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Who else is getting the Digitech Trio?


LikesLoomis

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Man, I am more excited for this pedal than any other I can remember. I love what this thing does. I'm glad Digitech got one of the "best in show" kudos at NAMM. I imagine the Trio is going to be many bedroom player's best friend. It's perfect for someone like me that only plays in my house (or on rare occasion filling in for our worship guitar guy if he's out sick or gone for the w/e).

 

I really don't think it would be good as a dedicated backing bad, so to speak...live people are usually better in that setting, but as a practice/song-crafting tool, I really don't think it has any competition. I know about the beatbuddy, but last I checked, that thing was like 2x the price of the Trio.

Anyone else getting one?

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I think that I will probably get one. I do a single act in rural southern Iowa. There are few venues down here and practically none that will hire a band. You can get hired as a single act in some bars, legion halls, etc. so this looks like a way to fill out the act.

I have a beat buddy but without workable software it is a $400 toy. Too bad because the hardware is great.

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I really wanted to post my opinion on The Digitech Trio pedal and found this website. I got the Digitech Trio by accident. I wanted one so bad. I still have two on order. They say 3-4 months before I can get one. I got mad and for some reason decided to check Craigslist. I found one on Craigslist. The guy just got it a day or two prior and decided it wasn't for him. He has been waiting since Feb. All he wanted for it, is what he paid. They were going to charge him a $40 restocking fee if he returned it. It was in the next town. I tell you that he didn't give it enough time. This pedal is the bomb. It does everything they say it does. I don't play solo's on guitar but I do play most chords. This pedal is able to follow along with your chord progression. It is not the same boring pattern repeated on either drums or bass. There are subtle nuances I have noticed in the playing. Those nuances increase the more you play. If you play a 5 second chord progression it handles it well. I played so far "a minute and a half" bunch of chords to a song and it did it great. I swear I was playing with a great bass player and drummer. To everybody, if you play chords on guitar no matter what the style this pedal will adapt. If you do finger style or finger pick, it works but the Trio is looking more for full chords. If you do finger style, the bass that comes out will be all over the place. It works but the bass will be very busy. I find to be laid back in "learning mode" when playing guitar. Than when the trio is activated the bass is laid back and when you play guitar more aggressively, it meshes together great. It will juice up your practices to unbelievable levels. I think once you really get into how it works and learn all the ins and outs it will be a great performance tool for you solo artists who play guitar and sing. Get one if you can. I have this one and still have two on order. I am keeping them all. This is the next step in guitar technology. I am a bass player who has played with pretty much every drum machine out there. The bass sound is great. The drum sounds are great. If you put the effort into learning the pedal you will not be disappointed. One day is all it took me. It's now the most important pedal in my collection. Forget Midi sync, forget the beat buddy, this is all you need. I believe they will surely add upgrades to the Trio as time progresses. I would like to see them add the Digitech sync feature to the Trio so it can act as a master to the Digitech Looper as a slave. The Trio, a looper and you on guitar. You won't need anything else.

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this guy will buy one some day!

 

maca likes playing with himself. bands are too much drama/work

 

 

They really do take a lot of work. Just finding like-minded musicians locally can often be a big challenge. Even if you do manage to find people, there's no guarantee they'll be on the same level as you are in terms of playing chops, or have the same goals or degree of commitment and dedication. Add to that girlfriend / spouse issues, drugs, drinking, and personality-based drama, money and transportation issues, practice / rehearsal space needs and potential hassles with the local constabulary, and you have all kinds of drama potential. :lol: And we still haven't mentioned the hassles with finding gigs, dealing with agents and club owners, keeping the van running, getting paid, arguing over musical direction... :facepalm:

 

Having said all that, there's still nothing quite like hitting the stage with a full band that's firing on all cylinders and playing to a packed and appreciative house. :) Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll may be the cliche reason why we put up with all of the rest of that junk, but the real reason is performing, and the general love of creating music. If there are ways to get on stage solo and improve the quality of the sound and experience for the audience, I'm usually all for them. The Trio looks like a device that may be beneficial in that respect, and I'm very interested in checking one out. It won't give the audience (or the musician using it, for that matter) the same experience of a full band, but it may allow a solo musician or duo to sound fuller and be more musical while still being more interactive than using backing tracks and/or MIDI sequences.

