A complete beginners adventures with GR5 Pro and X1?

You have the attention of my furry ears

I'm gonna drop the demo link early so if anyone wants to take a look it's here. It's a fully functional version that lasts 30 minutes which isn't nearly enough time to check out so be set up to play as soon as you open the program. You can download it again later but that's a PITA. http://www.native-instrum...r-rig-5-pro/?page=2514

You may notice your registered version of GR4 that came with X1 claims to be a full version but that is not the case. You need to purchase the UPGRADE ($99) as opposed to the UPDATE ($79). This caused some confusion for me. Just getting that out of the way.

Hi, david. I would forget how things happened and probably not bother if I did it that way. Still undecided as to how in depth I'll go with this one. Cheers.

I always reboot after stuff like this so after that I opened GR5 as a standalone just to see what was up. It took about 30 seconds or so for it to fully load as the program was importing all the sounds and whatnot. I wanted to make sure this wasn't going to be how long I waited every time I opened it so I closed it and reopened it. No delay this time. Just to be sure I rebooted and reopened the program. Didn't have to wait. It opened almost instantly. On first startup of the program I see all the menus and the loaded modules are in sequence Tapedeck Pre. Metronome, Preset Volume, Tapedeck Post, Master Effects.

I see that all of those modules were linked to buttons above the amp/effects window. Clicking those buttons make them appear/go away. The only thing that was not being displayed was the tuner.

Well after about a whole thirty seconds of trying I can't seem to figure out how to get GR5 to take input from my interface as a standalone so I'm gonna just go ahead and load it into X1 and see what happens.

I love presets. Often when I am using a plugin for the first time or even later I will try a preset. If it doesn't do what I want I adjust it until it does. It also gives me a good idea what the experts think would be good for a particular use.  I also make my own. 

I also rely on synth patches. I would hate to have to roll my own all the time. 

  

@ampfixer... Yeah, I'll check them out too as I'd like to describe them so maybe I'll find some gold but I inevitably end up spending ages trying to tweak those things to my liking and just make a mess of it all. lol... As I said though I do like looking at them and seeing what the different modules do. I did this a little with GR4 and learned a lot. Still didn't find anything usable for my purposes but it helped me create my own set ups. Cheers!

@John... Sorry, didn't see you up there, buddy. I hear ya and for most of this fancy computer recording stuff I'll likely be relying heavily on presets but when it comes to guitar tone I gotta dial my own crud in. I've got a, uh, unique way I like things to sound and it cuts real hard. Looks like I'm gonna be able to achieve at least one of my sound goals after messing around for a bit. I will explain later. I wanna check out another amp I bought this silly thing for. I hope you are well.

Alright... so I tested out the two amp sims that I wanted this thing for. The Van 5150 (Peavey 5150 sim) and the High White (Hi Watt sim). I've used both of these amps extensively in real life and they are my faves so I wanted to see what GR5 would do with them. Not bad. They were still a little more squishy squashy than I like but I'm sure with some eq'ing and tweaks I can work that out to a reasonable level. With the 5150 I managed to completely dial in my old metal tone relatively easily and didn't need to add any extra modules to make it happen. All the dials worked and responded as they would on the real thing so I noodled with those for a bit and got it sounding pretty good and then went down to the cab module and messed with the mic and room faders. Sounded pretty close to a recording I did years ago through a 5150 in a big ole soundroom so that was pretty impressive. Done deal on the 5150. I'll get tons of use out of that one. The Hi Watt wasn't so easy. Anyone who's played one knows how bright and responsive they are so it's hard to expect that out of a sim but GR5 did an okay job of it... but only okay. It took quite a bit of tweaking but I managed to get a semi decent Townsend sound going. Then I started messing around for a nice blues tone (which is going to be super important for me) and eventually I got kind of a cleanish Hendrix sound and a Yardbirds type sound. Still wasn't great so I decided to try and find that room module I've seen in the vids and some of the presets. But instead I found the Fast Comp. Tossed it first in line of the module window and kapow... my blues sound came much more alive. Not nearly as good as a real amp but it was getting there. I'm sure I can tweak it out some more with some of the other effects and with ProChannel or other X1 stuff but yeah... not nearly real amp quality. No complaints though. So the two amps I really needed pretty much did what I wanted. Hooray!

Oops... I spoke too soon. After leaving the menu I had saved the amps in I could no longer find my presets. I looked all over the place and nadda. I punched in the keyword I had used for both into the little GR5 menu search. Nuthin'... until I started poking around the menus with the keyword still in the search bar. Somehow they popped up out of nowhere. Not sure what I did but they popped up in the lower preset menu. I created a new tag in the Presets Attributes menu by right clicking and selecting "Create a new tag". I punched in my keyword and then dragged both presets into that tag/folder. Now I can find them easily. Oof... that was stressing me out. Still didn't need no steenkin' manual to figure it out though. Peace.

I've just caught up with your GR5 ramblings Beep. You seem to be reasonable impressed with it, is that right?

I am embarrassed to admit that I bought GR5 before I realised that X1 was bundled with GR4 LE. Too late to do anything about that now lol.

I've had a bit of a play with GR5 myself. I only have a humble Gibson SG Special (I think that Special stands for cheap). When I used to play in a band, the other guitarist used to complain about my sound, and he was probably right. I couldn't afford a proper amp at the time, but I did have a GT-5, and I probably relied on that too heavily to create "my sound," so to speak.

Anyway, that's history now, and I am glad to say that I am now able to ditch the rather old hat GT-5 and use GR5 instead. I tried a few of the presets at first, but decided to ditch them in favour of experimenting with much simpler "set-ups." I've just been dragging in a head/cabinet combination and sticking just one or two pedals on the input side.

I'm no expert, and I can only use my own untrained ears, but I like what I hear. It's quite interesting really, because I have recorded a couple of different guitarists in my home studio over the years, and they absolutely insisted that I mic'd their rig, and refused point blank to DI.

Surely GR5, and similar software tools, must be changing this attitude amongst guitarists. The benefits are so obvious, the biggest one being that the recorded audio track is clean and you can play with different sounds after the fact. Just brilliant in my opinion.

Anyway, thanks again for your writings...

cheers

andy

So I'm not gonna do a detailed update today (sorry... I forgot) but I did hammer out some decent presets of my own last night and learned quite a bit about managing GR5. The one little tidbit I'm gonna drop here for now is USE THE GATE FEATURE! It is soooooo useful. I am not talking about the gate modules I am talking about the integrated gate. It is the little button/knob above the module window that says Gate. Set your sound. Stop playing or making noise with your guit for a few seconds with the guitar volume set to where you want. Then click on the Gate knob. It will learn your at rest levels and cut out any noise. It makes everything wicked clean and is SOOOOO much easier than dialing in your own gate. I have tons more to say but I want to do other stuff. I'll have some reviews on a few amps and settings next time. Cheers!