Boss GT-8
I broke down and bought a Boss GT-8. I had run up against tweaking limitations with the GT-6 and finally decided to go for it. Immediate knee-jerk review is that it sounds great, a substantial improvement over the GT-6. Other things:
- The GT-8 does two amp models at a time, giving you a nice big stereo sound.
- The patches sound more full and natural.
- The synth patches (wave, sitar, etc) are actually responsive and playable. (On the GT-6 you could make noise with them but they frequently missed notes if you played at anything above a really slow speed.)
- It's black and looks sexier.
- The effects chaining makes more sense, particularly that it has a standalone compressor/limiter outside of the effects chains. It always pissed me off on the GT-6 that in order to use the compressor or limiter you had to give up an effect slot.
The bad:
- The acoustic guitar sim presets still sound like tinny crap. Maybe I'll be able to tweak it into usability but I'm not optimistic.
- The Output defaulted to JC-120 instead of Line/Headphones so I had a little "uhh why does this sound like total garbage?" moment, which I assume would be way worse for someone new to amp sims.
I'm very happy with it though I'll need some real time programming it to know the full score.