A Case of Mis-Economies of Scope? – Review of the Boss SY-1000 Guitar Synthesizer

I have often used the Roland Corporation’s products to illustrate the concept of economies of scope to my students. This concept refers to a competitive advantage that comes from being able to use the product of one investment as an ingredient in multiple products. In Roland/s case, this can include everything from the band name, castings for effects pedals, displays for multi-effects units, sound samples, modelled amp and effects sounds, electronic tuners, foot switches/pedals, and synthesizer engines. The trouble is, Roland is prone to pursue economies of scope in a way that leaves its customers frustrated. The new Boss SY-1000 is no exception. In many respects it is brilliant but it is also very annoying for the opportunities the firm missed or deliberately chose not to take up. Given that the Roland Corporation runs both ‘Roland’ and ‘Boss’ brand names in a way that sometimes looks unsystematic (why a Roland GK-55 but a Boss GP-10, for example?) one might wonder how well the firm appreciates economies of scope in market compared with other musical equipment manufacturers that run multiple brands in a way that sacrifices economies of scope in marketing for the benefits of clarity in price discrimination.

When I first became aware of the SY-1000 at the end of 2019 I hoped that it would be a solution to some of the challenges I faced when trying simplify the task of playing both regular and GK-equipped guitars live, both in terms of making it quick to set up and in order to reduce the risk of things going awry if I hit the wrong foot pedal (e.g. accidentally wiping out the sound on the fly due to getting the tuner). It was this pursuit of simplicity while trying to build a system that blended regular and synth guitar sounds that had led me not to buy the SY-300 years earlier, in the hope that Roland would sooner or later put its synth engine into one of its other effects units, or into a revised GK-55. So, before commenting on the shortcomings of the SY-1000, I will explain some of the issues I have been wrestling with.

Most of the gigs I played last year involved using both a GK-55 and a GP-10, connected using a Y-splitter 13-pin cable. This enabled me to use regular guitars as well as my GK-ready ones. Had Roland had a regular guitar-in capability on the GK-55 that enabled such a guitar to use the amp and effects models, I wouldn’t have needed to use the GP-10, which (like the new SY-1000) accommodates both 13pin GK and guitar lead inputs.

Using both the GK-55 and the GP-10 also enabled me to blend sampled sounds (typically organ, oboe, sax or flute) from the GK-55 with guitar patches on the GP10 without having to program layered patches on the GK-55 in a way that enabled me to mix them via the GK-55’s single expression pedal. By routing the GK-55 output (including backing tracks from its USB stick reader) into the GP-10’s stereo mini-jack input, I could achieve a stereo mix of the entire sound and send it straight to my Bose L1 Compact PA units without a need for a mixer. However, to record live performances, I had to bring along a digital recorder and plug it into the headphone out from the GP-10 for, unlike, my Boss eBand JS-10 (a backing track player for home use that has inside it the same amp models and effects), there was no in-built recording capability in what I was using. I also needed to have a separate tuner since the GP-10’s tuner only works for GK-equipped guitars. I would like to have used my GT-1000 unit instead of the GP-10, connecting that to the GK-55 via the latter’s guitar out, thereby gaining its superb sounds and a tuner that would handle regular guitars/ But if I did that, I needed to take a mixer along (which I sometimes did in the form of a Zoom R24 recorder, which at least saved me the bother of using a separate recorder).

When the SY-1000 was released, I hoped that it might be a means of keeping a really simple set up while adding the SY-300’s capacity to enable my regular guitars to get synth sounds – sounds that might be even more useful than the dozens of MIDI-triggered synth sounds in the GK55. After downloading the manual, many of my hopes were confirmed, albeit at the cost of making me wonder whether I should have splashed out on the GT-1000 a year previously. The SY-1000 seemed to combine in one unit the amp and effects models, and excellent display, of the GT-1000, the guitar modelling from the GP-10, and the synth engine of the SY-300, along with the poly distortion and chorus capabilities of the excellent GR-D and GR-S pedals (that get a lot of use at home but are at odds with my minimalist approach to getting complex sounds when playing live).

