Roland GR-33 User Manual

The GR-33 lets you use the TONE “TRANSPOSE” setting (p. 
p. 51) to shift the pitch of the 1st and 2nd tones relative to the 
guitar’s pitch, creating an always-parallel harmony.

However, to create harmonies that are more musically 
useful, the differences in pitch between notes must follow the 
key of the song and the scale being played.

The GR-33’s Harmonist function, also known as 
“Harmonist,” creates harmonies in just this fashion. By 
setting the key of the melody a patch plays, Harmonist can 
create beautiful, appropriate harmonies by adding synth 
sounds to guitar sounds, or to other synth sounds.

Let’s take a look at how Harmonist is put together, and 
compare it with the Transpose function.

The sample score shown below compares the effects of the 
Transpose function and Harmonist when playing the scale in 
the key of C major.

fig.8-01

The difference in the results of the two methods is shown by 
the arrows in the figure.

The harmonies produced by parallel transposition may 
sound odd at times. The place on the scale where this 
problem occurs depends on the key, whether the key is major 
or minor, the interval between the main melodic line and the 
harmony, and so on.

The GR-33’s Harmonist uses what it knows about the current 
key—which is already set in the patch—to continuously 
adjust the harmonic intervals between the guitar sound and 
synth sound, or between the 1st and 2nd tones, creating 
pleasing harmonies.

The GR-33’s Harmonist also fully supports chord play. This 
means that complex chords can be created by playing a 
simple three-note chord, greatly reducing the chances of 
fingering mistakes during difficult performances.

The commercially available device known as “Harmonist” is 
a type of pitch shifter, and can only make guitar-sound 
harmonies for guitar sounds.

In contrast, the GR-33 Synth Harmonist lets you take the 
guitar sounds you normally use and make harmonies using 
any sounds you like.

These can be put to practical use, such as adding a marimba 
line to a clean guitar sound to produce a supporting 
harmony, or adding a rock organ to a distorted guitar to 
create a bluesy minor-key harmony.

And of course, you can always select a guitar tone on the GR-
33 to create pure guitar harmonies.

If you wish to create a harmony between your guitar’s sound 
and the GR-33’s sounds, set the guitar/synth selector switch 
on the GK-2A to “MIX.”

and 2nd tones to the external MIDI sound generator—
harmonize with your guitar’s sound, follow the steps on p. 82 
to set “HAR/ARP SELECT” to “Harmony All.”

You can make harmonies using only synth sounds, without 
hearing the guitar, by setting the guitar/synth selector 
switch on the GK-2A to “SYNTH.”

You can produce a richer sound by using two similar tones to 
create harmony. It can also be quite effective to create 
harmonies with totally different tones—such as sax and 
muted trumpet—and select “CROSS TONES” with 
COMMON “PAN MODE” to assign these to the left and 
right stereo positions. You can also combine guitar sounds 
with the main melodic synth line by setting the switch on the 
GK-2A to “MIX.”

Normal note

Normal note

Transposed note

Harmony note