Roland GR-500 Synth-Guitar 1977
The introduction of the Moog Guitar at this past summer’s 2008 NAMM brought to attention of previous attempts to making guitars more synth-like. The Moog Guitar Company didn’t create a guitar synth, per se, but with its features like the voltage-controlled filter and continuous sustain, it’s a prodigy of the Roland GR-500.
The Roland GR-500 was introduced in 1977, which was actually a guitar synth system, with a comparison of an Ibanez-made Les Paul-style electric guitar/controller and a synthesizer design with more than 40 switches, knobs and controls. The Roland used a separate floor unit device, the PC50 footswitch. This unit allowed users to create and select from three different preset sounds. In that era, before MIDI, the GR-500’s components joined together with a bulky 24-pin cable about the diameter of a “garden hose”.
The instrument itself was an impressive looking guitar, with a beautiful honeyburst finish and an extensive knob-encumbered control panel on the top (like Les Paul) and bottom right (like Ibanez) that gave full-control over the synth unit’s four sections: Guitar, Poly-Esemble, Bass and solo-synth section called “Melody”. The guitar had a single humbucker pickup for standard guitar sounds and a hexaphonic pickup that allowed the synth-guitar to track the pitch of each string note with a fair degree of accuracy. In addition, magnets installed within the body allowed the guitar to produce everlasting sustain on demand, though all this added significantly to the instrument’s weight.
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So what did the Roland GR-500 sound like? It’s reported that the Poly-Ensemble could produce convincing bowed string sounds, bass tones were effortless, and the synth’s “Melody” section gave guitarists total control over the synth’s components, allowing a complete range of tones, noises and, of course, effects.
The End Line
Roland’s GR-500 is not only unique, but rare, especially complete systems (see: PC50 footswitch and 24-pin cable), which is unfortunate. Without a synth unit and the cable to connect it, the GR-500 guitar is just a guitar.
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Elvis Presley
November 2, 2008 by Chazders · Leave a Comment
On June 5, 1956, signing “Hound Dog” on national primetime TV, Elvis Presley served the white man his notice. In a burlesque performance full of hip-swiveling gyrations and erotically charged yelps, Elvis turned a nation of middle-class teenagers onto the libidinous power of black rock and roll. He also shook the status quo to its foundations. “An aborigine’s mating dance,” wrote one reviewer. Another critic—a duly elected congressman—was less indirect: “Rock and roll has its place,” he offered, “among the colored people.”
What is obvious in retrospect is not that Elvis was the greatest rock singer of his time—that would be Little Richard—nor even its most brilliantly innovative artist—that would be Chuck Berry. Where rock and roll was concerned, Elvis Presley’s true gift was being white.
As quickly as he arrived, he was gone. By the end of the Fifties, the dangerous Elvis gave way to sanitized Elvis, fueled by the easy success of mainstream acceptance. As rock music advanced into bolder territory, Presley stayed on familiar ground, showing occasional flashes of brilliance during his late-Sixties Memphis period before settling into the zombie kitsch of his Las Vegas years.
On August 16, 1977, he was gone for good. Overweight, and punished by years of drug abuse, Presley died on the bathroom floor at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, just 42 years old. His remains are interred on the mansion’s grounds.
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Even as Elvis died, the rock music he helped create was experiencing it last moment of consequential fury in the punk music rising out of England. Within two years, black musicians in New York would begin brewing up rap, an insurgent music more potent than anything white rock could muster. Today, Presley’s legacy is kept alive in the confrontational rock-rap hybrid of groups like Beastie Boys, Korn and Limp Bizkit. In crossing the great racial divide, they got white American culture all shook up, much as Elvis did one hot summer night in 1956.
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