Despite noting some things that the SY-1000 didn’t do, I ordered one from Better Music in Canberra (which is probably Australia’s best-stocked and best value music store) as soon as the first shipment arrived, and three days later it was delivered. The SY-1000’s sound quality is as startlingly clear as the range of sounds it is capable of delivering, and the quality of guitar modelling feels a step up from what’s in the GP-10.

Since I had seen in the manual that there was a guitar/bass selection for the regular input but had not seen any demos of it with an extend-range guitar, I wasn’t fully confident it would work well with by 8- and 9-string guitars. However, my fears were unfounded: with the ‘guitar’ input, it works brilliantly across the full range of these instruments, making one all the more aware of their potential as instruments that combine the range of a guitar and a bass in a single instrument – there are rich picking to be had here, way beyond what typical metal players use these instruments to achieve.

For me, the problems with the SY-1000 arise from what it leaves off from cheaper products, and from the Roland Corporation seeming to view those who purchase its premium products as time-rich professional musicians rather than folk like me with well-paying day jobs but who are time-poor when pursuing music as serious hobbyists who do all their own setting up when playing live.

Superficially, the SY-1000 has a lot of its external features in common with the GT-1000. However, when ordering the SY-1000 I was already well aware that its footswitch bank is only four switches wide, not five and it has no in-built expression pedal. An EV-5 is a cheap solution to the latter shortcoming but because it is so light an EV-5 is far less satisfactory than the in-built one on the GT-1000: to have a well planted expression pedal, it appears I am going to buy one of Roland’s more expensive, heavy-duty units. The loss of one row of switches compared with the GT-1000 means that the SY-1000 does not have a single, dedicated on/off button for the tuner, but at least the dual-switch tuner does work with regular guitars. So, compared with the spectacularly good-value GP-10, I lose an expression pedal but gain the tuner that I wanted. However, there are other downside:

• Unlike the GP-10, there is no stereo input mini-jack, so that if am to use the SY-1000 in conjunction with the GK-55 to get the latter’s backing track player and instrument samples, I will have to use a mixer to take my one-man band to the PA.
• Unlike the GT-1000 (or even a Line6 Firehawk) it offers no XLR outputs, which may be a concern to some users and may require purchase of a stereo DI box for use at some venues.
• There is also no Bluetooth connection for programming (unlike the GT-1000) or for streaming in backing tracks from an iPad or iPhone (which seems to be a Roland/Boss blind spot, compared with the availability of Bluetooth connectivity for both programming and backing tracks on the lowly Line6 Firehawk that is little over a third of the SY-1000’s price). So, it doesn’t really solve the problems that drove me to use the GK-55/GP-10 pair as my preferred live rigs, and perhaps I should I should merely have bought an SY-300 to get the non-MIDI synth engine to use with my regular guitars and simply put that ahead of the GP10 in the input chain.

As with the GK-55, GP-10 and GT-1000, the presets are loaded in an infuriating unsystematic way: with 200 of them, a seemingly random order means it is very hard to find patches of particular kinds again after an initial scroll through unless one takes notes. Roland/Boss really should take a lesson from Line6 in how to avoid turning a huge range of choice from a blessing into a nightmare: on my Line6 Firehawk, banks of preset passages are conveniently grouped in categories, such as acoustic, country, jazz, blues, metal, much in the same way that a supermarket organizes its shelves by categories of products.

My impression is that, when it comes to presets, the Roland/Boss philosophy is not to offer buyers ready access to classic sounds they are likely to want to use, but to showcase the weird and wonderful things that can be done with the product. It’s fine to provide that service, and there is room to do this when there are 200 presents to play with, but my time is precious and I’d much prefer a good selection of classic tones that the device can emulate preloaded in readily findable form. Instead I feel I’m largely expected to work out how to program them myself or visit the online tone centre to find out if someone else has come up with them. Ten weeks in, I still lack patches for favourites such as a 1970s prog-rock-style Mini-Moog.

