Roland GP-8

Easy to use across the board. The editing and midi features are especially easy.

There are 8 effects - all of which are tied to the boss product line. I have been using this for 12 years and have yet been interested in changing, so that proves I enjoy the sounds. Only complaint is the distortion can exhibit a lot of white noise.

I never have had a problem. It still has the original battery!

They're fine. They continue to carry parts for this dinosaur (battery, ECC cable for connection to a fc-100).

I play a lot of styles of music and I enjoy the organic qualities of the sounds. The number of sounds that you can create is literally infinite. I've enjoyed it. You can now find these machines on e-bay for under $200 consistently. An incredible value at that price.

The Distortion is okay but not a thrill. I use my Marshall Boost channel and that needs no further description (or does it ?!)
Delay and Chorus are fine and the most important thing:
This digital rack machine does NOT affect the original amp sound (at least I didn' hear any difference). Very important, as my amp has only a serial FX-Loop.

The GP-8 is a Multi-FX-Processor built about 10 years or more ago and can be used for creating all the basic sounds you need including Distortion and features 128 programmable sound patches. The included effects can only be used in a fixed order but that doesn't matter much.
There's a choice of 6 serial effects like compressor, OD, Distortion and a 3-band EQ, followed by a serial FX-Loop and 2 parallel FX: Delay and Chorus (Stereo possible).
At home I use it as a preamp and with my band I switch the 2 parallel FX (behind the GP-8's FX-Loop) into the serial FX-Loop of my Marshall amp.
Each sound patch can have individual FX, Master Volume and Footswitch Out settings (for switching the channels of the amp).
The patches can be changed with a Roland foot conroller or a MIDI switchboard.
Disadvantage: there's no MIDI Out switching possibillity, which doesn't matter for me.

The battery for saving the patch settings should be changed every 7 years. I've had it for 9 years and still the same battery. I may have to change it soon.

Had nothing to do with them yet

The GP-8 is a reliable rack component and flexible enough for different types of setups. If I had to buy a new Multi-FX-processor for my band setup only I would rather prefer something with only those FX I need and perhaps a noise gate would be nice.

Sort of esay but mostly its easy one you pick it up

AMAZING......
If you have a fender delux amp, and are dissapointed with the distortion on it, get one of these!!! Turn on the distortion and the equalizer with full bass little mid and adjust trebble for severity. And whatch the shredding sound the heavy metal sound!

100 percent unless you have shit seymore duncan picups that are from the 80's and are rustted:)

9/10 The phase isn't to good

Very easy to use and manipulate and edit the patches.

I use a few guitars, including a Les Paul Custom, Tele, and custom Stratocaster, with a Mesa Boogie combo at the moment. The main thing I love are the clean sounds...they're awesome! The digital chorus sounds are very nice and you can tweak some of the delays quite easily to get that Robert Smith of the Cure sound. The distorions can be quite harsh, but they can be tweaked to your liking. The main thing about the compressor and the overdrives is the sustain they produce, especially with the Les Paul or the Duncan Hot Rails in my Strat. It really can sustain forever, and it's just awesome! With my Les Paul, I tap into some Phase and play along to The Clash's "Rudie Can't Fail" and it does the job nicely. The chorus and digital delays are pretty much like BOSS pedals, except I have a ton of sounds for the price of one pedal, and I think this sounds a little bit warmer.

Yes, I can depend on it. I have to use it without a backup since I can't get another one. I think I should change the battery though. I think this one's from '87 or so and it's already mounted, so it's been used a lot.

I still prefer natural tube overdrive, but when I need extra sustain, I use the comp or one of the overdrives and it's sustain is just unreal. But this is definitely what I use for quality clean tones. The chorus and delays are all nice and VERY clear, without being brittle. I can cop an '80's Cure sound or some Clash stuff with a little tweaking of the patches. Plus, I got mine for a hundred bucks. This could possibly be the "one piece of gear I can't live without."

Not hard to get the hang of it. I like the fact that you can turn the effects on and off easily, then start messing with the parameters.I've used it for everything from fusion to heavy metal

Okay. Skipping the "dynamic filter" and phaser which I never use, I have found a lot of great tones between the compressor, overdrive and distortion. The chorus is essentially the same as the JC 120 chorus or one of the boss pedals and is useable until you can get something better. Almost any rackmount digital chorus/delay is better and cleaner. However the gp-8 will probably always be part of my sound because the all analog signal path is great and the overdrive/distortion sounds very warm and fat for my taste. I have tweaked this thing to sound like many amps out there. I use it with a mesa-boogie 50/50 power amp and a Qusdraverb in series and get tons of cool sounds. One thing notable is that there is an effects loop after the distortion and EQ section and before the Chorus/Delay section. It's very cool to use this little bit in the effects loop of a boogie or any other favorite amp or to put another amp in the effects loop of the GP-8 for further tone shaping!

