Native Instruments Guitar Rig VST PC

I've been playing and recording music for 10 years. I love plug-ins but I will not sacrifice sound quality for ease of setup. I'm running Guitar Rig as a Pro Tools plug-in on a top notch Mac G4 using OSX. I record all kinds of music with an emphasis on alternative rock.

I love the interface. It is laid out well and you can pretty much master this thing without the manual. It is laid out in signal path form which is very cool and fun. Plus, they give you free stomp boxes as they are developed. I got Guitar Rig and then was able to download 5 new pedals right away. Installation of everything was fairly easy as compared with most plug-in products.

The sound quality... hmmm. I'm split on this one. I really like the clean tones that Guitar Rig produces. Even the playing lead notes with distortion is ok. However, everything sounds muddy when playing chords w/ distortion. Distortion is the number one thing I was hoping to get out of Guitar Rig and it just isn't good. I was also incredibly unimpressed with the presets. With Amplitube, I am able to create awesome distortion sounds by layering 2 or 3 presets that I created. I struggle to accomplish that in GR. Overall, clean is fantastic, distortion sucks.

This is not worth the money unless you get it for the clean tones or for that ripping lead solo. It also is terrible on my CPU. I can only use 4 Guitar Rig RTAS plug-ins before I'm tapped out. With Amplitube, I can use about 12 before I'm tapped out. My Mac is awesome, Guitar Rig is too heavy though unless you have a TDM system. Guitar Rig also crashes a lot! I would settle for a lot less "bells and whistles" such as mic placement, type of mic, and things like that for a lower CPU intensive package. I'm rating this a 2 based on price and what I get out of it.

This refers to the version 1.2 demo, I use Vegas, Tracktion and other things but mostly I've tried this out in standalone mode both live and with prerecorded clean tracks from the board. I've been making music almost all of my 28 years, on the PC for... 13 years now? The music I make is diverse but mostly experimental; guitar is not my only instrument.

My PC's presently equipped with an M-Audio Delta 1010LT. I'm driving the card directly with a Hamer FM Special (LP Jr. knockoff with Duncans) through a cheesy Behringer UB-series console. Monitoring is provided via a pair of Mirage M290s (small and pretty accurate Canadian bookshelves that I've been using as monitors for 11 years-- I know 'em really well and have made a number of great recordings on them).

Let me say before I begin this review that I absolutely love Native Instruments products on the whole, and have been quite smitten with them since Reaktor 2 (!). Since then they've only gotten better at what they do, and I was very excited to see them bringing their prowess at modeling (as demonstrated in the fantastic B4 and Pro-53 plugins) to the world of guitar.

Immediately I was struck by the familiarity of the interface. "Huh," I said, "this looks an awful lot like Alien Connections' Revalver." Now, Revalver is absolutely freaking terrible, but I wasn't about to let my visual impressions prejudice me.

I noticed another curious resemblance to Revalver as I scrolled through the presets. What would you, my friend, choose to recreate a definitive Beatles electric tone? Sure, you'd pick up a Rickenbacker. For the amp... well, perhaps an AC30 with top boost, maybe a vintage Marshall or Fender would do the trick in an emergency if no Vox was available. You might also have some ridiculous fuzz pedal for leads, at least if you were going after late-period Beatles. The preset "Beetleback rider," meanwhile, has you running through a DUAL RECTIFIER. More curious still, they have you running through not one but two 2x12 cab models.

In fact, the vast majority of the presets have what appears to be some pointless effect and way too many cabs. Then you have things like "metal" tones (or labeled as such) where you're running through a blackface Fender model. Of all the things my Fenders could do well, metal was not one of them. .. well, they might be able to stretch to an almost-convincing imitation with just the right angry Rat or what-have-you in front. So imagine my surprise to see a Tube Screamer model placed in front of this "metal rig."

What I'm getting at here is that if a component-based modeling program really works as advertised, you should be able to create classic tones using just the same sorts of components. Revalver had this problem too, where to get Classic Tone X you had to experiment and string up absolutely ridiculous things that really shouldn't go in that rig if you were trying to come up with the same tone using real gear.

