George Vodden of Illinois is the winner of the Steve Stevens autographed G-5 VG Stratocaster. In this video, Gary Lenaire of BOSS and Roland guitar products, congratulates George and sends off the prized guitar. The Roland & BOSS team is currently working on the next giveaway, and YOU could be the next winner!

Related links and articles:

• Win a Steve Stevens Autographed G-5 Strat
• Steve Stevens V-Guitar Experience Interview
• New Product: G-5A VG Stratocaster, Built in the U.S.A

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’!

Related links and articles:

• Michael “Nomad” Ripoll Artist Page
• Bubby Lewis Explains the VB-99
• Steve Stevens Demos the G-5 Strat

In this video Steve Stevens demonstrates the Roland G-5 V-Guitar and the plethora of sounds it covers. We could continue to write about the demo but it wouldn’t give justice to Steve’s  talent or the product so just check out the video.

The G-5 features the following guitars and tunings:

MODE knob: 5 types

N: Normal (non-modeling mode)
S: Stratocaster
T: Telecaster
H: Humbucker
A: Acoustic

TUNING knob: 6 types

N: Normal tuning
D: Drop D
G: Open G
d: D Modal
B: Baritone
12: 12-string guitar

Guitar legend Steve Stevens is perhaps best known for his nearly 30-year association with ‘80s icon Billy Idol and his pyrotechnic playing on Idol tracks such as “Rebel Yell” and “Eyes Without a Face.” Additionally, Stevens boasts an impressive resumé of achievements as both a solo artist and sideman, working with a diverse range of artists, including such greats as Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, Vince Neil and many others. In 1986, his contributions to the Top Gun soundtrack earned Stevens a Grammy Award. Join Roland, Guitar Center and Steve Stevens for an evening of insight, discussion and live performance.

Published on May 24, 2012 by Rolandmedia

Location: Guitar Center #110 7425 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90046

When: Thursday, November 8, 2012

Live streaming here via GuitarTV.com. Live streaming begins at 7:00pm EST

7-7:30pm: Steve Stevens V-Guitar demonstrations
7:30-8:00pm: Q&A with Steve, autograph session

Giveaways include:

Roland G-5 Strat autographed by Steve Stevens
Roland Micro Cube guitar amp
BOSS TU-10 Clip-On chromatic tuners
Lots of T-shirts

V-Guitar 2012 World Tour:

9/22 Calgary
10/2 Nashville
10/4 Birmingham
10/6-7 Copenhagen
10/10 Redmond
10/11 Portland
10/12 Keizer
10/17 Torrance
10/25 Budapest
11/3 Sterling
11/5 San Antonio
11/6 Austin and Warsaw
11/8 Hollywood
11/10 Albuquerque
11/13 Pensacola
11/15 West Seneca
11/17 Fukuoka
11/18, 22-23 Tokyo
11/24 Saitama
11/25 Osaka

Links and related articles:

Michael “Nomad” Ripoll Demos the Roland G-5 V-Guitar
Billy Duffy (The Cult): How I Discovered My Signature Sound
Mike Scaccia (Ministry): How I Got My Tone

Michael Ripoll is a monster player who presently is the Musical Director for Baby Face and Chris Mann. Michael does tons of session work as well. (He recently played on the soundtrack for MIB III.) In this video, Michael demos the different guitar models and tunings found in the Roland G-5 VG Stratocaster. (He is also pairing the V-Guitar with the Roland GA-212 amp.)

More of Mike:

• Twitter: @michaelripoll 
• Facebook: Nomadsplace
• Blog: iLikeNomad.com
• YouTube: Nomadsplace

Related Articles:

• Billy Duffy (The Cult): How I Discovered My Signature Sound
• Mike Scaccia (Ministry): My Pedals
• Mike Scaccia (Ministry): How I Got My Tone