The Gp8 really needs a tube power amp to sound good though. It's really amazing what just this combination alone will do. The FC 100 I use to control my whole rack with and it's cheap, but I have two of them and two cables. If someone drops an amp on the cable, you just lost your whole rig because you can't find those cables anywhere. I use the ev-5 with it and if you set it to delay effect level paramater you can play a solo and slowly bring up the delay at the end of the line which is really great. Also setting it to the amount of distortion is a lot of fun. you can start with a bluesy sound at the beginning of the solo then slowly go up to full shred as the band follows you and build your solo.

Just replace the battery every 5 years or you will lose all of your patches. I kept mine in longer like 7 years and I didn't lose them but you never know. I've played all over the world and it's never dogged out on me. The midi system exclusive data dump recieving and sending dogged out after 6 years though. bummer.

Roland is a way huge corporation. They give you service but do not have the "hungry viewpoint" anymore in terms of servicing working musicians. It will get fixed but not in the time you want.

I would probably buy another one as I have used this one for 13 years now and every concievable type of gig and it hasn't failed me. It can't compare to a lot of more expensive amps and preamps but has a lot of great sounds and bang for the buck. I recommend it.

This is an exceptionally easy effect unit, with eight simultaneus effects, which include a dynamics filter with slightly more adjustability than the Electro Harmonix Q-Tron, a compressor which tends to add a little noise and has slightly arcane settings yet sounds great, an overdrive with with drive amount and a selectable Super-drive, a very usefull distortion with incredibly good colour and tone which is also very flexible, an incredibly transparent phaser with straightforward settings, a 1000 ms delay which sounds extremely clear, and a chorus which sounds extremely smooth and is highly modifiable. In addition you can select the (optional) FC-100's footpedal switch (And no you don't need an EV-5 specifically, any volume pedal will work) to modify parameters. Very straight forward. The Manula was great. Bought this rack again after unwisely selling it for an Alesis QV2. This time around no manual and no FC100 (A must have)...

Sounds excellent, especially the distortions sound better than most of the pedals I have ever owned. Fully able to crunch, sound warm, sound cutting, or full on fuzz. Phaser is extremely transparent without artifacts and really adds to the sound. The dynamics processor is very dynamic and can do an up or down dynamics filter, great for Disco or wild Sound efex, although it can cause distortion on peaks which muddies up the sound a bit. The Compressor does an excellent job, however isn't as sophisticated as newer compressors, and also tends to really bring up noise levels if sustain is too high. The overdrive is superb, the delays are crystal clear and musical, and the chorus can mutate the sound wildly. I was even able to get spacey hall reverb from extreme settings.

This is a very dependable unit built to take a beating. It's a full length unit that puts out a ton of heat, so it's a good idea to keep it in the open or at the top of a rack since the heat it generates could bother other units. I would definately use this unit without a backup, it's a workhorse.

Never tried to get support, although now I have just repurchased it without manual or foot controller I am going to be trying soon.

If anyone has a manual and could let me know what the external control jacks are for I'd apreciate it a ton! Contact info below...

I do electronica, and use effects on everything from guitar to drum machines and have owned this unit previously. It is extremely musical and adds an excellent depth to guitar, and other gear as well. I have used it on vocals, keys, bass and it adds an awesome depth to all of them. A rock solid performer, with fewer effects but a much higher musicality that digital effects seem pretty short on.

Easy is not the word for it. I love this little processor, an unbelievable unit! It has the basic presets and makes every other processor I have used look like rocket scientry.

A little bit noisy at higher settings, but other than that, studio quality sound. From Heavy Metal to blazing solo's this processor is the BALLS. I am currently using an '92 Gibson Les Paul Studio, an Ibanez RG270 (w/ a Seymour Duncan Sreamin Demon), and a Carvin MTS3212 1/2 Stack...and this processor is the Cherry on top! I have been able to mimic sounds on the Johnson Millenium Amp.

D-E-P-E-N-D-A-B-L-E!!! I had stopped playing guitar for a little while and needless to say it still works. Not that I didn't play the Guitar occasionally, but I stored the processor in a garage w/o heat!! Let me tell you, I live in New England and the winter gets pretty cold, but the GP-8 still works!

I play a little of everything and I appreciate having the tools to do so. I have been playing guitar for about 14 years (off and on) and I would say that this is the BEST peice of equipment I have ever owned. I would replace this processor, DEFINITELY!

This unit's a breeze. I've got an Ensoniq DP/2 as well and I still haven't figured that one out completely yet. This was the first rackmount FX-unit I bought and from what I can tell, the effects are pretty much top-notch. Some of them are not as useful as the others. Since I play pretty extreme metal the distortions are pretty useless for me, and noisy when turned up. Keep in mind though, that they are not suitable for my playing style. I found them just remarkable for a bluesy, overdriven lead tone and jazz stuff. I haven't quite figured out what the dynamic filter is good for in the GP-8. Haven't used it much though, the one in the DP/2 mops the floor with the GP-8. I haven't got the manual, I learned to operate the machine with the help of a magazinereview and I made some inquiries in the net also (Thanks Pedro!).

