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Post subject: How I became a G-Dec Power User by Accident
Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2011 9:24 am
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Okay, maybe "Power User" is not the correct term, but bear with me.

I'm new to guitar. My son has been playing electric guitar and I thought that looked like a lot of fun. I started playing his until reaching the point where I decided to get my own. I followed his advice and ended up with an American Special Stratocaster HSS. His amp is a Super Champ XD which I really like. However, I wanted to do something a little different so that we would have a bit of variety between us. My plan was to get a Mustang III, but at the last minute switched to a G-DEC 3 30.

The reason I switched to a G-DEC was its ability to play band tracks. My expectation when buying it was that I wouldn't use most of its features. I just wanted to turn it on, select a preset and a band track, and start playing. In the beginning, that's pretty much what happened. But, soon I wanted to put my own band tracks -- for songs I was learning -- on the amp. I discovered that its limited internal storage made that difficult. No, problem. I had plenty of SD cards around and used one of those. Accessing band tracks on the SD card was brain dead simple. Soon, that card was loaded up and I actually had to buy a larger one.

Next I wanted presets to go with my band tracks. I started exploring the Fuse community and downloading presets from there. I was soon importing presets within the amp itself and also with Fuse. Not long after I decided some of the presets were not producing exactly the sound I wanted, and decided to see what I could do about that with Fuse. Fuse is a mixture of simplicity and complexity. It looked very simple until I realized that I didn't know what most of the settings even meant, let alone how I should adjust them. What's a Small Hall Reverb? How does that differ from a '63 Fender Spring Reverb? Why are there reverbs going into and coming out of the amp? I guess I could have taken time to learn all about such things, but instead I just started twisting knobs. Twist this way, twist that way, it reminded me of the eye doctor: "What's better, this or this?" Pretty soon I was relying almost entirely on my own tweaked presets.

That led me to using the quick access buttons to get to my favorite presets. Then, I started feeling I was reaching over to change things on the amp too often and I bought the foot pedal. Now I could select presets and start/stop band tracks without taking my hands of the guitar. That led to my first use of the Phrase Sampler. Step on a button, play, step on a button, step again and listen to what I had just played. Just what I needed to help with learning new licks. I learned that I was frequently worse, but occasionally better, than I thought.

So, now I am using essentially every feature of the G-DEC, something that had never been in my plans. There are still a ton of things I don't know about guitars and amps. But, the most important thing for my progress is practice and the G-DEC has made practice as enjoyable as possible.


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Post subject: Re: How I became a G-Dec Power User by Accident
Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2011 1:31 pm
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Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2007 9:46 pm
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Sounds like everything fell nicely into place for you. I've been a serious G-DEC user since Feb of 2008 when I bought my first G-DEC 30, the older style. I was using backing tracks on them to play live gigs, but with the limited memory in the old timers, I had to use multiple amps to do what one SD card can do today.

Image

At one point (as shown above) I was using six of the older G-DECs to handle the various types of music I was using (everything from old time country to classic rock) for backing tracks. When you run a G-DEC backing track through a PA the results are awesome!

Enjoy the amp and practice!

http://www.cr-rockhounds.com/Our-Sound.html

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Rockin' since 1963


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Post subject: Re: How I became a G-Dec Power User by Accident
Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 9:49 am
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Posts: 4396
Very cool story, JSteele. I hope you continue to enjoy tweaking Presets on you G-DEC 3.

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