Re: My new weapon of choice
Nice set up! I had a GR-33 (I think it was the 33, might have been the 30, I can't remember exactly) for a while. I pawned it for some money for a festival when I was young, dumb and super broke. I wish I had it back now, just because it was a really fun toy. I don't have any projects going I could actually see myself using it with, but I had a lot of fun with it. I played it at an open jam night at a local bar one time. That was cool, the sound guy/host stepped out for a cig before I used it, and came back in while I was using the Tenor Sax patch and commented that he thought someone had actually brought a sax in from outside (he didn't know I had a synth). That being said, he was drunk.
I loved the organ, percussion and wind patches the best. The string patches always sounded really off to me. Especially Violin, way too thin and bright sounding. When I had it, a couple of friends and I were in the midst of forming a band and I was trying to work it in as much as possible. We covered a couple of Cake songs with me using the trumpet patch, and we covered a couple of Tull songs with me playing a flute patch. Unfortunately, the drummer friend moved away suddenly and nothing ever cam of the project.
Another fun thing to do was build horn section patches, i.e. playing a single "A" note would give you a Tenor Sax playing an "A" a trumpet playing a "D" and a trombone playing an "E," and use it to pretend to be the horn section in a funk band. It really pushed me as a guitarist to come up with cool ways of using it. I found that for the best results, I had to alter my playing style a bit depending on the patch. Using lots of partial chords and very specific picking to play an organ sound, for example.
If you want to see a good example of someone making the most out of one of these things in a setting you'd never expect, check out the banjo player in this video, he's playing a homemade electric banjo with a strat body and a Stealth Banjo neck on the organ patch. The best organ stuff is around 3:30