You Rock Guitar YRG-1000 < Gen2 >

In the past, a Novation Impuse 61 into any Mac DAW (Logic / Garage Band) did the trick, but as a guitarist my natural rhythm is tied to my finger style guitar approach. I love the sound of hammonds, rhodes and many other vintage key sounds and the rolls made famous buy ray charles, herbie hanckock and greg allman. I can't even touch their fluidity on a keyboard, but can emulate them through this tool. Again, if you are a keyboard challenged guitarist, this is a great tool. Now the OOB sounds to my ear are not my cup of tea, but just yesterday I used a vintage piano instrument in Logic Pro X, and re-amped the midi signal through my Vox AC30 and got a sound that knocked my socks off. All the while I retained the score, for when I need to have a real key player play the part, they will have sheet music. I am finding that it also helps me look at my guitar differently and to approach the neck differently. This is very very cool. OK the thing looks a little cheese ball and the rubber strings and fret aren't the fastest surface that could have been used, but for the price and in the right hands it is a great composing tool.

I've changed from 5 stars to 3. Pros: I like almost everything about this. The musical accompaniment is sweet, helps with practice to keep in time and key. So many presets, likely several will be good for anyone's individual tastes. Cons: It's not a guitar, so think of it as the unique device that it is, and you'll be happy with it. The muting bar at the base of the strings doesn't always work, although I'm sure this can be tweaked. Batteries: about 5 hours of playing time for each 4 AA battery set. Seems a bit expensive. They could have made it use much less juice by auto-light dimming. Engineers can't foresee everything... Construction: I think 10:1 this is built in China. Oh... where to begin. The first one I had was with major issues. The CPU somehow was not operating, or the control board, and the device would reset during play, or not stay on one preset. Amazon was good enough to send me another one. Alas, this one has issues too. The whammy bar is a bit wobbly, and it can easily be activated even when it is not desired. I know this because the last one had a whammy bar you could set perpendicular to the device, and it would not activate at all. I'm debating whether to take it off permanently, or just return the device and forget about it. That said, I love the idea behind this device, it is an ideal. Although their manufacturing process seems to have quality issues. You might get one that has no issues. If you do, I'm happy for you.

Love the features for this price! I did have to adjust the sensitivity to make it recognize all notes played but it was not a big deal to adjust the sensitivity. It is worth installing the app that allows you to control the settings from my PC. I did not have any expectations for the quality of the sound because of the price range....the sound samples are not of high quality. I am using it primarily as a midi controller. I connected it via the legacy midi jack to my Motif ES 8 keyboard and it worked really well. I also connected it via my laptop to Sonar X2 and set it to control my Dimension Pro patches. It worked amazingly well. The strap and guitar cable it comes with seem like they are of cheap quality. However, if one is a guitarist, you should have better straps and cables in your kit anyways. Just throw out what comes with this guitar. I wish this guitar came standard with the headstock and bag. I bought the bag. I thought I could do without the headstock but it is an eerie feeling until you get used to the spatial positioning. I think the headstock would have helped with the visual feel. I was constantly going for the 5th fret thinking it was the third. I am now used to it and don't make that mistake anymore.

I went into this purchase having read all the reviews, so I didn't have unrealistic expectations. I am a guitar player for nearly 25 years now and was unable to get anything usable out of this box. Did the firmware, the string adjustment, the control panel tweaking. Tried tap mode and slide mode. I play semi-pro and have a disciplined picking technique and excellent finger picking skills, but was unable to even play a cowboy chord song without mistriggers, dropouts and glitch notes. If you are a touch guitarist you might do OK with this. If you are a conventional player with high hopes of doing some midi recording/triggering, I would suggest you pass on this.

It needs a bit of adjustments which is different than plug and play keyboards. Then there are issues with windows drivers to be able to catch up with plug-in instruments. Keyboards don't have that issue. If you don't have a Mac you'll certainly have problems with latency. Huge problems, not good for recording. I'm waiting for the next generation where they develop the hooking up with windows plug-in instruments. Aside from this, I find it's still not the number one guitar controller. Well look at the price, did you think $250 was going to reign supreme?

I highly recommend this midi instrument. I have played guitar for most of my life and I'm not quite as good at keyboards and pad controllers as I would like to be. This is a perfect instrument for mapping chords and even playing live. The only con I have is that picking doesn't feel quite as natural as it should. But switching it to tap mode resolves a lot of those issues for me after a little practice. As with most midi instruments you can remap the controls and wammy bar to brush that synced LFO or whatever is most annoying to the neighbors ;3

I had the original You Rock Guitar. This is my second. Looks basically the same, but after downloading the software and uploading the firmware, some strange things have happened. First, the whammy bar / Pitch settings appear to adjust on their own now after a string or midi transmission occurs. I've tried re-flashing the firmware and same result. Either this is a software issue on the most recent firmware, or the pitch bender whammy is defective. Wonder if anyone is having this same issue. Also, there is an index of tones it contains, but the number does not correlate to the same patch........ something wrong. Update as of 12/5/2013 - I thought it was strange there was no option to revert the Firmware back in time. Even the Factory reset does not change this which is odd. I sent back the faulty guitar and waiting on a replacement. It appears there was some type of software issue and guitar was sending or receiving midi data to self adjust it's pitch. Incredibly annoying. Update as of 12/13/2013 : Replacement arrived. Seems to be working fine. No pitch shift on it's own. I am NOT updating the firmware. Word of warning. If it is working fine, do not upgrade the firmware unless you fully read what has been fixed. Latest firmware at the time of writing is flawed and should not be installed.

I felt I had to write a review. The tracking is horrible! My Yamaha EZ-EG blows this away. Find one of those instead! I'm retracting my review. If you adjust the tension of the strings the sensitivity is alright. You have to work with it awhile everywhere you set it causes midi errors on certain notes. There's a sweet spot where they're nominal mainly double triggering. Given this transmits all strings on one channel and most midi guitar controllers transmit on six channels I think it's worth the 249.00. If the dynamic range was better they would have a total winner. There's really only low velocity and high velocity. This is where the Yamaha EZ-EG wins.There is no delay when using the Midi out and my Roland Octa-Capture. It keeps up with fast scale runs easily. When you engage the Auto Silence Notes feature notes decay and stop perfect. If they can improve the sensitivity and Dynamic Range this would be the panacea of guitar midi controllers! Peace