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Today I have a very special guest review from my old pal Paul Davies. I met Paul whilst studying music at Kidderminster College many moons ago in the days of my Purple Neon RG550DX! Paul is a guitar geek with amazing knowledge and playing skills and this review is the best I’ve seen for the amazing TC Electronic G-System, enjoy!

Overview
I hate those reviews where the text is cleverly written to ramp up your excitement but never actually gets to the point about what the reviewer’s impression of the product really was.

So…let’s get right in there.

This thing is possibly the best bit of gear I have ever had the pleasure of owning or using. And that’s a good word to pick, “pleasure”, because it is a pretty darn luxurious box. It’s gorgeous to look at, is a joy to work with and sounds completely delicious. In this day and age of recycled plastic TC really have built us a tough piece of gear here. And from metal. And it was worth it. There are videos of this thing being ran over by tanks. That said, I dropped a glass on mine and it put a little ding in it. Obviously they didn’t run over it in giant glass tanks.

Something I found extremely cool about the way this thing is built is that you can either use the G-System as a floor unit or you can take the little 19” rack out and stick that into a cabinet. I have chosen to do this as it keeps my floor nice and tidy and I have all my other bits and bobs in the rack along with it. More on that later when I describe how I have this thing hooked up in my rig.

Management
Basically, the G-System is like any other guitar FX floor unit but with TC effects on board and 5 loops for you to connect your fave pedals up too. Every switch is assignable to anything you like. The top six switches double as the rotary encoders for setting params and you can even assign those to params in the FX. So… half way through a solo you can get down on your knees and twist the analog delay feedback up and get those Tommy Bolin like delay effects. It’s a very impressive system indeed, kind of the sort of thing I dreamt about when I was still a young-gun. What’s also very nice is that there are 4 inputs for volume/expression pedals. Two of each to be exact, two on the rack unit and two on the floor unit. So you can have pedals everywhere if that’s your thing.

Loops
There are 5 Loops in the G-System. The fifth is an Insert Loop which is rated much tougher so you can put your pre-amp in it. The other 4 Loops can be used to insert any of your other MONO effects. I believe the idea here was that you could connect your expensive boutique pedals. If you separate the rack from the floor then you can have all 5 units connected to the G-System loops entirely inside a rack cabinet. This is what I have done and it’s extremely nice and tidy to do so. I have 4 overdrive & distortion pedals (my spice rack) in loops 1 - 4 and then my pre-amp in the Insert loop 5. Conveniently the G-System will even power up to 500mA of effects units with the supplied 4x 9V DC outlets. By default you have 3 of the switches assigned to on/off these Loops but of course you have the freedom to re-assign the switches if you feel the need. That pretty much covers the effect management side of things. It could have more loops I guess, 5 is ok but I have several pedals sat on top of the rack that I swap in and out every now and again as my tastes in stomps change. It’s also worth noting that by default the switches will on/off the FX. The preset remembers the setting for each, including the on/off param but it’s really nice to be able to stomp a delay in when you fancy without having to do any programming. It makes it that little bit more like having a line of really nice stomps.

Let’s talk about the really juicy stuff now…

Effects
Anyone familiar with the TC reputation will have an idea just how good these FX really are. If you like the 2290 or the G-Force then you have an idea what you’re in for. If you don’t; seriously, you have no idea what you’ve been missing! I hear a lot from guitar players about certain brand names being the best FX for guitar. Trust me, they’re not even close. Not for one second can you get this TC unit to sound as bad as even the best that those have to offer. Is there better? Of course. Pricing alone means that you can find a better reverb unit and so on but for guitar players this all in one unit really is an outstanding piece of gear. The effects don’t “cut” through the mix. They don’t need to “cut”. They just fit into where you put them. It’s very impressive just how rich and warm the FX are but without clouding the sound to that unintelligble level that so many FX tend to do. What’s especially impressive is just how much variation the FX have. Too many modern units have one sound and one sound only. The params say 0-100 but they really only seem to compare to 40-60. Remember the analog days when you could go from min to max and have all those sounds in between that sounded rich and different? Somehow TC have done that with this box. In digital. Somehow. I can’t stress enough how good these FX sound right through the entire range of settings. I believe that this unit is a hybrid of digital and analog. If you pick an analog delay it is not a model, it actually is passing through analog bits and bobs to get the effect. This yields truly breathtaking results. I spent an embarrassing 20 minutes looking for the overdrive unit and even disconnected all my stomps from the loops. Only to find it was saturation from an analog delay. It sounded that good I thought it had a Tube Screamer in there.
I won’t detail the effects on board the unit as you can find out at the TC website for yourself if you’re that interested in the specs. All the usual suspects are there including formant filters and wah. The stand outs are the delay related FX, which have always been TCs area of expertise. The delays, chorus, flanger and reverb in this unit truly are exceptional. They are clear, rich and warm and truly are like adding the icing on the cake. Demos are available on the TC website but this is definitely one of those cases where it’s simply not enough to listen to some tailor made samples.

Missing bits and downsides
The phaser has some incredible spacious imaging and can be very impressive indeed but it does have a harshness that is slightly disappointing. Let’s not get carried away here, it is still an incredible phaser effect but it does need taming. Which is a slight shame if you run a digital signal out to a DAW or something. If you run it into a nice valve amp it will just get warmer and fatter, something that is very impressive and I would guess what TC intended.

