My birthday present arrived yesterday - slightly earlier than the birthday, but who's counting, right? Anyway, the few owners of this beastie on the forum haven't posted anything on the subject, so I thought I'd have a go.

Construction

As you'd expect, it's all plastic. It feels pretty robust though, certainly to the same standard as, say, your average stomp box. The control panel is recessed for safety. The only exposed controls are the joystick and the volume dial, which live around where your normal guitar controls would go.

On the lower side of the body live all the sockets. This isn't actually the ideal location for them, because it tends to be where the instrument sits against you. This is particularly an issue for the 3.5mm jacks, since these aren't generally very robust. Mind you, there's a fair number of sockets (3.5mm line-in and headphone/line-out, jack out, MIDI out and USB) so it might have been tough to get them all to fit anywhere else.

It sits against your body fairly comfortably, mainly because it's so light. I would have liked a larger (more Strat-like) bevelled edge where your right forearm rests, but never mind. The headless neck is a bit odd for someone used to having more neck there - in first position your thumb can slip off the top of the neck. The neck profile feels OK though.

It doesn't come with a case or a bag. Conveniently though it fits perfectly in the bag for my old tenor mandolin, so that was nice!

Strings

Which leads onto the fretboard. In the pictures it looks like it's metal frets and fretwire running down for strings. Actually it's just slightly squishy plastic, profiled into ridges for frets and "strings", over a hard plastic base.

Surprisingly it feels very natural. The slight give in the "strings" is enough to make this guitarist feel entirely at home on the neck. I've tried a Ztar and the whole button thing really didn't work for me at all - at no point could I get over the essential button-ness of the feel. The YouRock on the other hand feels like playing a guitar on which all the strings happen to rest on the frets.

The picking strings for the right hand are thick steel (presumably for long-term survivability) with the same thickness on each string. They don't feel like steel guitar strings at all - the closest thing feel-wise would be nylon classical strings, although they're a bit thicker even than those. Reinforcing the classical theme, the strings are spaced very wide apart, wider even than a lot of classicals. They're also exactly parallel, unlike strings on a real guitar. The end result is that the right-hand feel, although useable, really isn't as good as it could have been with a bit more thought put into it.

Playing

Which of course is the important part...

Start with the bad news. The big problem here is that they *really* haven't got string detection working properly. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it just doesn't register that you've picked a string. Checking the web, it's possible to adjust string sensitivity and I expect (I haven't tried yet) that this will help a bit. However the failure to register doesn't seem to be related to how hard you pick, so I'm not sure what's going on here. Maybe a firmware upgrade (now or in future) will help, perhaps.

A further problem with strings is that they don't play nicely with classical technique, where you use a combination of pad and nail to pick. This tends to result in a flam effect as the instrument triggers twice. The same effect can also arise with a plectrum if your pick is slightly angled so that the string rubs on the side slightly.

The net result is that I simply couldn't use it for fingerpicking or playing with a plectrum. It just doesn't work properly, at least with the sensitivity settings and firmware it's shipped with.

But...

For two-hand tapping, it's nothing short of a revelation. I never really got to grips with tapping on a real guitar, mainly because of the amount of extra noise from undamped strings. No such problems on this, of course, and it works like a dream. If you bought this because you can get around faster on a fretboard than a keyboard, prepare to go two-handed.

Unfortunately they haven't (yet) allowed us to tap more than one note on the same "string", as you can with a Ztar. I'm hoping this comes along in future, because it's simply the logical way to go with an instrument like this.

One other thing which doesn't quite work as expected is sliding. The instrument has a "slide" button which in theory removes the initial attack when you slide, hammeron or pulloff, so you have the normal legato sound. Unfortunately this only works for pulloffs and slides down - hammerons and slides up produce attack on every new fret you cross. I suspect this is a bug that will get fixed sometime, but it's annoying.

