Once I remembered that it needed a firmware update, things went a little better than at first. D'oh!
It's a lovely thing. Just what I'd sort of hoped the Cyber-G was from the beginning. You see, I don't know how to play a keyboard, so the keyboard module just bothered me. I didn't like the limitations of the strum module. But then, I saw the string module, and YOINK!
It's very, VERY nice. I can play without nearly as much discomfort (I lost all my calluses in a freak boating accident), but I'm still trying to overcome the dreadful lag that hits once in a while, where I can't play a note to save my life without WAITING for the thing to let me. Sometimes, I can work my way through the melody line of "Malaguena", but others, I'm lucky to get more than one note out every 5 seconds. It's weird and maddening! (I found the manual, but it hasn't helped yet.)
Also, the electric guitar setting seems oddly shrill, almost as though transposed up half an octave. And it's got a wild tremulo that's out of place half the time. I wish there was a "clean" preset for it. I'd love it if some of the XMari's functionality was in it, with different presets that don't require picking a freakin' SONG to base it on. I mean, it's not like "Greenback Dollar" is in its repertoire, or "We Didn't Sink the Bismarck". "Morning Dew" by the Grateful Dead MIGHT be, but I didn't see it. My sister used to play it a lot on her acoustic. I can noodle it along from memory fairly well, given she used to play it in the late 60's.
All that said, it's still a really great instrument. Just being able to play for more than a few minutes, with these tender fingertips, helps a lot. But I have Zippy Slinkies on my XMari, and that's almost as good.
I do recommend it. I recommend it as the primary function of the Cyber-G. Not everyone who plays the guitar also knows piano/keyboard for a very unusual sort of keytar, and I'm unsure what to even consider the strum module. An electronic autoharp? (I have one, the Minichord synthesizer. It's fun to play.)
One thing that is vitally necessary for all of your instruments is when you only have the manual available through the app, please allow us to zoom into the text? If you're using the app on your phone, that's awfully small for a page you can't zoom into with two fingers, OR with a control. And you can't save it to the phone and open it with a PDF reader, either. If I might suggest putting it in EPUB format, and letting us download it, that would help a LOT. I'm still in the head-scratching mode regarding how to use most of the app's functions with the string module.