The 3-band parametric EQ almost feels like an afterthought and whilst it sounds ok it’s not especially useful. Which is unfortunate.

Unlike the G-Force you can’t re-order the FX. This is something that I was initially very disappointed about. I really wanted to have the compressor after my pre-amp as I particularly like a dynamic crunch on the front-end but need to level out after. Of course the unit is flexible enough to find a way around it but it’s a shame that re-ordering isn’t possible.

Sometimes the expression pedals don’t calibrate quite how you expect and have a very rough low resolution. TC have a recommended list of pedals to use so stick with those and not get disappointed when your pitch shifter goes up in 3rds!

Finally, the biggest missing component here for me is a speaker simulator! This unit is capable of inserting a pre-amp and then going out via S/PDIF to an audio interface for an amazing direct stereo sound. It’s such a shame because it’s the one thing that could have made this the perfect recording unit for those of us that have rack mounted pre-amps, such as the Marshall JMP-1. I understand why it’s not there as this unit is high-end and aimed at people that have nice amps and use those with nice mics to record. But there are a bunch of players out there that have invested in recording pre-amps, such as the Mesa which is not a cheap investment! Those of us who have those boxes know that the filter type speaker emulations are mushy, middly and generally just not right. There just doesn’t seem to be a box around that offers high quality speaker sims preferably using convolution. Running such pristine sounding audio through a Pod or similar just for cab emulation really has a noticable degradation in the quality.

Mutant Rig
I thought it would be interesting to detail how I have this all setup in my rig at the minute. Like anyone else my rig morphs every single day into something new. This rig is used primarily for recording at the moment but can be easily boxed up and moved around due to having most of the stuff cabled up inside a rack cabinet. Currently I run my guitars through a Vox Wah (prefer it to the G-Sys even though the G-Sys wah is very impressive but it frees the expression pedal up for other params instead) direct into the G-System. I then have 4 overdrive/distortion units in the loops; Maxon OD-9, Boss DS-1, Marshall GV-2 and an MXR M104. Soon TC are releasing the Nova Drive which seems to be like having a Tube Screamer and a nice distortion, in parallel if you want (!)… so I’ll be replacing one or two of those stomps as soon as it arrives. In loop 5 I had my Marshal JMP-1 pre-amp but recently due to the speaker emulation problem mentioned earlier I have swapped it out for a Boss GT-8 which I am using only for COSM amp/cab models. Even using these models with G-System FX is extremely impressive! Especially if you roll the gain back and use the analog pedals up front from loops 1-4. The cab simulated signal then goes via S/PDIF directly into my DAW. The regular line out to amp is not connected at the minute as amps are just too flippin’ loud! I have a Boss FV500H connected for expression pedal type stuff but don’t really use it that much to be honest. The JMP-1/Boss GT-8 are wired up via MIDI to switch per preset. Speaking of presets I have one bank of 5 user patches. No need for anything more so far. Patches 1-4 are Clean 1 (bright and super clean), Clean 2 (slightly dirty with a thickener), OD (set for a nice amp crunch and I can kick in the stomps for more oomph) and an OTT lead where it has far too much of everything. Patch 5 is totally bypassing everything to let me get a direct signal for Waves GTR, Guitar Rig etc. Sometimes I prefer to turn off the cab simulations altogther and run that nasty signal into the DAW adding cab sims later from software. That has had various results ranging from “what’s the point? It’s no different to the GT-8” to “wow, that really is more realistic”. Couple that with the Softube Acoustic Feedback effect and you have some very usable direct sounds.

Three years later…
I have absolutely no regrets about buying this unit when I did. Do I feel I get the most from it? No. Do I feel I’ve really earned the right to have such good FX? No. Have I got my rack perfect? No.

There are some clear benefits to staying simple and having a nice stomp with a nice amp. Having banks of presets is sometimes very troublesome. When you don’t have so many places to store settings you tend to adjust the settings you have until they’re perfect. This is something about the G-System I like very much. Because of the design you can forget about presets and just treat each of the effect blocks as a stomp box much more effectively than in other units. And, with the exceptional quality it really is like having the best stomps you could find. The loops mean you can always expand somewhat even if one of the FX isn’t exactly to taste. If I were in the market now for a better class FX unit I would seriously consider the newer TC Nova System. This has a lovely analog overdrive in there too. Very tasty indeed. That said, the G-System is the bigger brother and I’d probably always wish I’d gone to the top of the line instead. Technically, I’ve had no operational issues at all. TC have released several updates, one of which upgraded the pitch shifting to an intelligent pitch shifter. And if I remember correctly they added a differenly routed delay/reverb. Some users have compained of various bugs, some of which were fixed in these updates and I must admit I haven’t needed to look again for fixes as I never experienced any problems to begin with.

Even after 3 years I’m not tired of the sounds at all. It’s still exciting to kick a chorus in. “Exciting” isn’t a feeling that we get too much with gear these days. There’s a lot of it and most of it is so inundated with features that it’s hard to feel that way. Yet, with the G-System even adding something which should be boring, like a single delay with some slight saturation, is a joy.

The moral of the tale has to be that it’s true, you really do get what you pay for!

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