Product Review: The Roland VG-99, The Arsenal Of Guitarocracy - Page 3

While the VG-99 can be rack mounted (and controlled pretty well with its supplied software), rack-mounting would render two of the VG-99’s most intriguing new features much more difficult to use. In addition to optional foot control, the VG-99 has built-in two pretty nifty effects that Roland has adapted from their keyboard synthesizers. These include a finger-sliding “ribbon” controller, which can be switched to control the pitch and filter settings of most patches. Perhaps more intriguingly, there’s also Roland’s “D-Beam”, which can also control many patches by waving a hand over the VG-99, or even a guitar neck. The D-Beam could even provide the opportunity for some flashy stage gestures, reminiscent of Jimmy Page and his Theremin in Zeppelin’s concert movie, The Song Remains The Same.

And speaking of Zeppelin, whoever programmed the presets of the VG-99 has included several versions of DADGAD, one of Page’s favorite alternate tunings, which Page used for several Indian-sounding compositions within Zeppelin, including, most famously “Kashmir”. A patch called Z DADGAD, with its combination of a modeled Danelectro guitar, distortion, and slow phasing nails this tone perfectly. Other patches reproduce DADGAD in six and 12-string acoustic versions, and even as a sitar patch.

Back To The Future: The Built-In GR-300

Robert Fripp’s early 1980s tones, radically different from Page and other blues-based guitarists, are also well represented in the VG-99, via the VG-99’s built-in recreation of Roland’s GR-300 guitar synthesizer. This landmark synthesizer, the first guitar synthesizer that tracked accurately and was easy to use, was played by several superstar guitarists with a taste for the avant-garde in the early 1980s, including Fripp and Adrian Belew in the then-newly reconstituted King Crimson, Andy Summers in the Police, and Jimmy Page. And Pat Metheny uses one to this day. Unlike modern sampling synthesizers, no one would confuse the GR-300’s sounds with real strings, flutes, or other acoustic instruments. It’s not that kind of synth. But it does provide the guitarist a variety of fat analog sounds, and the original introduced many guitarists to the electronic realm for the first time.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

Visit Ed Driscoll's author page — Ed Driscoll's Blog