Boss GT-3

Its a Sweet Processor! I had one oce before and sold it while in a fit of buying and sell rage(STUPIDITY).......
Some may say its dificult to edit the patches but I say its a breaze!
Roland manuals are known for being bad.
Not shure of the firmware, never try to find out...............

I love the sound quality its very clean. I never had to add any further noise supression.

I like the effects thay are usable for me and my music(Electronic ambiant crazy).

No amps just direct into the mixer.
I never try to emulate artists thats left up to the cover bands in my opinion.

Delays are awsome and modulation effects are very usefull.

I have gigged with one in the past as did my friend in our band we both used them without a hitch.

No need for a backup.

Roland is alright when it comes to support.
Never delt with them any more than to ask a dumb question.

I play very odd and effected stuff with under layers of regular sounding guitars. This effects box works well for me.
I would hunt down another if mine was stolen, or get the GT-6 to replace it.
A digital out would be nice, but the GT-6 has added that so........

THIS UNIT IS NOT FOR KIDS OR IMPATIENT WANKERS, IT CAN BE MADE TO SOUND ANYWAY YOU WANT IT, SOME OF THE FOLKS WHO HAVE HAD PROBLEMS WITH GETTING A WARM TONE OUT OF THIS UNIT WOULD BE BETTER SUITED TO HAVE METAL BOX WITH A BIG RED BUTTON THAT SAYS GO! ON IT AND NO OTHER FEATURES,

THERE HAS BEEN NO TONE i HAVE HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO RECREATE,

GREAT DO IT ALL UBIT, I CANT HELP BUT LAUGH AT THE PEOPLE WHO COULDNT GET GREAT TONE OUT OF IT, YOU CAN ONLY IMAGINE THEIR PATIENCE TO LEARN ANYTHING NEW,

IF IT WERE SUPER INCREADIBLY EASY TO USE IT WOULD HAVE NO OPTIONS

AND IF IT HAD BAD TONE BOSS WOULDNT HAVE PUT THEIR NAME ON IT,

IF YOU DIDNT LIKE THIS PEDDLE OR FOUND IT TOO HARD TO USE, KEEP WAITING FOR FISHER PRICE TO PUT OUT THEIR UBIT! :)

Somewhat involved to use...you definitely have to ead the manual to get to some of the more subtle tweaks. Once you get the hang of it, its quick to change fo your needs. Editing patches is easy.

A quick use guide to this unit: (1) AVOID THE PATCHES - build the effects yourself so you can appreciate each effect's capabilities; (2) Don't use the COSM preamps - they are pretty sterile - certainly don't use the COSM peamp in place of your own amp's pre-amp as the manual suggests. (3) Set up your distortion patches - the Distortions/Overdrives on thie unit are not COSM, but actual analog circuits and they sound really nice. These alone are worth the proce of the unit. Chorus, Dely and other modulations are OK - not awesome, not bad either. The Wah capability is nice. The compressor is only OK at verry low levels...too high and it begins to sound plastic.

I've had this for five years - its a tank.

Though I love separate effects boxes, they are a pain. You can't go wrong on this box.

this box sucks! ive had it for 3 years and can hardly get a good solid tone out of it, this thing is all about tone! pipsqueaky shit tone in fact! its good for intermediate players who havent experimented yet or if you cant play and want to hide that fact behind a wall of distortion.

not very good sound quality wise.

it is very reliable though

dont know

if you want to experiment with all sorts of sounds and modulations then sure! go ahead but for the serious player this unit will not 100 percent satisfy you, i,ve tried alot of different single effects lately and theres a couple i love! they are the dod juice box and the 308 box, now the juice box is not manufactured anymore so i got 2 of them! you may be saying to yourself at this particular moment.... dod is shit! but as a matter of fact i believe they kick boss, ass! i used to own a few individuals of those pedals and was never satisfied, try logging onto the dod effects database in harmony and just see for yourselves how the overall ratings are so much higher than boss gear plus has anyone ever heard of a pro player using the gt3 before? i,ll leave with that, bye all, p.s dont take this inscription to heart if you alredy have a gt3 im only speaking my mind and trying to help.