Yes, putting modules together is very easy-- drag and drop, and the same goes for tweaking knobs, etc. You can put together a complete new rig in seconds. However, I absolutely guarantee that if you have been playing with a Boss DS-1 and an old Marshall plexi with exactly the same favorite settings through a nice 4x12 for all these years, and then you go into Guitar Rig and drop in the same devices and set everything up exactly the same as you would for a night on stage, your results are not even going to *resemble* your real-world rig. What you'll have to do to come up with your desired tone is basically a lot of guesswork and trial-and-error, dropping modules in, yanking them out, changing cabs and mics around constantly, and that absolutely kills Guitar Rig's ease of use in my opinion.

I used to have a major case of Gear Acquisition Syndrome. I owned so many different amps and pedals it would make your head spin. I'm a firm believer that good tone is about good basic tone, which in turn is about how the guitar and amp sound on their own, interacting as a pair. Eventually I sold all my vintage Fenders, VHTs, what-have-you, and kept only a cheap Yamaha modeling amp, the DG60-112 (which I've reviewed twice here!). I wish they were still developing the DG line, because they sounded soooo much better than anything available at that time in the modeling sector. Most modeling amps can't produce even one good basic tone-- the DG60 has the goods in a big way. Alas, the amp is just a bit too noisy to record, and Yamaha's DG Stomp was a major letdown in comparison. So I've still been looking for a solution that can give me good basic tone, preferably in a plugin. It would be great to record a clean track in Vegas, then go back and have the power to play with the tone nine ways to Sunday. I've used both Revalver (gah) and IK's Amplitube (much, MUCH better, but takes a lot of experimenting) to this end, and I'd hoped that Guitar Rig would be the end of my search.

Unfortunately, no matter what I did, I couldn't get a decent basic tone out of Guitar Rig... actually, the problem was much more pronounced than with any crappy Johnson or Line 6 product I tried out circa 1999 or 2000. Every preset sounded distant and distinctly digital. The clean presets were almost bearable; crunchy and high-gain tones sounded absolutely terrible on the whole, although there were a couple of almost-passable crunch tones. But no matter what preset you called up on Guitar Rig, it came out sounding dead / lifeless at best and absolutely hideous at worst. Like a real amp, Guitar Rig sounds the best when fed with a healthy / hot signal, and thankfully they provide input VU meters to this end. But no matter how you pad up (or down) with the input, this thing still sounds like a plugin, not an amp.

Noting that most of the presets were overloaded with effects (and had the aforementioned problem of not even slightly resembling the rig I would put together myself for Genre X/Y/Z), I tried building a tone from scratch myself-- specifically, a crunch tone. I fared a lot worse than Native's programmers. I'd rather record with a Crate practice amp than with some of the tones I was able to come up with after an hour or so of endless parameter experimentation, cab/mic-swapping, and hair-pulling. Forget about just playing through a Plexi and a 4x12 with a 57-- the resultant tone will sound basically like your guitar through an ca. 1988 Ibanez "LA Metal" petal straight into the board... with a completely dead battery... maybe with the bass turned all the way up and everything else scooped out. Funny how, by comparison, I could just plug into a real Marshall plexi, shove a 57 in front, and sound basically awesome right away.

However, one thing Guitar Rig is extremely good at emulating is real-world noise and feedback. Just about every preset hums like the real thing... actually, worse. You can put noise gates in there, sure, and then the hum just ends up pumping in with your signal. And any time you put a Distortion box in there and the input gain cranked up to any usable level, count on some kind of hideous self-oscillation that will remind you acutely of your favorite Wednesday-night soundman tweaking the vocal monitor mix after his ninth shot of Jack, regardless of whether there's signal or not. (Of course, forget about *guitar* feedback. That would actually be cool.)

Remember what I said early on about Revalver? Yeah. It was bad. However, I once managed to produce a usable tone or two with it, so I'd have to say that this is markedly worse.

