Digitech Trio+ Band Creator

I loved the idea of this band in a box accompaniment / songwriting aid and it delivers. There's a little learning curve to become familiar with how it all works but it is pretty easy, you just need to spend a couple of hours with it and you'll pick it up quite quickly.

Unfortunately, mine has glitch. On turning the genre and style knobs the light flicks around almost with a life of its own making it frustrating to go exactly where you want, it flits to the wrong choice 7 times out of ten making it a bit of a pain to deal with. I am sending it in for repair or replacement next week.

Aside from this fault, which is hopefully unique to my machine, I am reasonably happy with what it does. However, there is on thing that they got totally wrong, in that the saved 'songs' on the supplied SD card are in some weird format that makes it impossible to then work with them in a DAW. Why they couldn't just have made them WAV files, I do not know! Really frustrating for me and other users I have read online reviews from.

Would I recommend getting one? That really depends on what you want it for. Some say they work with it in live situations and it is a godsend. Others say they would never gig with it. Personally, I use it for getting down song ideas in my little garage studio and I am happy with what it does. Being unfamiliar with any other bit of kit like this, I cannot comment on whether this is better or not than say, a Beabuddy.

It is good at what it does most of the time and really helps with creativity, for that reason I like it and will continue to use it

The TRIO+ is incredibly easy to use and would be of great benefit to any lonely guitarists out there. It doesn't take long to get used to as long as you treat it like any drummer and bassist. Don't overload it with info all in one go and keep to rhythmically simple chord progressions. The fact that you can tweak the suggested bass and drum parts by genre and/or style means that you won't be long waiting for a backing track that you're happy with. The AUDIOLASTIC time stretching function is incredible. It adjusts the tempo of the drums, bass and guitar loops very well. The sound quality of the drums and bass is reasonable and exactly what you would expect at this price point, although, the onboard guitar effects are genre specific and don't sound great at all. This isn't really an issue though as most people will use their own fx pedals with the TRIO+.

Unfortunately the TRIO Manager software does not allow you to edit your songs on your PC. This would have been a nice touch, especially if it generated MIDI files that could be exported to a DAW.

Overall this is a great product and I would recommend it to anyone who obviously can afford it.

Works for most parts. I do not use full range of sounds, but they are fun to experiment with. Sometimes the bass or drums don't give you exactly what you want. But hey - this has actually been used a lot for just practice and tying down song ideas. Looper is quite decent - so this is a yes.

I use my effect loops though it and that works quite well. The extra pedal does what it is supposed to do.

One part I would have loved to see include is a was to use the foot switch to move whole banks if you would like to use in a Live settings. You prepare a few songs and all is good and then you need to stoop down or signal the sound guy to change things up. Just s a though. But I like this pedal!

I have received, try and sent back to Thomann this tool. One reason, it seems a well build useful looper but i had troubles with the software program but the hardware is almost perfect, i didn't like the foot switches, they are small and hard to press on to get the fonction, it hurts my feet so. It is complicated still to make it work fine, so for me, it was not the best band creator to work with. The Boss loop stations RC1 and 3 are still better and simple to use for me, but maybe i am too much perfectionist indeed. Thank you Thomann. I hope that Boss and Roland will build such more tools for improvisation skills to practice.