Well, it's not so easy to program this thing. I really had a problem with the reverb and spent two days finding what the problem is. Even a person from I bought this didn't know the answer... the problem was that in Global options reverb was set to 0. Who did this difficulty in the factory, I don't know, but this is quite stupid for me.
Anyway in general it's not so easy to edit this gt3 machine, mainly becouse it has a lot of options. It's good from one hand, and bad from the other. Basically it takes time to do sth with it that makes sense.
The manual is usefull to some degree, but mostly you will have to use your brain...

Generally speaking you can do a lot from gt3. It just take some time to combine it with your particular amp.
Basically it lacks mid frequencies and that can be a problem if you wanna get the sound of VH for example, but in my opinion anything can be done with gt3, it just can take a lot of experimenting. I got this thing about a week or so and I think that it may take me a year or so to really get the balls out of this, and undestand everything that's there inside.
It's not noisy unless you use some compressor over distortion etc. That's normall. Actually I don't use any distorted thing out of this, mostly it sucks for me. But the amp simulations works fine and you can get a lot of it combining with the amp, but as I said before it takes time to find 'the sound', a lot of experimenting with the amp and gt3 together...
The effects are good, although I lack for the knobs in delay etc. Forget about the synthesizer thing, it sucks, too much delay in what you're doing and what you get, and also you will have some strange sounds comming out of this, without the reason :-) But this is not the guitar synthesizer... 2'nd BUT I don't have a clue why they put this inside the gt3 knowing it doesn't work...
The main guitar effects like chorus, flanger, reverb, etc. even the wah are good, so for me it's better to have one machine doing this, than jump over thousands single effects with your foot.
Good thing is - you have a lot of space to do your own combinations, so you can create a separate banks for each piece of music you play, having it under your foot just changing the banks. For example one bank for heavy distorted sound, combined with the wah sound on the next peadal and flanger and chorus. The other bank may be for jazz kind of stuff etc.. Plus you can program the CTL pedal for certain thing (delay, flanger over basic sound etc).
Basically it's a good machine to explore, but you have to spend some time to understand how it works, and how to get the most of it.
I use jcm 900 combo with it but mostly connecting it directly to the PC through music card to be able to practice at night. I don't know right now how it sounds in gig situation...

have no idea

never used customer support

I play different styles for 14 years mainly using distorted sounds, but also some more simple jazz kind of stuff. Gt3 is usefull, but don't expect miracles from it, it's just some machine, quite usefull, nothing more.

I got mine used w/o the manuel. I figured it inside and out in a matter of a day. With the green screan and red lights it is simple to see what you have on and what dose what. The wheel is a good feture to scan.

Now given the fact that the patches when you first get it sound very very high and tigy. If you have any creativity in you at all. You can make anything sound awesome. I play alot of rage against the machine, tool, and othres so I need to have a wide range of sounds. I can go so far to even make synthesizer come from it (witch can sound like crap or like an actual keyboard granted you play one note at a time). Some of effects can be chopy or sound funky ie: pitch shift, but can be fixed with some pushes of the right buttons to set a tone you want. It dosen't hurt to have a good amp either. You name it. The gt-3 can make it posible if you are willing to sit down with it.

I have had few problems with it. Two time I turned it on to find that ether it didn't save what I worte on to the patches. Metal casing though. Could more or less suvive a atomic bomb.

I never had to get it fixed. Looked on line thoguh for a manuel. You need to pay $10 for it. Ha. Who needds it any way.

Nothing is perfect. But for studio, and yes even... live. The gt-3 will make you sound like the guitarist you want to be. I like to play Rage Against The Machine, 311, Tool, Led Zepllin, Fugazi, Dream Theater and many more. I have been playing for 4 years now. And play a Schecter 006 Elite with Di Marzio DP-100 brdige and a kramer dual rail neck out of *sight* a crate gfx-212t (a am on a budget. Will next TRY to buy a mesa boogie). I was debating between this and the korg ax-1500. Even thoguh it can do almost anything it is hard to make a guitar sound different than a guitar is suposed to sound. But all my friend were impresed with its effects and flasy looks (purple and yellow). I don't think I will ever sell it. It make a world of differance. If it was stolen I think I would have to get the same one back no matter what the cost b/c of all the time it took me to set up all the patches (witch was well work the one day it took).