I can't overstate my disappointment with Guitar Rig, and I really hope this isn't the end of Native's Midas-touch streak. I would say that perhaps they should just keep trying to get this right, but frankly after this I'm not sure they should even bother, and should stick to what they're already absolutely great at-- synth-y sorts of stuff, and modeling in that realm. It absolutely astounds me what they have been able to do in that universe that others haven't even come close to touching, and it absolutely appalls me that here we have the GERMAN KINGS OF MODELING being made to look completely foolish and amateurish in a segment where pretty decent progress has already been made in the hardware realm. Surely, if even Behringer can do it (sorta close to) right... yeah, you'd be much better off with a V-Amp 2.

I feel that even if some poor soul DOES think the tones are great, $499 is an awful lot of money to pay for something with only four basic amp models and a really slim and shockingly pedestrian selection of effects. And this coming from the company known for the tweak-happiest softsynth of all time?! Even with the addition of fuzz, there's really only three distortion boxes in this thing-- the other two being a DS-1 and a Tube Screamer... absolutely inexcusable for five bills. Native tries to make up for the lack of, say, a tweed Champ model by giving you tons of cabs and mics, all of which sound pretty bad.

If you have to have modeling in a plugin format, try IK's Amplitude. I have actually done some of my best recorded tones ever on that plugin, although it took a *lot* of experimentation to get there. I also note that they've got a limited live version of Amplitude for $99-- you'd be much, much better off than playing through this.

I been playing guitar for 15 years. I am a poor bastid, so I plug my axe straight into the mic port on my pc. Output is to a pair of cheap pc speakers and rear out is into 4 car speakers and car amp I hacked up using an old pc power supply. Since I'm using a demo (coff) I'm also using my midi keyboard as a foot controller. It's easy enough to set up using the learn function. I do record some stuff but mainly I just like playing along to cd's n that. I'm too deaf now to play seriously.

Interface is easy to learn. A left click here and a right click there, here a learn there assign, old mcDonald had a ... Put it this way, if you can't figure out this program then perhaps you should stick to real hardware.

Sounds good as. I'm playing live with 10ms latency and sampling set at 48000hz, using nVidia ASIO and a 1300 duron! All stuff is onboard.

I gotta say though I had MAJOR problems with it crashing and setting up ASIO in stand alone mode, so I use Toby bear Minihost which can load vst plugins, ie Guitar Rig VST, and it works wonderfull for live playing.

Yea I was messing with Amplitube before but now that GRig is out, Amplitube is the sore loser.

I reckon if your serious about live playing through a pc (and why not? how is a pc different from any other effects pedal?) then get Guitar Rig and the foot controller if u aint got one. With the right driver set sampling etc this program rox!

I've Played guitar for 14 years. I own/owned a Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier, Triaxis, 2:90 , Rocktron Intellifex, Mesa Cab .. and a few other not so great amps. I own a pretty good computer with a audiophile 2496.

My sampling rate is always 88kHz for low latency. Samples are always 24 bits.

I use this plugin standalone, as well as in Nuendo 2.0.

I use this plugin for home practice and intend on using it a real band practice soon and hopefully live eventually.

Interface is stupid simple. Getting good sound however is, as with any guitar setup, a feat in itself. People who grippe about how the presets suck are obviously inexperienced musicians and are most likely used to very simple setups, not a complexe rackmount. It's unfortunate, but any guitarist knows that sound 'presets' are matched to specific guitar configurations. You can't play a SRV preset using an Ibanez Jem and expect to have it sound as it was designed to. That's plain stupid.You must go on a quest to tweak the software and make your own presets for your own guitar and for that reason, i'll give the software a 10 on ease of use since the user interface is very intuitive. Tone ... well that's in the ear!

Sound is awesome. A dedicated/obsessed guitarist will ultimately find whatever tone he/she's looking for.

