Roland U.S. Blog » Guitar Synth

How to Sound like Slash and Score Movies with Guitar

Gary Lenaire [Roland US] — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 19:00:31 +0000

Slash Uses GR-55 Synth to Make Music for Slasher Films

A self-described film buff, Slash has had many small acting roles in both film and television. This has naturally progressed into a new side venture: the business of making movies, and horror movies in particular. His production company, Slasher Films, is currently finishing work on its first release titled Nothing to Fear, a horror thriller about a small-town family haunted by a bloodsucking demon.

Slash – Scoring with the GR-55 Guitar Synth…

Roland GR-55 Guitar Synth

Among his many projects, Slash has taken on the role of musical director for his fledgling movie production company, scoring much of the film music himself. To extend his capabilities on his primary instrument in this new realm, he’s turned to the Roland GR-55 Guitar Synthesizer to help generate and create the many sounds required to bring a movie production to life. “The GR-55 has been a great tool for me to use in a movie scoring capacity. There is an endless range of sounds/instruments I can transpose onto the guitar very effectively,” says Slash. “This is a way for me to record synth sounds without using a keyboard. I can also use the GR-55 to trigger soft synths in my computer via the USB output on the GR-55.”

Yes, Guitar Sounds are Still Included…

With over 900 synth sounds to choose from, including orchestral voices and sound effects such as screaming people and blowing wind, any guitarist/composer using a GR-55 can find the sounds they’re looking for. The GR-55 also features COSM® tube amp and humbucker-pickup guitar models, spot-on emulations of the classic sounds that Slash has built a career on.

Slash has shared some of his custom patches for the GR-55, and you can download and play them yourself. Grab ’em now at the GR-55 Artist Patches site! Other artist patches include Eric Johnson, Steve Stevens, Jeff Loomis, Gary Willis, and Robert Marcello. Play their patches or edit them even further.

GR-55 Technology…

For those of you that are not satisfied with 900 sounds, the GR-55 has MIDI IN and OUT for connection with other units (keyboard synths, sound modules). The GR-55 also features a USB port to trigger soft synths or to connect directly into a DAW for MIDI and audio recording. This unit truly offers endless possibilities, which is why film scoring is not just for keyboardists any more. Regular guitars and basses not outfitted with a 13-pin connector could be equipped with a divided pickup accessory for connectivity.

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Bass Guitarist Rudy Sarzo in Our Studio!

Gary Lenaire [Roland US] — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 01:51:16 +0000

From Randy Rhoads to Rudy Sarzo, This CUBE-40 Amp Has a History

Most guitarists know that Randy Rhoads used stack amps on stage. However, he also used a very special combo amp. What was it? Bassist Rudy Sarzo revealed that amp on the set during an in-depth interview with Gary Lenaire at the Roland Studio in Los Angeles.

Watch the full interview on our Livestream channel

Rudy Sarzo’s resume spans four decades and multi-platinum success. His resume includes Quiet Riot, Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, Dio, Yngwie Malmsteen, Blue Oyster Cult and Queensryche. Rudy discusses his time jamming with Ozzy, Randy Rhoads and many others. He also talks about some of the amazing gear he has used including guitar and bass effects, bass synth, Roland GR-55 and guitar amps. From the stompbox to the tour bus, Rudy’s stories captivate and entertain.

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The VG-99 Inspires

OV Valle [Roland US] — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 23:30:28 +0000

A few weeks ago we gave Michael “Nomad” Ripoll a VG-99 guitar synthesizer to test drive and report. After a brief follow up we were surprised to learn that he’d been using the unit for his movie trailer projects. Michael says that within an hour of unboxing the unit he was committing to tape. Off camera, Michael explained that the unit has sparked his creativity, sped up his workflow and eliminated the need of extra musicians for his current studio projects. In these videos, both Michael and Joel Stevenett express how the VG-99 has inspired them musically.

For Roland, the VG-99 is a milestone in guitar modeling and performance technology. It has three powerful processors at its core, plus expressive performance controls such as the Ribbon Controller, a versatile new foot controller, and our standard D Beam sensors. We’ve sure come a long way from the VG-8, the world’s first guitar modeling processor. We weren’t sure how Michael would use this unit, we were pleased with what we saw and heard.

