Roland GR-55S Black

I have in conjunction with a Godin guitar with Synth access.

There are so many features in this device reading the manual is a must and you have to calibrate the pick up to make it work properly.

The sound shipped are very good and you can make adjustments in order to build your preferred sound, this is based on guitar modelling, synthesized instruments and on the sounds and effects shipped with the unit, it would be amazing if you could create your synth sounds from scratch or load them from your computer, don't get me wrong, you can modify thousands of sounds but I feel they will always have a kind of roland "signature"

In the other hand it can be used as a MIDI interface and there are so many features like phrase looping, playback audio from a USB pen drive, alternative tunings, guitar models to choose from... etc, it is a worthy purchase.

You may need to adjust your technique and execution to get the most of some sounds and this can be a bit weird at first, at some point you may need to change your mind from guitar player to a sythesizer player using a guitar as interface.

I bought the Roland GR-55S in order to expand my vocab as a gigging bassist, and ultimately with the aim of supporting/covering for our keys player.

I am no expert - but it appears to me that this unit is easy enough to use, and my bass tracks well with the Roland midi pickup. Support and forums are available and they have both been helpful. I intend to spend more time getting into the functionality, but the basics are certainly easy enough.

I have only rated the "sound" as 4 stars as some of the presets aren't usable FOR ME. Also, I found that the quick editing of patches to be a little limited, but this is probably my ineptitude.

A great function is the ability to change tunings of strings - this is something that works well and opens up huge new possibilities in my playing.

Definitely worth it. Thomann delivered it basically instantly too