 

What I'm waiting for is the 2050 version, where you can program in what types of players you want to interact with, and where it not only gives you their musical output, but full-personality holographic projections of those players for the audience to watch and that will interact with you and your movements and playing in real time. Or maybe we'll just be using clones of ourselves or programmable robots as bandmates by then. :D

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Without a memory' date=' playing live is not great, how do you do it? You have to teach the pedal its parts before each song. Would Band-In-A-Box on a laptop be a better solution for a live solo player?[/quote']

 

It doesn't really work like a sequencer where you'd need memory. It's more interactive and works off of what you play. BIAB or a sequencer would be fine if you wanted to pre-arrange things. Think of the Trio as more along the lines of what you can do with a looper pedal - it augments and adds to what you're doing.

 

[video=youtube;26E8AHpUJ6k]

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So how do you use it live? Every song you have to teach it the parts in front of your audience.

 

You essentially have to do the same thing when you use a looper pedal - you have to play the part you want looped, right? As I understand it, with this, you play the chord progression and it bases its output on that. It looks like you could have it playing along with you pretty quickly, but I don't think it's likely that it would be a suitable substitute for a sequencer or a backing track if that's what you need.

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I am still laughing at some of the comments. This was designed for having fun while you practice. It will also work in a performance based solo situation. I am still on "using only one bank". I am savoring the learning process. This has three built in banks to use. From a cover song standpoint I found songs that cycle through a progression works great with just one bank. Example: Bob Seger "Turn the Page". I sing and play the first two verses and chorus on acoustic guitar while the Trio is in "learning" mode. When it comes time to get to the third verse you hit "the button" and the bass and drums come in flawlessly. The Trio will now do two verses and chorus "endlessly" or till you stop using just one bank. This gives you the opportunity to solo over the parts if you want. Or just sing through all the parts till the song ends. This is just with one bank. It works FLAWLESSLY. You just have to be able to hit the button on the "one". not maybe "the one". On "the one". It works. Other songs that work are:

CCR LODI, Skynyrd Freebird, PP & M Leaving on a Jet Plane. There are too many to mention. I do not know what the copyright laws are with cover tunes so I balk at posting any here until the administrator says its ok. Once I get "the more than one bank part/s" down I will post and give you more input. Now the following which I will post: Me and my friend Jamming. One 10 min Jam I-IV-V (E-A-B) and another 10 min Jam I-IV-V

(C-F-G). I inputted the learning part with my Martin Backpacker direct. My friend just made up stuff using his $50 Squier Bullet with a Roland GK pickup going through a Roland GK55. So nothing analog here. This was recorded direct to hard disk. No tracks were cut and pasted. We did two jams for 10 minutes each. While my friend played I changed styles on the fly. All that was added is some reverb in the final mix. So I had him cut some musical snippets so I am not uploading big songs. The first few seconds on some of these was intentionally left with just bass and drums to show case how the Trio sounds. He faded his guitar shred work as he wanted. There are guitars, piano, horns and voices all off the GK55. Again NO editing or over dubbing here. Everything was recorded on the fly in less than 20 minutes. Than it was mixed and carved down to snippets in a couple of hours. Not bad I think for just a drop of the hat. Go to http://www.theonlyski.com/Steve/ and listen or download and you will see what I mean. As I learn new stuff I will post. Once again: There is no other device like this on the market. I have one and still can't believe that this does what it does. I think it won't be till you try one out that you will understand. Good Luck.

 

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As long as it's for non-commercial purposes, and for the sake of helping to explain things to our other members, you can feel free to put up a Soundcloud or YouTube link of your Digitech Trio recordings / demos, even though it's a cover song. You're trying to show how it functions and works / sounds, not trying to sell a disk with the cover song on it - I'm not an attorney, but I think that falls squarely under "fair use" provisions of the copyright law. It's certainly not something we object to here at HC. :)

 

 

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I kinda sorta wanted one of these after hearing all the hype, until I heard the samples...ugh! Nothing is in bed with anything else. The drums sound like lame midi drums and the bass is...abysmal. All together it sounds like a bunch of machines just doing...whatever, without regard to what other parts of "the band" are actually doing. In terms of practice tools, one would be way better off (financially and musically) buying a cheap looper and a tattoo parlor bass and/or guitar and learning how each instrument accompanies the other.

 

This pedal has been called a "game changer", and a drum machine / looper / BeatBuddy killer, but sadly, it's none of those. The technology isn't new, and putting it in a pedal doesn't make it sound or work any better.

