for the best, but might mean you need a lifetime license or Roland Cloud subscription?)

It will be interesting to know if the new system is up to quality of the Fishman.

cuscolima

Just received my Fishman Triple play today. First tests are really good