Tones

Generally the tones available from it are a bit iffy. They're all too "general-MIDI"-ish to be really ideal for using as-is. Combining a guitar sound and a synth sound can make for a more convincing tone, if you plan on using this for keyboard parts. But sadly there isn't a good guitar sound to be had from it, with the exception of a fairly convincing 12-string. Maybe they were expecting anyone using it more seriously to be hooking it up to a laptop though, at which point of course you can do what you like with VSTis.

The strangest part of this is that it comes with built-in jam tracks to play along with (actually short loops of 16 bars or so), and these are actually really good. I've definitely heard worse sounds from e-drum kits, and the tracks are well-constructed. Clearly a musician was at work creating this, so it's a shame the same musician couldn't have said "hold on, why do all the guitars sound like crap?"

The "open tunings" also didn't get much thought. This thing has 64 different tunings. Did no-one think that tuning down an octave for bass might be useful? Checking on the web, there's a "secret" combination of key-holds to tune up or down by up to two octaves, which of course will do the job, but this isn't listed in the instructions.

In fact, looking on the web, there's an awful lot that isn't in the instructions. I think they would have been better giving out an absolutely minimal manual (like two pages) and pointed users to the web for anything else - at least then everyone would know that they needed to look there.

Conclusion

It's a flawed work of genius, basically. I love it for the two-hand tapping that it opens up. I just wish all the bugs could have been ironed out first. Perhaps that's what you get for being an early user though...

I've had similar issues. And Pretty much everything you say is true, at least until I
1. Loosened the Screws holding the rear string cover 1/4 - 1/2 a turn each which made triggering more even.
2. Downloaded the Control Panel and tweaked the Sensitivity and trigger settings to suite my own very sloppy technique.

It's now still not perfect but infinitely more playable and false/no triggers are far less frequent.

You're right on the tapping mode it's bloody great

I certainly agree with your review - it's a killer for playing keyboard sounds in tap mode using external sounds but pretty mediocre as a "midi guitar".

I adjusted the strings and did some tweaking via the control panel software but using the string triggers I still get too many false triggers and non-triggers and will be sticking with Casio and Roland for that sort of thing (it's also frustrating not being able to do string bending).

But as a "keyboard controller" I love it - being able to play notes and chords with the left hand and using the right to control pitch bend and modulation with the right, it's in a class of its own. Having both 5 pin MIDI and USB output is the icing on the cake.

It would be great if the "whammy bar" could be assigned to certain strings only.

You mentioned you would like to have more open tunings - if you download control panel, you can set up your own custom tunings.

Thanks for the comments, Jeff. TBH I've not had much use for the joystick, since the built-in modulation is pretty grotty.

I've tried the Control Panel, but every time I try to connect to the guitar, the Control Panel crashes big-style. I will own up to being aware of a certain amount of bitrot on this PC - it's about due for a reinstall - so this could be the reason.

My issue with the tunings, and indeed everything else like sensitivity, isn't so much that you can't do it with some fiddling, it's that the out-of-the-box setup (which is probably what your average kiddie who gets this will be using) has a fair number of odd glitches. And most (if not all) of these didn't need to happen in the first place if they'd just thrown it at someone and said "let us know what you think". Since it's been on the market for over 6 months now, you'd think they could have sorted some of these teething problems.

Now I'll go back to practising my tapping. Current exercises are playing "Harvest home" with the right hand, to get the speed and control going on that hand; and practising parallel lines with both hands so that I can play horn backings for stuff like "Superstition". I have designs on the piano part in "Bat out of hell", but I think that's going to have to wait until I'm a bit better at it! (And probably until YouRock give us multiple-note tapping on the same virtual string.)

Quote grab:

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Thanks for the comments, Jeff. TBH I've not had much use for the joystick, since the built-in modulation is pretty grotty.

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If you're triggering an external device (as I almost aklways am) the modulation is whatever is set up for that patch and just triggered from the joysytick.

I haven't had any luck getting the joystick to do different things depending in what direction you push it though. Must check if it's sending different controller messages.