Boss GT-5 Guitar Effects Processor

I give this rating kind of conditionally, because a lot depends on what you want to do. If you want to just edit the presets a bit and go into your amp, "Hey you're there." If you want this unit to approximate all those sounds you've had in your head or heard on those records for years, it will do it, but you are going to need some patience or some inborn talent for these types of things. I say this because although the manual handles the basics - what are the effects(too many to go into), what they do(a lot!!!), and what the paramaters are (flexibility deluxe), if you are looking for advice on how to get certain kinds of sounds or suggestions you need to delve into the presets. This is particularly true of the MIDI portion, where if you don't know a bit already, forget it. No help for the uninitiated here. Being a programmer by trade, it strikes me how far behind the music industry's programmable products are in the way of documentation. Most software development tool documentation blows anything in this manual away. And that is how you get people on board. Although I will say that the presets, if you really take the time to delve into the settings, should point you in any direction you want to go. Bottom line though - anyone who can't take this thing and get at least some settings that impress someone probably still has the clock flashing on their VCR. If they say they can't find some way to make this thing useful in a musical situation, keep your eye on them - they may be the next Unabomber.

Pretty darn good. Haven't really experienced the noise some have claimed when using this, but I just may not have hit the right combination of settings and volume yet. Everyone wants to know about distortion, so here's my two cents: Tubes, schmubes, by the time you preamp, flange, delay, eq, mix cabinets and all that crap, anyone who says they can do a blindfold test and tell the difference in all but a handful of situations is either a mutant, a liar, extremely lucky, or knows the tester doing the setup and has the answers in advance. It's pretty close, and you don't have to worry about the your sound depending on some corrupt apparatchik some Eastern Europe or convict labor in the Far East, since they seem to be the only ones making tubes now. Oh, yeah, I love the fuzz, od's and plain vanilla distortions too. The acoustic guitar simulator sounds a lot like an acoustic with a bridge pickup, so if you don't have quibble with that sound, you're ok. Delay, modulation, eq, chorus, compression, etc. all ok to excellent, depending on taste. If you can't play without that old Maestro Echoplex hiss as a security blanket, this may not cut it for you, but I like it fine. Pitch shifter could be a bit better, but I like the tremolo. I do have to say that the wah is weak. Well maybe not that bad, but I'm not throwing away my cry baby. Slow gear and feedbacker I can take or leave, but since they're here, I'll probably use them. Guitar synth? Matter of taste, but I'm not complaining. The keyboard players will snicker and sneer, but you can still cover the part in a pinch. As for the speaker simulator - really good. I wouldn't want to live on the difference between some of them, but they are all useful. I currently run the unit right into the stereo so I can get a nice heavy sound without doing any damage to my forty-something ears. It also sounds great through my Carvin 100 watt combo. They say you can use the global settings to get a decent stack sound out of the combo(a little tighter), and it does the job. The fine tuning parameters for the preamp and distortions I haven't used yet, but I expect them to also be useful. Tuner is ok, but I still like strobetuners. If you are a rocker and are waiting for me to get to the noise gate, shame on you - I didn't worry about it when I was your age. If you are using I like I am, you may not even need the noise gate. You can get some really neat effects when you use the gate's extreme settings though.

This thing is built like a tank. AC cord, no wall wort. All the jacks lined nice along the back where they should be. I have a Boss Chorus that I bought in the early eighties that is stil going strong, so I have to give this a high rating. No 10, however, since being a programmer I have learned the folly of unqualified optimism. I think I could live without a backup without losing too much sleep, though.

I did talk to a techician when I was deciding on whether to buy this. Like techical support for most software and computer hardware companies, he was essentially useless on anything other than basic queries. Very nice, and tried to be helpful, but you have to remember that in any company like this, technical support is where you go until you get enough seniority to move out of the place where idiots who forget to plug the thing in or haven't even read the manual are the usual order of business. I did get a couple of useful pieces of information, however, and they helped influence me in buying the unit. I would not hesitate to call them again.