This unit is very easy to use if you just wish to try the different presets, and tweak them with the EZ functions to control parameters. However, I did not really appreciate the versatility of the GT-3 until I began to delve into different types of guitar effects. (This was my first guitar effect, as I had never used stomp boxes before, and indeed bought this so I wouldn't have to.) The manual can be deciphered with continual reading, but the supplements to the manual available on the web were a real eye opener. If you have one of these or plan to buy one you can save yourself a lot of time by doing a bit of research. Once I understood more about how different effects worked, effect order, assign functions, etc. I found the GT-3 very easy to use to set up custom patches. I tend to set it to a few patches, and leave it for months, then try something new every once in a while. The possibilities are endless!

I currently use the GT-3 in the effects loop of my amp as follows. Les Paul Standard - Boss CS-3 -Boss P10 V-Wah - Boss GT-3 (into parallel effects loop) - Marshall JCM 601 combo.
After much research and effort trying to use the 4-cable hookup method which allows you to separate out your amp's preamp and take advantage of the GT-3's preamps, I had to admit defeat. I and others have found that this method works great with some amps, but does not seem to fit the Marshall tube amps in general. It just sucked too much tone no matter how I tweaked settings! As I prefer to use my Marshall amp's sound anyway for distortion this was not a great loss, but I would encourage all users to try the 4-cable method as it definitely allows the most versatility and access to the widest scope of sounds from the GT-3. Because the GT-3 runs after the preamp stage in my amp I purchased a separate compressor to keep at the front of the effects chain. Proper level matching in patches is essential to keeping volume consistent between patches, and also makes this unit very very quiet in use.

The following effects I use all the time: Reverb, Delay, Chorus, EQ, Com/Lim, Harmonist. I find the sound quality good to excellent.

I do not use some of the other effects such as the synth sounds, special FX, and modes as they don't sound too good through the effects loop. Also, the tracking on certain effects is poor - I think I need the software upgrade which is available. The pickup simulation offers a few possibilites, but I haven't found a great acoustic sound in the GT-3.

The wah function does not have adequate range or depth, in my opinion. The auto-wah can be used with some success. The tremolo effect is weak.

The available distortions and preamps are difficult for me to judge, as I haven't tried a lot of other amps. The clean sounds such as the JC 120, and Fender Twin are excellent, but most of the distorted or hi-gain preamp models sound just okay. I think a high quality power amp would open up a lot of possibilities, judging by what I hear playing only through my own power amp stage. I do like the MT-2 emulation using my amp on the clean channel.

I don't really try to copy other people's sounds, although I am a big Tom Scholz fan, and have tried to replicate the "Boston" patch with my amp. Still working on this one!

Overall the sound quality is very good, and I often play with the guitar and GT-3 into earphones just to play with different sounds.

This unit really shines in two areas: 1) giving you access to many of Boss's best stompboxes/sounds in one compact pedal board. 2) being able to push one footswitch and having subtle changes made to a number of effects.

My unit is set up for playing at home as follows

Main bank: all patches set up to switch into manual for 7 seconds when footswitch is pushed, allowing you to turn effects on or off individually. Expression pedal through assigns controls rates and levels of delay, reverb and chorus (heel down is everything off or very low, toe down increases levels, rates, etc). Effects used are Delay, Chorus, Harmonist, EQ, Com/Lim, Reverb. Most rates set to Master BPM and controlled through CTRL switch
Patch 1: clean patch except for Master volume and Noise suppressor (essentially bypasses GT-3)
Patch 2: chorus and reverb for rythym parts (usually on clean channel)
Patch 3: delay and reverb for distortion parts- delay time controlled by tap tempo at CTRL footswitch
Patch 4: delay, reverb, limiter, Eq with boost for leads

Other banks set up to different parameters of the same effects

I've used it live many times with no problems. I buy good stuff and take care of it, so I don't generally have backups for any of my gear. (I don't play for crowds of thousands, either :))

Boss reliability is a cliche. Great reputation for tough stuff.