I read somewhere that some poor SOB couldn't get a good heavy metal sound. Poor guy never heard of an overdrive pedal. LOL. Overdrive pedals and treble boosters are designed to let the tube amp's 'tubes' enter saturation. Put a treble booster in front of the Gratifier!!!
Oh .. and here's a tip. Crunchy sound isn't about cranking the bass. Take your time and experiment. It takes a while to get all this. The presets are a very good starting point but will NOT sound 'great' with any guitar without tweaking. It's an unrealistic, foolish and lazy goal to have great sounding presets on any real guitar. (as opposed to midi controllers)

Well it's a bit expensive. Software vendors are all struggling. NI is trying to make a buck and curb piracy by including the footswitch. Can't blame them. Worth the price? .. well yeah, i guess. It's the best sim out there. Awesome job. I've tried amplitube, izotope thrash, rock legends, and some others that i can't remember .. they are all garbage.

Running an AMD XP 2500, at 24 bit, 88kHz, it takes up to 47% of my CPU when i use my favorite setting.

In this case my gear is PIV + Fender Telecaster + Ibanez RG. I am playing guitar for ten years, Now I am mostly playing at home but in recent years I was playing trash with my band. So I know how the heavy guitars schould be!

I tried to use Guitar Rig with Cubase and it's standard set of plugins.

I looks good, even cool. Instalation smooth as silk. Each piece of gear they moddeled is shown with due dilligence. Anyway they had better stop at it and don't make it VST plugin but just a pack of free screenshots.

At best it's a joke. It sounds terrible!!! When I started it I thought It was damaged or broken in some strange way. But could software be broken? Take Dual Rectifier sound... If you want to know how it's not to play throught this amp try Guitar Rig, I promise it's nothing like rectify... No gain, no tone, sounds like a transistor radio cranked up. Take Marshall - you can play with a a pick, with your fingers, with your legs and it still sounds the same. Distored tones will make you doing hit records all the time - especially when you want to hit ones head... Clear tones? You could record 10 watt solid state amp and it would sound the same and even better - guitars aren't the same but not on the gutar rig... Crunch? Gritty, muddy (all is muddy there), dark, awfull even POD 1.0 had had more clarity. Effects? What they are for? Add it to the bad sound and it will make it even worse. I worked with it for five days It was five days to much. I would spare you the details but BE WARNED!!!

Keep away from this piece of crap! If you feel like recording guitar directly download Simulanalog it's for free And it does resemble real amp. Guitar Rig compared to Pod XT: I am not digital guitar geek but I admit Pod sounds are somehow amp-like this days UNLIKE guitar rig. Over and out!

I have been playing guitar and bass for about 5 years. I have a mexican strat and cort bass, which I connect to my computer through a behringer DI box. I have been fooling around with cubase sx for a little while now, trying to put songs together. I do have a modded fender blues jr. tube amp, but no quality mic, so thats why I use plugins for amp modeling.

The interface is good, pretty easy to use. My main complaint is it fills up the whole screen in cubase. I think there is a setting to change that, but its still annoying at default. Intallation was easy, of course I am using a hacked copy without the copy protection, so who knows what the real thing is like.

I think about 80% of the presets sound like shit. The clean tones this thing makes are decent, and it stays decent right up to mild distorted tones. Once you push past this, everything sounds like pure shit. I can get a better high gain sound out of a single stompbox than this plugin. The fx are also crappy, my main complaint being the octivator... it's note tracking is completely horrible. Also, all the cabinet models sound echoy and drowned out. There is no definiton. Amplitube is way the hell better for high gain sounds. Sure, you have to tweak the fuck out of it, but atleast you can still get a good sound eventually. I played around with everything in guitar rig and could barely make any useful sounds. There is no way I would pay 400$ or whatever they are asking for this. It isn't really even worth having for free.

I'm sorry NI, but you had a good idea. You made the most feature-rich guitar plugin yet. I mean theres everything in there; a tuner, tonnes of fx, amp models, and cab models. You can hook them up in any order and any way you like. Its just really too bad that it sounds as horrible as it does. You guys have the interface down, just concentrate on making it sound good for the next release. Thankyou.

I'm a student at Ex'pression Center for New Media in San Francisco.(www.expression.edu) We spend all day everyday recording musicians onto SSL's, Neve, Studer's. I've played guitar for about 8 years and have owned a variety of guitars from fender, Hamer, Ibanez, Gibson. Also amps, Fender Tweeds, