The Roland GR-55 Guitar Synth is a deep pedal. So deep, that it can be fiddly to try and edit, using just the on-board controls.
Fortunately, there are a couple of free solutions that should make working with the Roland GR-55 Guitar Synth a lot easier.
First up, there’s an iPad template for TouchOSC (shown above), created by Marc Benigni:
Many sliders have been replaced with banks of buttons, which I have found to be much more usable. (They light up when you touch them – neato! – but they don’t persist to represent current state.) I’ve taken the opportunity to replace a lot of “lawsuit-aware” labels with real descriptions, for instance LIPS becomes Dano 56-U3 and so on. This is a little more “fun” for me as a guitar geek, and moreover, it’s called out a lot of functionality that I didn’t even know was there. Embarrassingly, I didn’t realize that MA-28 etc were acoustic guitars; I thought they were mics or pickups I’d never heard of! So it’s been good to embed some of the documentation right into the UI.
There are pro’s and cons, though. I’m using a lot more screen space, which itself is both a pro and a con. And I’m using a lot more memory with this increased control count. This makes pages load a little slower, and could even result in more TouchOSC crashes. Oddly, I noticed that labels have OSC command strings, but they don’t actually respond to touch. So every button is a label imposed over a push button, doubling the control count.
Details are available in the VGuitar forums.
There’s also GR Floorboard – an open-source editing app for the Roland GR-55 Guitar Synth that works on Mac, Windows & Linux:
midi editing software for use with the Roland GR-55 guitar synthesizer, to allow graphical representation of the internal settings and parameters of the GR-55. Realtime editing and patch data backups, bulk patch editing.
It’s available via Source Forge.
While these apps are pretty deep – we’d be interested in seeing Roland offer an official editor, too.
If you’re a Roland GR-55 Guitar Synth owner, let us know what you think of these!