Dealt with Boss a couple of times. No problems. The Toronto repair center is only 1/2 an hour away, so I am going to try and get the software upgrade to fix the Harmonist tracking problem. Had other stuff fixed quickly under warranty.

I stick to basic rock and bluesy type music, and have been playing on and off for 25 years. I don't play out that much anymore, except at church. I would definitely consider another GT-3, or a GT-6 if this one were stolen. As it is with the wah and compressor, and amp footswitch I have enough to fiddle with. I can't imagine adding several more pedals to my rig. I looked at several other products available when the GT-3 came out such as the Digitech line(originally I was going to get a GT-5), but the Boss product seemed sturdier and had a better array of features. (Remember I didn't know much about effects when I bought this) User reviews were also very positive.

My biggest complaint with this Boss product is that the manual itself is not sufficient to give you a complete understanding of the unit's capabilities. I spent a lot of time reading about effects in general before I really knew how to take advantage of the good things in this pedal and work around the less useful stuff. I think many of the reviews which rate this product poorly are due to this lack of background in the manual (ie needs more why as well as how-to.)
Also, I wish you could have 6 different effects available for control through manual mode for each patch, instead of the global setting which only allows the same 6 effects for each patch.

The pedal's best feature for my money is the ability to control so many effects' parameters with one push of a footswitch. Once you realize the GT-3 is really just a bunch of stompboxes in one unit with widely variable parameters, it is easier to understand. Instead of having to bend over and tweak 4 pedals, just push a switch and you are off! At first I was trying to set up patches according to specific songs, but now I set the patches up as "flavours", and use the manual mode to further tweak sounds during a song or set. This saves having to switch between banks too much.
Also, if the 4-cable method works with your amp, you can place effects in any order in the effects chain, use the amps' or the GT-3's preamps, and take advantage of the complete range of effects.
Overall I have been very happy with this effects processor, and recommend it both for new players trying to get a sense of what effects they would like, and experienced players who want to simplify their rigs. No product is perfect, but the GT-3 can be made to perform very well.

OK heres the deal. This is a great sounding pedalboard but you have to work at it. The menus and patches are not hard to edit but there is so much stuff in this pedal if you dont know what you are doing you can get lost. I had it for about 2 days and got it to sound great.

I use a Jackson with a EMG 81 bridge pickup,Ampeg vh140c halfstack, BBE sonic maximizer and a Rocktron hush/limiter/compressor. Like I said it takes time to get it to sound good and if you plan on using it for stage, test it at quite and loud settings. The effects are great with some signature mods like Rhaods pan. The wah is decent and the foot volume is as smooth as can be. Amp models are very almost to exact sounding and this thing is very accurate and the ODs and Distortions by BOSS. Plus the ability to mix 2 Marshalls with a distortion box is just insane. Couldnt be any better for a Metal player.

Dude if this thing was ran over by a semi it would still probably work. Ive seen on all jacked up and twisted dented you name it and it still worked.

boss gives you a free issue of guitar world if you regester your product. Boss has always been generious.

Been playing metal for 10 going on 11 years. Everything form Metallica,Slayer,Megadeth,Overkill,Testament and Ozzy. Im really happy that I got this pedal . It is like having every single boss pedal and then some to your disposal. I have heard some reviews saying its tinny,sucks and it dosent make my $20 dollar amp sound good(dosent that tell you somethin'). You need more than a great processor to get a great sound dont you think! Trust me ,you can do anything you want with this pedal. Marty Freidman(Megadeth Lead guitarist) uses the GT-6 witch has the same COSM processing engine as this pedal. I like the GT-3 over the GT-6(wich I also think its great)because its more compact and not so overwelming. Other than that there the same trust me. Boss GT-3 kills everything without mercy and makes Zooms pedals,Digitechs RPs and GenX series sound like crap.

I've own my Boss GT-3 for over 6 years now and it has gone in and out of my rig. In the late 90's I played Limp Bizkit, Korn, No Doubt, and Greenday covers. Now I play various Christian praise bands, AC/DC, Radiohead, and U2 covers. This item is pretty easy to get use to. First play around with the presets, who knows, you might like them. After that I recommend you sit down with the manual and run through the manual. Understanding the theory behind the different aspects of each effect is essential and will make you a better musician. Once you get use to making your own sounds programming is easy. One downfall is that it's hard to change settings QUICKLY, LIKE ON THE SPORT in a live environment because you have to use the big jog wheel, at first it didn't bother me but now it annoys me, I wish there was a faster way to dial in sounds. I believe the new Boss GT comes with a bunch of knobs instead of a big jog wheel which is what I wish this thing had.