Does it sound like I like it? You bet I do. It's not perfect, but for the price, I think it's as close as I'm going to get this year anyway. The dirty little secret is that everything electronic gets faster/cheaper/better after you buy it, but no regrets here. Truth is that everything Boss makes generally has at least one good sound in it, and everything they make seems to be in this box. If nothing else, this is probably the value of the year, even if it was just every stomp box with an on/off. Specific gripes I have? Well, yeah... I wish there was a dedicated row of footswitches for manual on/off like on the RP12. That would make it a little more live gig friendly. I wish there were fewer hard coded presets and more user patches. Or maybe just all user editable patches. With 250 patches to play with you could be the musical equivalent of a terrorist with an H-bomb. If anyone out there has experience with carrying around extra patches to a gig and using a sequencer to load them in on a set by set basis, I'd like to hear from them to see how feasible this is. Maybe I should be asking this question to keyboard players, though. On the other hand, the additional inputs and outputs tend ot make up for these shortcomings. And the ability to play with the order of the effects(we don't need your steenking algorithms) is exactly what I have always wanted in one of these things. Thumbs up, way up.

Editing patches is real easy on this unit. There is one button for each of the 13 effectgroups and a big alfadial to modify the parameters and I managed to do most of the things without looking in the manual. However, I suggest you read the manual thoroughly before starting playing because there are some parameters that has to be set globally before you can get the best sound out of this unit. One cool thing I never experienced in any other unit is I could program new patches all by my feet with both my hands on the guitar. This under the condition I didn't wear shoes of course. Too bad it was impossible to use the built in expressionpedal for the programming. It would have been useful to find the right parameter setting by used moving the pedal. Twisting the alfadial is possible with your bigtoe but not as easy.
One other thing I liked is the presets for the effects. You can create new patches by just choosing among the presets of the 13 effects. Thats good for me who only gets frustrated tweaking around the para- meters. Maybe that's why I never found any real good heavyrock sound in this unit. The manual doesn't give any guidance how to set the parameters to create sounds. Else the manual is very detailed and easy to understand.

The sound is better than anything I have heard before. It was very easy to create exciting clean sounds and sounds with little distorsion. Though I had problem to create good medium or hard distorted sounds. The presets are real bad because they seem to demonstrate all the extremes but hasn't Roland always been this way. I think it it possible to get good heavy distorted sounds but you have to be patient. I'm not and I can get the sounds I want much faster with the Ibanez VA3 which I replaced the GT-5 with after one month. The VA3 gives almost the same quality of the ampsimulations but you cannot at all modify the sounds in the same way the GT-5 allows you to do.
Another cool feature is you can chose the order of the effects. discovered it to be very nice having the modulation before the amp and distorsion making the ampcharacter more distinct but still with a subtle chorus somewhere in the background.
The pitch-shifter is, eventhough it is muck better than earlier Boss pitch shifters, not that good as I would have expected after reading all Roland ads. I tried to use it for pedalpitcheffects but with no good results. The lowbudget pitchshifters still sound like Donald Duck. The autowah was also a disappointment. Actually the only autowah that I have liked was the one included in the ART SGE and that was an analogue autowah. Eventhoug this is the best digital autowah I have ever tried.
The guitarsynth (only mono) is rather fasttracking but when I tried to used is laying down basetracks it turned out to be to slow but it is really nice to be able to put down synthsolos with it.
As everyone else says it is noisy especially on highgain ampsettings and the noise is not of the character i have in the VA3. The noise in the VA3 is enjoyable but in the GT-5 it is not.
Some says the Acoustic Guitar simulator is noisy but I never experienced that. Also I never felt it simulated an acoustic guitar. It just added a softer touch to the tone for me.
The chorus/flanger/phaser is good but I prefer the ones you find in the old Alesis Quadraverb especially the Phaser. When it comes to reverbs I also would gladly exchange the one in the GT-5 with a Quadraverb.

It is built like a tank and has the weight of one also. This is one of the reasons I replaced the GT-5 since I prefer smaller and lighter units. It seams to be reliable but I only owned it for one month so I do not really know.