The digital delay and chorus kick ass! I recorded some guitar in stereo and the sound, oh the sound. It is to die for. The flanger and phaser are allright, nothing to remark really. Compressor sucks, but that's not a problem for me since I've got a separate comp. in my rack.

I got it used, along with the fc-100 and the ev-5 and my guess is, this thingamajig has seen a lot of owners in its time. Yet there is not even a scratch on the machine. Probably more due to wellbehaving owners than sturdiness, but it seems solidly built and it hasn't failed me yet.

I've been playing for six years now. Mostly extreme metal, getting more and more technical. This unit was not built for this kind of music (hell, this music didn't even exist when the GP-8 came out) so I use it mainly for chorus, delay, phasing, flanging and a bit of eq. My buddies and me have a small home studio where we tape our own (and other peoples) music. This unit has been used for guitar, vocals and bass and the result has always been satisfactory. If it were stolen I think I'd buy it again (provided someone is willing to sell) mainly because of the fact that I'd probably end up paying more for a bunch of pedals which aren't that good anyway. I wish the parameter increments would be shown in "real life" terms, for example, the eq goes from -50 to +50. 50 what? It would have been better to know which frequency range you're adjusting and how many decibels you're knocking on or off.

If you have had any experience with rack gear at all, you will be figure out 95% of all the features on the GP-8 without the manual. It is pretty straight forward. The only thing I have ever had problems with is loading all the system data via midi. I have owned two GP-8s and encountered difficulties while doing this with both units, hence 2 point deducted.

Analog, analog, analog..... what can I say but analog. The sonic quality of this unit is unmatched, especially by today's thin sounding digital processors. Here is the honest truth folks: I purchased a Roland GP-100 to replace the GP-8 in my rack. I decided I would sit down and figure out the patches in my GP-8 and then recreate them with the algorithms in the GP-100. Guess what? I couldn't do it. The sound of the GP-8 was just richer, warmer and fuller... like velvety cream, thick and rich (I used that adjective already, didn't I?). No matter how much I tweaked the parameters on the GP-100, I couldn't match the sound. Now, I must say that I did come up with some pretty interesting sounds on the GP-100 in the process, but I was unable to duplicate the sounds of the GP-8. To make a long story short, I decided to keep the GP-8 in my setup along with the GP-100. There is a little noise in using the GP-8, but I use it in an effects loop with a noise gate which pretty much eliminates that issue for me.

I think these units are built to last. I purchased a second one used not too long ago and the guy who shipped it didn't pack it very well and it saw an incredible amount of abuse while in transit. When I opened the box and pulled the unit out the rack ears were all bent up... one of them was completely flattened against the side of the metal housing. It took a little bit of muscle to get it straigtened out, but I never have had a single functional problem with the unit despite the rough handling.

I have dealt with Roland a couple of times for parts, etc. They were helpful, but not outstanding.

Would I replace this piece if something happened to it? Yep. Especially since you can find good deals on this due to their age. I know that a lot of guys go chasing after units that offer a zillion and one effects, but honestly I would rather have eight that are outstanding (like the ones in the GP-8) rather than one hundred mediocre ones. This is a great processor for any rock guitarist. I have owned processors from Korg, ART, DigiTech, DOD, Ibanez and this pretty much tops anything in its era (except maybe the Korg A3). My advice to anyone using stompboxes... Trade 'em all in and get yourself a GP-8 and save the $150 you will have left over for a rainy day. You won't regret it.

It's very easy to get a beautiful sound, but the Pre-Editing patches from factory sometimes seems very ridiculous, but you don't need them.
The manual is very didactic and clear. And the FC-100 (foot control) is very good and resistent.

I use an Ibanez RG 550, a Hendrix Stratocaster and a 94 Stratocaster with a Marshall VS-8080. I use a Jimi Hendrix wah-wah too.
The unit isn't noisy and it always sounds great.
I can get the sound of my favorite artists, like the Queensryche's distortion, Robin Trower's univibe, Hendrix's crunch and much more.
And I have my own sound too.
The Turbo Overdrive is amazing and the Chorus too. I don't like the Phaser and I don't use it. Every effect is very similar with those little Boss pedals and it's great!!

I don't know what I would be without my GP-8.
I use it every gig and it always sounds great, doesn't matter the place.

It always works!!!!

I play blues and hard rock in Brazil for 15 years and I use my GP-8 for 9 years. It and my Marshall VS-8080.
I love the tone and the facility of use. The 126 patches are very useful and I use and expression pedal (EV-5) for some effects too.
I hate the Phase. It sucks.
I wish it had a phone input.