I play a Squier Pro-Tone Strat w/ a Seymour Duncan JB pickup in the bridge through a Fender Blues Deluxe.

The sound quality for this thing is very good, but not great. I recommend the Boss GT-3 for people who are new to using effects or to people who need to cover a wide range of sounds. Like I said earlier I use to play Limp Bizkit and Korn which required good distortion as well as a lot of mods and effects. Now I play more U2 which requires a lot of mods and effects.

Preamps (clean and dirty preamps), OverDrives, Distortions: Generally they sounded okay. I personally love the clean sounds especially the TWIN preamp sound. As for the overdrives and distortions my favorite tones where the Marshall SLP sounds. I love British overdrive and the Boss GT-3 did a really impressive job at replicating those tones. Honestly because of the Boss GT-3's ability to replicate great Plexi tones, I now am a fan of AC/DC. The GT-3 does a decent job at replicating American distortions (Mesa, Soldano, etc.). I give the cleans an 8 out of 10, the British overdrives & distortion a 9 out of 10, and the American overdrives and distortion a 6 out of 10.

Flanger, Phaser, Chorus: Again the GT-3 does an impressive job of making good sounding mods. I give it 8 out of 10.

Tremelo: sounds okay but kinda weak. I give it a 5 out of 10.

Delay: Sounds okay but also kinda weak. I give it a 5 out of 10. I had a hard time making U2 delay sounds with the Boss GT-3. The delays even when set at its max volume could not cut through the rest of my band's mix. The only way for the delay to cut through the rest of the band was if I increased my amp's volume, which will not make the rest of the band or the sound engineer happy.

As for the rest of the effects that the Boss GT-3 offers, I really have nothing to say for them because I do not use them too much nor do I have much experience with other pedals or processor that do the same job.

This thing is very Reliable. Mine has not blackouted or erased my presets or anything like that in my 6 years of owning it. I consider this product to be physically and electronically very consistent and reliable.

Never had to deal with them, I have no say.

If you need to cover a wide range of tones and effects and do not have a huge budget then I recommend the Boss GT-3, you may want to use something else for your delays/echo sounds.

Again I love the Marshall Plexi tones and the Fender Twin tones on this thing. I think the Boss GT-3 does an impressive job at replicating these tones.

Also, this thing has helped me make music. It's got so many effects and sounds that it definitly will inspire you.

Also, this thing will cut the tone in your signal. I recommend that if you wanted to use your amp's clean tone and the Boss GT-3's distortion, you'll recognize that your clean does not sound as good if the Boss Gt-3 is in the signal path, that is why I recommend the Fender Twin sounds.

Editing patches is a hell!The manual is clear enough, but a lot of of functions makes everything so damn complicated, I don't need to spend 25 minutes to search a suitable sound, my inspiration dies.

I use Ibanez Musician '79, ESP eclipse, Yamaha AES 620, Fender Squier (for nasty sounds)and what I care more is distorted tones and this unit doesn't satisfy me at all. Crappy digital compressed distortions, almost all of them are worthless. Crappy, thinny delay, you can't use it to create atmosphere. Useless amp modeling section, neither good to play with an amp nor for recording direct. ZOOM processors take care of that! I don't comment on Wha, Whammy, Pitch-Shifter, Tremolo. Compressor, pick-up simulator,detune, chorus and reverbs are ok.

Very sturdy but heavy... also the adaptor is heavy as a rock

I play alternatve metal with melodic and atmospheric parts were delay and warm distortions are mandatory to be good. Been playing for ten years, know something 'bout tone. Good for pop rock, though, but wha is a big disappointment so you are very limited anyway. For the price I paid it 2 years ago I expected the ultimate processor, but now I will trade this 80% piece of shit for a ZOOM product, easier to edit, better distortions (I heard the gfx-4 has analog ones.