After 1 months I replaced the GT-5 with a Ibanez VA-3 since I thought the GT-5 was just an overkill. It has just too much for me since I dont like tweaking but if I have the possiblility I cannot keep off doing it. The VA3 is less than one third in the price, size and weight and has only the most important effects with only a few parameters. For use in a small home for someone who likes to play and hates to tweak and don't care if the sound is ultrapersonal the VA3 is perfect. If you want the possibility to create any imaginable sound and you have both the time to create it and use it the GT-5 is the right thing. If you choose between a GX-700 and GT-5 remember that though the GT-5 is $200 more expensive you in the GT-5 has a floorpedal which could be used as a main MIDI controller with a built in expression pedal and you also get some extra effects such as the monoguitarsynth.
If Roland makes this unit half the size, removes most of the stereo- effects and includes better presets for the preamp and for half the price I would highly consider buying it again.

Although this is a complex unit, the interface is suprisingly intuitive. Most Preset patches are only good for demoing the units versatility, You will want to create your own patches. Fortunately, this is straightforward. After only a few hours of use, I had figured out the interface without having to read the manual and I was creating my own patches. The unit holds 150 presets and 100 user patches, more than I will ever use. The unit is very professional, heavy construction, built in power supply (no walwart), and just about more effects packed into one space than you could ever imagine. One of the features I liked the most was that for most effects, they offer a handful of presets for the specific effect. For example, if you select "compression", you can select from presets like "light compression", or "normal compression", without having to play with three or four parameter settings. But all the parameters are still there for tweaking till your hearts content. The packaging, ease of use, and interface on this unit are well thought out and engineered very well. Bear in mind however, that this unit is very comprehensive and you must spend some time with it in order to understand and use the effects properly. If you don't have time to tweak, or you are just looking for one or two sounds, go with the discrete pedals. They are much simpler to operate.

This could be the "be all, to end all" of multi-effects guitar processors, except for one key exception: The unit can be very noisey on many effects, such as any of the high gain preamps, the HG overdrive, the compressor, and the acoustic guitar. The ring modulator and the synth sounds are just a little to strange for me. But I found the reverbs, chorus, and digital delay to be quite good. Even the Pedal Wah-Wah effect was quite usable (not quite as good as my Vox-Wah, however, but close enough to be acceptable). The pre-amp section claims to "emulate" different pre-amps such as Fender Twin, Marshall, Mesa, Matchless, Soldano, etc. And although these preamps do color the sound differently, there really isn't a substitute for the real thing. If you have a $200 solid state amp, there is no way it is ever going to sound like a cranked up Marshall stack or Twin. However, the pre-amp selection can give different "personalities" to a good sounding tube amp. There are also many different selections of overdrive and distortions. All the way from natural, vintage, blues and crunch to metal. You can even customize two different distortions and two pre-amps. The variable expression pedal is quite useful for controlling different parameters (I think you can control up to eight different ones at once). I use it to change the reverb density, or the tremelo speed. My only disappointment is the noise. If it weren't for this, it would be pedal nirvanna. The acoustic guitar is so noisey it is not usable. If you turn off the noise suppressor, and you use any of the distortion or preamp effects at moderate to high gain, the noise is very high and annoying. If you leave the noise suppressor on, the tail end of the notes will waver on/off as they approach the noise threshold. If I were the BOSS engineers, I would figure out how to improve this in the next version of this pedal. If it weren't for the noise, I'd rate this unit a 10.

Seems to be very reliable

n/a

I will buy the next version when they fix the noise problem. The manual mode seems pretty useless. This could be made more usable by giving it some more programability. but I don't really see this as a problem since the non-manual mode gives you quick access to most of what you need. I also own a Digtech RP-10. This unit beats it hands down on all catagories except the reverb. The RP-10's reverb was one of the best I have ever heard. The RP-10 was also quite noisey, and not as intuitive. If BOSS fixes the noise problem, and tweaks the reverb just a little, this unit will be just about the perfect floor multi-effects pedal.

Starightforward to get started, and the preset patches offer many very uasble sounds. good sales assistant helps the prospective buyer here - for example, the global tone setting needed adjusting to get a good sound to my ears, and its not the first thing you'd look at. Nevertheless, basically easy to get on with. The manual could usefully give examples of setting things - I have yet to sit down and address 'target settings' for example

Very good quality to my ears - streets ahead of a Zoom for example. The more I play with it, the more good sounds I find. There is a Hendrix-influenced one for example which almost gets you there. Overall, quiet where applicable, and it generally feels like you're playing what it is emulating. I reckon the simulations are superb, and the modulations up there with the best. The synth and acoustic guitar sounds are useful.