The VG-99 contains a vast array of COSM-modeled guitars and amplifiers ranging from acoustic to electric to the non-traditional. The on board dual process modeling also allows you to play two different guitar sounds simultaneously. For example, one virtual guitar could be a Telecaster® in a vintage Tweed amp with full effects and the other a nylon-string guitar with just a hint of reverb. One could easily see why Michael was so inspired with the unit, he was playing with a pallet of sounds he wasn’t accustomed to playing with a traditional guitar.

If the on board sounds isn’t what your looking for, the software editor is a dream for sound designers. The VG-99 can produce custom tunings — anything the player desires on any virtual guitar. A virtual Les Paul®, for example, could be tuned down four or five steps for a heavy sound, while a nylon string could be tuned as a 12-string, and also tuned down four or five steps at the same time. Open and drop tunings are also supported as well as user-defined custom tunings and can be applied to any COSM® guitar, so the player can switch instantly between tuning setups without physically switching guitars or having to manually retune.

Joni Mitchell who was named 72nd greatest guitarist of all time in 2003 by Rolling Stone magazine was also inspired by guitar synthesis with the original VG-8. She turned to the VG-8 with the help of her friend Fred Walecki after expressing her frustrations with alternate tunings. The following excerpt was taken from Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers’ article, “The Guitar Odyssey of Joni Mitchell: My Secret Place“:

The new influence at work is an electric guitar that Mitchell’s old friend Fred Walecki built for her to alleviate her ongoing frustrations with using alternate tunings – one of the reasons why she stopped touring in 1983 and was on the verge of quitting the stage permanently in the spring of ’95. Walecki, of Westwood Music in Los Angeles, designed the Stratocaster-style guitar to work with the Roland VG-8 – the Virtual Guitar – a very sophisticated processor capable of electronically creating her tunings. While the strings physically stay in standard tuning, the VG-8 tweaks the pickup signals so that they come out of the speakers in an altered tuning. This means that Mitchell can use one guitar on stage, with an offstage tech punching in the preprogrammed tuning for each song.

“This new guitar that I’m working with eliminated a certain amount of problems that I had with the acoustic guitar,” Mitchell explained. “Problems isn’t even the right word; maddening frustrations is more accurate. The guitar is intended to be played in standard tuning; the neck is calibrated and everything. Twiddling it around isn’t good for the instrument, generally speaking. It’s not good for the neck; it unsettles the intonation. I have very good pitch, so if I’m never quite in tune, that’s frustrating.” Over the years, Mitchell has learned to slightly bend the strings to compensate for the intonation error, but that effort is still often defeated by the extreme slackness of her tunings. “In some of those tunings I’ve got an A on the bottom or a B-flat, and it’s banging against the string next to it and kicking the thing out of tune as I play, no matter how carefully I tweak it.” The VG-8 sidesteps all these problems: as long as the strings are accurately in standard tuning, she can play all over the neck in the virtual alternate tunings and sound in tune.

In every gig since the 1995 New Orleans Jazz Festival, Mitchell has used the VG-8, using its effects to build a guitar sound reminiscent of her Hejira era. But the VG-8 is having a much more far reaching impact on her music than just providing a workable stage setup. In composing and recording the songs for her next album, she’s thrown herself into a heady exploration of the VG-8′s sampled sounds. “Sonically, it’s very new,” she said of the tracks recorded so far. “I don’t know what you’d call it. It’s my impression, in a way, of ’40s music. Because I don’t like a lot of contemporary music – it’s just so formulated and artificial and false – I kind of cleared my ear and didn’t listen to anything for a while, and what emerged were these vague memories of ’40s and early ’50s sounds. Swinging brass – not Benny Goodman and not Glenn Miller but my own brand, pulled through Miles [Davis] and different harmonic stuff that I absorbed in the ’50s. Because this guitar has heavy-metal sounds in it and pretty good brass sounds, I’m mixing heavy-metal sounds with a brass section, so it’s a really strange hybrid kind of music. I’m a bit scared of it sometimes, you know. I don’t know what it is.”

Have you been musically inspired by our products? We want to know, please leave us a link to your site or video as we are always looking for great content to share with our readers. In the meantime, keep rockin’!