Anyone Have Trouble With Their Roland GR-33?

[JohnnyMan]

I bought a used Roland GR-33 guitar synth and a Roland-ready Strat on eBay and I’m having difficulties with the GR-33.

While I am playing it seems to fire wrong notes randomly. Usually it is a very high-pitched note. I am confident it’s not my technique because a random note fired just after I played a "good" note and I had done nothing, i.e. I did not move, touch a string, or anything. I played the note, the synth played the correct pitch and then immediately afterwards played the high-pitched note.

Has anyone else seen this and if you have, were you able to correct it and how did you do it?

Interestingly I have an old Roland Alpha-Juno-1 keyboard synth and it used to do the same thing!

Could this be common to Roland midi gear?

 

[mixmkr]

I do not have a Roland ready strat..just the GK2A pickup on one, but did find out setting the pickup height and sensitivty was pretty important. And...I would also get some untriggered notes on occasion, but felt it was my fault in almost all situations. Potentially it might be a sensitivity setting on the GR33 that you might need to adjust. Have you fiddled any with that?

I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt on your "cleanliness of playing" too, but you DO have to play very clean to not trigger false stuff. I can vouch for that.

 

[dragonworks]

What's "play clean"?

 

[JohnnyMan]

I do not have a Roland ready strat..just the GK2A pickup on one, but did find out setting the pickup height and sensitivty was pretty important. And...I would also get some untriggered notes on occasion, but felt it was my fault in almost all situations. Potentially it might be a sensitivity setting on the GR33 that you might need to adjust. Have you fiddled any with that?

I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt on your "cleanliness of playing" too, but you DO have to play very clean to not trigger false stuff. I can vouch for that.

Mixmkr,

I know exactly what you mean and I initially put all the blame on my technique and myself.

But after a while of playing I noticed that these notes would fire immediately after I struck the correct note I played and without my participation. I mean I did not bend the string, let it go, anything. While I was writing the post last night my wife asked me what I was writing so I explained to her and then showed her. I played this quarter note riff I was working on (that she has heard over and over before ) and the synth would follow along with what I was playing but also would fire notes that were sometimes ½ step flat, or a completely wrong note – (i.e. not near the note what I was playing), or an extremely high-pitched note. I was recording the midi data during the performance and these bad notes showed up there as well.

The only thing I have done with sensitivity is set it to high. Maybe I'll to play with this some more but I found it curious that this same midi-related ailment resembled my old Roland synth’s malfunction.

John

 

[JohnnyMan]

What's "play clean"?

You know dragonworks, it’s when you play your guitar and no vulgarity comes out of it. You definitely do not want any warning labels stuck on your instrumentals.

 

[mixmkr]

You might try turning the sensitivity down a bit, and I found that it might also vary from string to string. Hopefully that might help. Otherwise, I don't have a clue. Maybe try another one in a store and see what happens using your Strat.