A While ago, I purchased the G-Major from TC Electronic. Offcourse, a review has to follow
First impression: WOW! Second impression,… not so much. It looks great ans sturdy, except for the buttons, they’re a bit flimsy. The display is ‘pretty’, efficiënt, clear, crisp and contains a lot of usefull info (tuner, inputlevel, effects-configuration, etc). The viewing angle is also changable.
The tuner is NOT suited for bass (can be read elsewhere as well). Despite the tuner settings (system menu) which can be set to BASS, it does not read anything below F#. After contact with TC Electronic, the answer was that this can not be fixed and will not improve with future firmwares. Hmm…
You can use 6 effects simultaniously, seven if you count the noisegate. Compressor, filter/mod, pitch (octaver, whammy, etc), chorus/flanger, delay, reverb. To be clear; no distortion or fuzz. They can all be turned on or off independent from eachother without any ‘switching silence’. The order in which they are ‘connected’ cannot be changed. You can however switch from a parrallel to serial or semi-parrallel configuration. This can be set per preset or globally. All effect settings can be saved in one of the 99 user presets. There are also 99 factory presets which can not be overwritten, but contain a few ‘bass-specific’ ones. Not really usefull though. Changing between presets is smooth and without any audiable hicks.
There are a lot of settings on this thing. Some usefull, some not. A BIG plus is the amount and ease of midi-control. Almost any parameter can be controlled by midi. Choose the parameter, press ‘learn’ and press a key on your midi-controller. Voila, done. So almost any midi-foot-controller can be setup as a very functional floorboard. Midi-expression pedals are also supported.
The sound, well, that’s where it realy went wrong. But first a few plusses
The chorus, flanger, delay and reverb are really good. Not fantastic, but good. The (auto)wah is very usefull as well. The chorus and wha are MUCH better then the ones on my Line6 BassPOD XT Live. Settings are easy to do on all effects. The pitch-effects are below avarage for bass. The shifter is slow and the octaver didn't sound very good either.
The compressor was the last straw (I always use a little bit of compression). At normal settings (mostly below and sometimes above the threshold) the compressor adds high frequency, digital artifacts to the signal when it has to dig in. A longer release helps a bit, but the effects stays. It’s not loud but very noticable and annoying.
The last drawback of the G-Major became clear when I removed the device from my effectsloop. You always lose some dynamics and transparancy, even with the (for the record not true)bypass and different in- and output levels. That’s a no-no for me!
My feelings where; AH DAMN!
It’s a very well thought-out and functional device. 6 Simultanious effects plus a tuner, good control options and in a 19” 1HE jacket can not be found for this amount of money. It may work in live situations (you will need a separate tuner), but for rehearsal/recording, the issues are unacceptable to me. My live- and rehearsal setup is the same, so I sold it again…
My 2 cents
