Pricing Information: I bought this brand new off of e-bay from a music store for $469.00. It came with 2 coupons, one for a footswitch (hands free recorder) and a gig-bag.
Pros/Review: It's simply awesome for home use. My favorite thing about it is that it has an 8 track recorder on it. With the added footswitch, when I get an idea, I simply hit record and play my riff. How many times have you nailed an awesome/riff lick only to forget it the next day? I know I have. The only bad part of this is that you have to buy a Compact Flash Card. I bought a 256mb one for $39 from Wal-Mart and it's suited my needs just fine.
The presets that come already installed are ok. There are a few useless ones, but there are some really cool ones. It has an awesome acoustic patch, plus the tones of many guitar legends from EVH to Joe Satch to Eric Johnson to SRV to Pat Matheny to Angus Young. There is also a really cool Guitar to Bass patch that turns your guitar into a bass. It doesn't sound the greatest, but it works for recording songs.
There is also a built in drum machine. Very cool indeed. Just pick your pattern, set your tempo and you've got drums. Easy enough right??
Now probably the coolest part is the USB hook-up. It came with a USB cord that you can plug into the computer. Now, you have a program that came with the GNX4, it's your patch-editing software. No more bending over and turning knobs to get your tone. It's all done right on the computer in front of you. When your GNX4 is hooked up to your computer, you just load a patch, do some tweaking and are able to hear what you're tweaking has done right before your eyes. Very cool indeed. There is also a plethora of patches online that others have created that you can download right into your GNX4. With the USB hooked up, you can also record live right into the computer with another peice of software that is supplied with the GNX4, ProTracks. The GNX4 also recognizes midi files. So I can download a midi backing track, and load it into the GNX4 and play along with the backing track. Very cool for learning songs. I've done it with "For the Love of God" by Vai. (I can't play it yet though ;) )
On the topic of editing the presets, the GNX4 has tons of amp models. From a '65 Fender Twin Reverb, to a Mesa Dual Rectifier. The best part of this is you can take these cabs and tweak them and save them as your own.
Now, from my very favorite part of all, you can assign those amps to your expression pedal (think wah pedal) and warp 2 amps together. Say a Mesa Dual Rectifier and a '78 Marshall Master Volume to create unique sounds.
Also a benefit of the expression pedal is using it to switch between clean and dirty. I can set up one amp channel for clean and one amp channel for my heavy crunch and use the expression pedal to switch between them, without hitting any buttons. That's awesome.
Cons/Review: It has a pretty steep learning curve. I've owned mine since December, and I find new things out about it all the time. The manual is very helpful, but if this would be your first Multi-Effects unit, it would take some time to figure things out.
The drum machine rocks, but you can't have tempo changes in your song. If you set it for 120bpm, that's what you have for your whole song. It doesn't nullify the drum machine, just holds it back a little bit.
The live situation is probably the biggest downfall of this whole thing. I have a little old Crate practice amp that I play through when I'm messing around, but usually I just use headphones. I did jam with my buddy once through a PA and I just couldn't get the thing to sound good. I recently learned though that the GNX4 has a speaker comp on it that is basically a preamp. I'm pretty sure I had it on, which is a no-no when playing through the amp.
Summary: I would give this a 9.5/10 for home use, but for live use I couldn't give a rating because I just haven't used it enough outside of my home for me to be able to make a good enough judgement. This is my favorite peice of equipment by far and I would say it was well worth the money. Just the 8 track recorder alone makes this thing a valuable peice of equipment.
I can provide a few sound clips if anyone would like to hear what this thing can do. Thanks and I'd be very glad to answer any questions anybody might have.
Sometimes I hit notes only dogs can hear.
