The Roland GR-30 is an older, but still quite useful, guitar synthesizer. It is my weapon of choice for working on my entry in the Roland Guitar Synth Challenge.

Right now I’m using the GR-30 to broaden my sound palette with the band, but I have also used it in church services over the last few years. Sounds that I’ve found useful in this context are synth lead, violin, piano, bass, a couple of different organ voices, flute, clarinet, a couple of different sax voices, and a couple of different trumpet voices.

For the contest I expect to use some of those voices and also use the drum set voices. The plan right now is to layer drums, bass, rhythm, and lead instruments using the BOSS RC-50 looper. I’m thinking that if I can find a cheap and easy way to synchronize multiple video tracks into a single video track I’ll probably not produce a “live looping” kind of thing but will instead go for a multi-cell view with me playing various tracks in the cells, and the cells being shown as a matrix in the video. Easier to show than describe.

As I make progress in this I’ll probably expand this article in addition to documenting the progress on my blog.