 

One of the dog and pony show highlights was being able to play some random guitar and not have to think about the drums or bass as the Trio would "create" those parts automatically. And this is the elephant in the room. Why would anyone NOT want to think about each part of their music? Guess what, it does what it says, but it uses music theory to do it. I'm thinking 90% of the people using this thing are not going to know and/or understand enough music theory to make it's regurgitated patterns sound even remotely decent. And even then, if you put a guitarist in one room and a drummer in another room, and a bassist in another room, then you sent them all a text that said 4/4 112bpm, key of A with a basic I,IV,V progression. After 1 minute, you put them all in a room together and they all start playing what they came up with, the odds of it sounding like anything other than butt is pretty slim. That is essentially what the Trio is doing. On paper it sounds like a good idea, but in the real world, it doesn't work so well because there are so many musical components that are missing.

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"Why would anyone NOT want to think about each part of their music?"

 

This question will likely generate answers that could lead to some hurt feelings. I would think that the reason you don't want to think about each part of your music would be because you are not interested in being creative; you are interested in either mimicking / reproducing (like the poster above, who bravely declares his love for old Bob Seger and Peter, Paul and Mary) to someone working on lyrics and/or solos.

 

Most interesting art is a result of not conforming to expectations, plus emotional depth. I heard zero emotional depth and absolutely nothing unexpected in those videos. I found them vile. To me, they screamed 'cruise ship lounge.'

 

I like creativity, and this is not it. And while I dig and wholeheartedly echo Phil's first post, I also think you can use technology to be quite creative; interest can be generated by things that are not 100% human-touch.

 

Then again, there's an audience for "smooth jazz," so different strokes I guess? Buy 'em up, kids, dental offices are waiting!

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TRIO is meant to be a practice and writing tool' date=' think of it as an adaptive, more fun metronome. Anything beyond that is out of the scope of TRIO's purpose.[/quote']

 

I think it would be really useful as a writing tool. Beats trying to sit and program a drum pattern and bass pattern to jam over before you can even start playing guitar... it seems a lot more immediate than that from what I can see. :idk:

 

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Living here in the UK I bought this as I play in an acoustic guitar/vocal duo and figured that it might be the answer to fleshing out our sound live. Big mistake, this unit is ok for practising, but that really is it. Did Digitech really think that putting this thing out with no memory storage was a good idea? While this works for the average bedroom rehearsal, practise musician it is of no use whatsoever for a live musician, and I really am staggered that Digitech could miss a trick by not providing the means to save and store/call back songs! There's no way that anyone in a live situation can use this. Teaching this thing every song, EVERY TIME you play it is no way to go to work. As I speak it's winging it's way back to the supplier (who I can't fault in any way) and a refund will be made. Maybe in the MkII?

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Living here in the UK I bought this as I play in an acoustic guitar/vocal duo and figured that it might be the answer to fleshing out our sound live. Big mistake' date=' this unit is ok for practising, but that really is it. Did Digitech really think that putting this thing out with no memory storage was a good idea? While this works for the average bedroom rehearsal, practise musician it is of no use whatsoever for a live musician, and I really am staggered that Digitech could miss a trick by not providing the means to save and store/call back songs! There's no way that anyone in a live situation can use this. Teaching this thing every song, EVERY TIME you play it is no way to go to work. As I speak it's winging it's way back to the supplier (who I can't fault in any way) and a refund will be made. Maybe in the MkII?[/quote']

 

haha, you might as well record your performance and then play it "live" for the audience.

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haha, you might as well record your performance and then play it "live" for the audience.

 

 

A lot of people do exactly that... or use sequencers. Same basic thing IMHO, and I don't really like either approach. If I want to hear someone live, I go to the show... if I want to hear their record, I can stay home and do that.

 

Loopers, OTOH, are a bit different. It's certainly possible for someone to incorporate them into their live show and for it to be musically interesting and entertaining. Phil Keaggy excels at it... but the difference between a looper and a tape is that you're actually playing the parts, then playing along with it, and it's usually (but not always) done right on the spot. Sequencers could be used in a similar way, and I'd be fine with that, but in most cases, the sequencing is done in advance, and the sequenced parts are far too often slammed to the grid and have all life quantized out of them.

 

As DigiTechRep said, the Trio wasn't designed for or intended for live performance use. It isn't marketed as being suitable for live performance. It isn't a looper. It lacks a sequencer's memory. It's strictly a songwriting and practice tool. As such, I think it's pretty darned cool. YMMV

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