Appears to be well-built, one of the reasons I bought it. To be honest, apart from a few leads, I've never had anything go down on me, so it is unlikely to get tested to the limit!

I'd definitely recommend it. It looks and feels good. It stays on the floor, where it should be. An advantage over so many other products is the ability to name patches - A39 never means anything to me! I had a Zoom 4040 - it sounds rubbish in comparison. I have a superb amp which shows off the depth of sound (Peavey Duel), and have some good stomp boxes to compare. Unless I was being extremely fussy, the Boss has it all and expands your complete set-up. I find it helps my playig as it inspires. I especially like the ability to have an alternate within each patch - e.g. kick in Wah - which is about as much as you'd do in many songs. The only shortcomings as far as I can see are that you can't stomp the tuner or Group settings. I'd love to receive ideas of patch settings from other users.

This is a follow-up to my past review.
With further use. I stick by most of my comments. The vibrato effect is much better than I have prviously commented, and is every bit as good as that found in the Boss VB-2 pedal. The reverb still proves to be weak.
But the biggest reason I am writing again is to inform anyone who is interested in using the unit in performance... Yes, there is the option to change patches and/or do manual On/Off switching of up to five effects (one for each pedal) in real time. The user can choose which of the 13 effects they want to assign to each pedal for manual operation. However, this is a global setting, and does not change, and is not save-able within individual patches. This is a BIG minus, as a user may want to control five different effects in one patch or another. I have spoken to the tech staff at Boss, and they think that this might very well be an overlook on the part of the engineers. I am working around this in a limited way, by having to keep the same 5 pedal assignments but altering their individual setting by patch, as an effect type like MOD(ulation) has many sub-varieties. I certainly hope that Boss will address this problem soon.

The unit is well laid out, and relatively easy to use. I give it an 8 due to the event that I had to refer to the manual a couple of times. But to be fair, it is a fairly involved multi-purpose unit, and any unit with this amount of features would take some time to learn. I think the interface is very well done. To get the best sounds does take quite a bit of tweaking, but at least it's not so hard to control. The patches have a decent amount of editable parameters, all of which make sense, and often imitate what we're all used to from standard stomp boxes. The maunual explains everything, but not in the best sequence. Within two hours I basically had 85% of the unit's operations down.

The sound quality is good. I am yet to find a multi-effect unit that sounds as good as decent stomp boxes through a combo amp. Some of the effects are way too subtle, like the vibrato for example. And some are very wierd. And some just don't seem to cut it, even where one would expect in a digital multi-effect unit... I'm talking mostly about the reverb, which is limited, and doesn't sound very liquid at all. So far, with some tweaking, I've gotten the distortions to sound O.K. through my amp, but it took some work... and no matter how much someone or some company says their pre-amp setting sound like the real thing... the real amp at the real setting, there is no way any analog or digital processor can duplicate the sound or a real good tube amp at any setting. I did not purchase it for pure tone, but more as a means of programmability and convinience. (Also, don't try and use the control pedal for wah, it does it digitally, and the response is delayed. The control pedal is good for overall volume and stranger effects such as pitch shifting and delay or reverb amounts.)

Hard to determine, as the unit is brand new... but it is very well made, in a sturdy metal box, with a strong power cord to an internal power supply. We'll see what time tells. I wish it came with a carrying case (esp for the price.) To be honest, it seem like a complex unit that has the potential for problems, but it seems well made, and comes from a company with a good reputation.

When I was trying to get information before purchasing the unit, they were very helpful, although not too knowledgable, siting the newness of the unit. They were reachable, however, and I'm relatively confident that support will be adequate.

In summary, I think it will be a very convenient and useful unit. It will never replace a good amp and real pedals, but one should not get it for this reason. Get it to have you biggest possible imagined pedalboard set-up in a small and rugged single stompbox.