Studio Diary #34: Gigrig G2 Goes For A Service

I recently rewired my home studio rack to replace unreliable home-made cables with professionally-made ones that would be noise-free.

Unexpectedly, the rewiring also revealed that I’d been losing some of the treble from my guitar without realising it. While testing all of the different signal paths that I have, I discovered problems with two of the signal chains that I use the most:

• the signal path through my Gigrig G2 (this blog post)
• the signal path through my Fryette PS-100 Power Station

In this blog post, I’m going to explain the problem I found, and what I’m doing about it. I’ll also include audio samples, so that you can hear the problem for yourself.

What Is The Signal Path Are We Talking About Here?

Sadly, we’re talking about the signal path that I use the most 🙁

• my guitar,
• into my Gigrig G2 unit,
• one or more drive pedals in separate loops on G2,
• out to my delay and reverb pedals (not through G2),
• out to my Marshall DSL 20HR

Regular readers will recognise this as my go-to signal chain for most of my blog posts recently. Swap out the Marshall for various other amps, and this has been my regular signal chain since mid-2016. My Gigrig G2 has been the one constant over the last few years – that’s how much I love it.

What Problem Did You Find?

Here’s what my guitar sounds like if it’s plugged into my G2:

and here’s what the same guitar sounds like if it’s plugged straight into the amp:

When my signal goes through my Gigrig G2, there’s a notable loss of treble. If I plug directly into the front of the amp (bypassing my G2 entirely), all the treble is back. This happens even with all of the G2’s loops bypassed.

How Long Has This Been Going On?

I’ve no idea.

It’s an important question: if one of my blog posts has been about pedals, my G2 has normally been part of that signal chain.

It’s possible that my G2 has always sounded like this, for as long as I’ve had it. I can’t rule that out.

I don’t think it invalidates those blog posts. They capture my experience at the time with each pedal through my rig. I’ve also been really happy with the tones I’ve been getting through my G2 – so much so, that I never thought to test or question the tone until now.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three blog posts where I talked a lot about a lack of treble in the signal chain:

• The Mythos Lark
• The NABLA Custom Black Tweed
• My first impressions of The Earl (my new PRS Paul’s Guitar) (not yet published)

There may be more, but those are the three that have stuck in my memory over the years. Once this problem is solved, I’ll write up some new blog posts about them. If you can think of any more, leave a comment below and I’ll revisit those too.

The PRS Paul’s Guitar blog post hasn’t been published yet. I had it ready to go, and then discovered the problems with my studio rack’s wiring. After the rack was rewired, I redid the blog post. And then I discovered the problem with treble loss through my G2.

It’s going to have to be rewritten a third time now.

Troubleshooting

So what’s going on? And how confident am I that the problem is with my G2 unit?

Checking The Cables

My first thought was “it’s got to be cables, right?” After all, I have just done a lot of recabling. (As a rule of thumb, you’ve got a problem, start by looking at the last thing that changed in that area.)

I tried:

• same cable directly into the amp – my treble comes back
• different cables into the G2 – no improvement, and possibly even worse loss of treble
• shorter cables out of the G2 (in case the cable run was too long) – no improvement
• bypassing the patch bay, so that my G2 went directly into the amp – no improvement

If it’s caused by cables in any way, I couldn’t find it.

Is It The Amp?

I found this problem while running my pedal board into my Synergy rig. Is the fault with the Synergy SYN-1’s input, perhaps?

That was very easy to test:

1. I ran the signal from my G2 into the Marshall DSL 20HR instead, and reproduced the fault.
2. I ran the signal from guitar into my Axe FX 3 and then straight into the amp, and could not reproduce the fault.

That’s testing two different amps, and also testing something that isn’t my G2 into the amp. It looks like my G2 is the common factor here, even if it ultimately isn’t faulty.

Buffering

The G2 has a built-in buffer. If I understand correctly, the buffer sits directly after the input jack (ie before any loops).

Switching on the buffer does bring back a lot of the treble, for sure.

That got me thinking … would a buffer pedal in loop 1 of the G2 also bring back the treble? If it does, that would help pinpoint the problem to be around the output from the G2.

I still have the Tumnus Deluxe on the board from my recent Little Tweedy Drive post, so I made sure its buffer was engaged, and tried that. No luck, sadly.

It would appear that the fault may be somewhere between the input jack and loop 1. I can’t say any more than that, because I don’t know the internal topology of the G2, and I don’t know how much someone like me can test that topology to narrow down a fault.

At this point, there was only one thing left for me to do. It was time to get some expert help.

Reaching Out To Gigrig

What About Replacing It With A G3?

My first thought was to order a G3 to replace my G2.

The Gigrig G3 has one feature that my G2 doesn’t: support for running some effects in parallel. That would be perfect for my real spring reverb pedal. As much as I love the Anasounds spring reverb pedal, it’s not very transparent when used in series. (I’ll put an example of this in a blog post soon.)

Alas, there’s currently a waiting list for G3, and it’ll be late summer before the next batch goes on sale. It’s not an immediate solution – although it may be the eventual one.

Asking For Help Online

I thought I’d reach out to the Gigrig community, to see if anyone there could offer any advice. There’s a Facebook group for this kind of thing.

Alas, it’s a private group, and I’m not a member. I did apply to join it, but I’ve heard nothing back at all. I guess it’s dead.

Getting My G2 Serviced

Why not ask Gigrig directly for help? Sure, my unit’s really old and I bought it second hand, but maybe they’re still able to service G2 units?

I got a reply pretty quickly (a couple of days, I think), with better news than I could have hoped for:

• Yes, they do servicing on old G2 units.
• As part of the service, they’ll upgrade the foot switches and onboard software to the latest spec.
• And they’ll also see if they can find the fault too.

This is all paid work, as you would expect. There’s a fixed charge for the replacement parts, and then an hourly rate on top for the servicing work. Assuming the fault is a straight-forward problem (and that is an assumption on my part), I’m looking at about £240 for the work. I’m very happy with that.

So I boxed it up, and posted it off to them 🙂

It arrived safe and sound the following morning, and now it’s just a case of being patient until I hear back from them.

Final Thoughts

It had never occurred to me that my G2’s components could be upgraded. I’m a home hobbyist, and my G2 rarely moves from my pedal board setup. As long as it continues to give me a great bypass tone when I switch each loop off, I’m already happy.

Hopefully, I’m going to get back a G2 that sounds even better than it did before – and it should last me another decade or so. That’d be great.

And when it’s time to upgrade to a G3 (or an alternative), I can say that my G2 has been fully-serviced and upgraded to the latest spec by the team at Gigrig, and sell it in good conscience.

That just leaves the Fryette Power Station to sort out. That’s a topic for a future blog post.