[frank falbo]

I've also heard the Axon unit beats the Roland, but I haven't tried one myself. We just designed a new Midi pickup for them, which should be shipping in a month or so if you can wait that long. I'm hoping once they start shipping, maybe they'll send a sample our way or something so I can poke around with it.

The magnets aren't "weak" in reality. They're actually extremely strong ND's, they're just really small. Plus the two coil "mini rails" configuration makes the magnetic field highly concentrated. I would assume you could diminish or eliminate any cross-tracking from the low B by reducing the sensitivity of the low E string within your device. But in all reality you have no greater chance of mistriggering with the low B than you do any other string skipping over to a neighboring string's pickup, aside from the fact that the B is the largest string, and the most magnetically active.

[NickCormier]

Thanks Frank,

I guess I can afford to wait a month or two, to see if theres something new coming. Is this from Axon, or from your company (which is??)

[dpm]

Frank is from Seymour Duncan

I haven't tried out the Axon yet, but out of the Roland gear I've tried the GR20 tracked best, and was basically flawless in that regard during the short test I had. It tracked quarter tone bends and stuff like that without issue, and didn't have any immediately apparent lag. But it's a limited unit in terms of sounds and programming. To my knowledge Roland's synth units trigger their built in sounds with very minimal processing. The MIDI output requires more processing and lag may become more evident. I've had a good trial of a GI10, and it seemed fine, with the tiniest of latency. I assume the GI20 is better. The new VG99 is pretty spectacular and has built in MIDI conversion, but it's pricey.

I'm really curious about the new stuff Frank mentioned. Is there any word of a new Axon synth/converter too?

[NickCormier]

isnt there already a duncan one out? associated with Axon?

[frank falbo]

Yeah it has been released, it's just not shipping yet. It's a Terratec (axon) product, we just designed the pickup for them.

[NickCormier]

is it the one that says Duncan Designed under it?? I think thats the one I saw a picture of.

[jazzsinger]

I just installed an interal Roland pickup into my DeArmond seven string (three bass strings, four guitar strings) and it works pretty well. The tracking is not as good as the RMC piezo system on my Godin, but is acceptable for live Rock and Roll.

[Tymon]

I've owned all big guitar synths (roland gr33, axon, yamaha) and always got fed up by its tracking issues. A device I really love is Roland's VG-88 (or VG-8 and VG-99 for that matter). If you're unfamiliar with the concept: it also uses the GK pickup but it doesn't translate the audio to MIDI, instead it uses the 6 independent audio signals (each string) to process the sound. It gives you a bunch of synthy sounds but without any tracking issues and (very important to me) it keeps your playing nuances intact. Of course it doesn't have as many sounds as a "real" synth coud give you, but for me this is definitely worth the penalty!

[jazzsinger]

I had a friend with the VG-88. It is a very nice guitar processor that does modeling of all kinds and even allows for alternative tunings, but like you said, it's not really a synth. I suppose one could say it's almost six different guitar processors in one. I would've bought one a few years ago if I could've found a rack mount version to control via my GR 30. Instead I bought a couple of Boss VF-1's (now gone). But even though I use a guitar synth, I now prefer a small tube amp with few effects for my "real" guitar sound with the synth mostly in the background. Part of the reason I used strings, organs, pads in the background was because of tracking problems on the old guitar my internal Roland pickup was in. I could never get the pickup close enough to the saddles because of the way the bridge was made. Now that it's on my seven string guitar it seems to track a bit better so I'm trying more solo piano sounds.