Roland GR-55GK Black

I wrote the entire back catalogue for my uni band on this thing, you can literally record every instrument, even drums!

Tracking is amazingly accurate, and play a sax solo on your guitar can be really fun, but even the 'boring' guitar models on this are excellent!

The build quality is solid, and it has literally every effect you could dream of built in, with enough tweakability that I didn't even delve as deep as this pedal can go. The presets are often so good that you can plug and go, and play a whole set with them.

For performing live, I would recommend a midi footswitch to switch between banks, as the three patches that you can load at once may not be enough at times, depending on your genre.

Honestly, I personally wouldn't use this to record string/brass sections etc. to my actual recordings, but as a creative or performance tool it excels, and the sounds are still strong enough for recording high quality demos for your band.

Highly recommend, it will change the way you write music!

Roland GR-55GK Black is superb for the pro or armature guitar player, the creative opportunities are endless and it is fairly easy to use once your guitar is set up with a midi pickup. The unit is robust and well made and the viewing screen is nice and and easy to read, the pedals are nicely laid out and are silent when pressed and they are good quality. Using the unit; once your guitar is talking to the unit its ready to use, I went on the internet and followed the advice of other users on how best to set up the unit for different scenarios, there are lots of good advice and videos. The patches and sounds are a great starting point and they are easy to edit, the manual is pretty easy to understand but there is lots of help out on the web. I use the GR 55 with my HD 500 and I have linked them together via midi, the HD can change the GR patches which is superb. The sound quality is great, I use it for recording and live work, I play a Strat but can use the Gibson L 4 or 335 patch to play Jazz without changing guitars, the sound great and used to play a 335. This unit is so versatile, I'm still learning the capability's and I have only scratched the surface in this review, if you want to mainly record with this it will talk to Logic Pro via USB and trigger the midi instruments, this is awesome, I can now do piano, strings, brass anything I like and not have to depend on a keyboard player, you do have to practice and alter your technique and you ad just the velocity and touch to help with any ghost notes. This is such fun and it just opens up so much more for creating music. Thomann delivered it on time packed perfectly and I have never had any problems with anything I have bought from them.