I should emphasize that it’s not that I’m averse to programming a synthesizer if I want sometimes to get a particular kind of sound: I used to do this happily on the Roland Juno-60 keyboard that gave me 29 years of great service, but that was with all the controls readily accessible in front of me as sliders, not with the ergonomic challenges of dealing with a floor unit with multiple screen pages to deal with or having to uproot it and connect it to a computer. For those of us with busy day-jobs, the presets issue is really important and those who program the factory settings of the SX1000 should have given more attention to the kinds of patches we may want rather than leaving us frustrated that we can’t immediately access (or readily find, if they are instaled somewhere) the great sounds demonstrated by the pros.

Given what this product can do, and despite my awareness of the phenomenon of sunk-cost bias, I’m not about to admit defeat and switch to the SY-1 effect pedal that is being presented as the affordable solution for those who don’t want spend time programming its big brother. The burden of programming the SY-1000 would have been eased if it had included the capacity to offer sequences of random sound/blend settings from which the user can save those that are appealing. It seems that the SY-300 offers this, so why not the SY1000? Or is the Roland/Boss strategy cunningly designed to ensure that, having discovered how few non-GK presets there are in the SY-1000, time-poor musicians with plenty of discretionary purchasing power will then also buy the SY-300 to avoid having to spend hours getting a good set of synth sounds for their regular guitars?

I suspect that is where I may soon be heading, having held off from buying the SY300 for the past five years in the hope that the Roland Corporation would eventually make the product that made the most of its economies of scope to put in one floor unit all the things I would like to have to enable me to do my one-man prog-rock/shred/fusion/blues/latin act as conveniently as possible. Here’s what I want in that single floor unit:

• From the GK-55: the sampled sounds for GK-equipped guitars, the toggle dial for programming and fast selection, the USB input and foot controlled backing tracker player (but which reverts the screen automatically from track selection/control mode to patch selection mode when I start the backing track)
• From the GT-1000: all the amps and effects, the dedicated tuner footswitch, Bluetooth/iPad/iPhone control, XLR outputs.
• From the GR-S/GR-D/SY-1000: poly distortion and chorus.
• From the SY-1000: V-guitar modelling, plus GK- and regular guitar-accessible synthesizer engines.
• From the SY-300: the capability to offer random sampling/blending of synthesizer settings, the on-off bypass switch.
• In addition to the GK and guitar inputs, an XLR input with phantom power for a microphone, with access to delay and reverb effects.
• From the Boss eBand JS-10: an SD card input and the capacity to record stereo WAV or MP3 files of live performances, with easy mixing of guitar, backing track and microphone.
• Two inbuilt expression pedals (volume plus assignable for wah, synth, or layer mixing) – as on my ancient Line6 POD mark 1 floorboard.

This unit would be no more than twice the width of a GK-55 or GT-1000, and could well be only one and a half times as wide if careful thought were given to the pedal layout, especially if the dual function pedals of the GP-10 were used. Given the economies of scope entailed in putting this unit, it surely should be possible to offer it for less than US$2000, at say, roughly the price of the a Line6 Helix Floorboard, despite being far more capable than the latter. I suppose that whatever eventually replaces the GK-55 might be something like this, but past experience doesn’t make me optimistic that the Roland Corporation will do the right thing as opposed to trying to ensure we buy more of its products than we should have to by and build our own systems by combining them to get what it could have put in one box for us.

Upadate (28 August 2023): It does not seem that anyone from Roland/Boss has taken note of this post, to judge from what they have offered as the Boss GM-800 — click here for my thoughts on  the GM-800.

Update (20 June 2024); I invested in a GM-800 to test my hypothesis that I could use the SUY-1000 to control it purely using Guitar to MIDI and a MIDI cable: to read what happened, click here.