This video, via Sound On Sound magazine, captures a demo of the new BOSS SY-300 Guitar Synthesizer at Musikmesse 2015.
The BOSS SY-300 is a polyphonic synth, designed to be guitar-controlled, with no special pickup required. You plug the output of your guitar into the SY-300, and the sound of the guitar directly controls the synth sounds of the device.
The SY-300 promises ‘latency-free’ playing and also lets you create up to 99 custom user patches.
Official pricing and availability are to be announced, but it several retailers have it available for pre-order for about $700 street price.
I’ll have to pass at $700. $500 would be hard to resist though. I would mainly be using it for midi out.
It looks like it has Midi out! That would be really useful.
I don’t think anyone has said it does that yet… realtime polyphonic pitch to midi that doesn’t have a delay of at least a few ms is a tricky one. Impressed if they’ve managed to pull it off.
It’s both interesting and not surprising that we are all only interested in the pitch to midi functions. Because maybe the synthesizer sounds would be interesting to a guitar player that isn’t used to actually playing synthesizers as well, but otherwise the sounds are pretty crappy But I will say that this seems like the least crappy guitar to synthesizer gizmo I have seen in a long time.
It’s mostly interesting because it’s very specifically omitted from the specs. You’d think if they had a good pitch to poly midi, they would be announcing it more heavily. Instead, it is a ‘guitar to poly synth with MIDI out’, which … I don’t want to call it deceptive, but is probably gaming the advertising a bit more than necessary.
I don’t even play guitar… but if they did have a FT fast enough to do realtime pitch to polyphonic midi and not sound like crap, Boss would get huge nerd respect from me 🙂
The presenter says price will be “around 499”- not sure which currency….
I really want one of these but they are a bit pricey….
This is a giant leap forward in not needing to have a special p/ups….I presume it’s got a whole lot more sounds than was shown in the video…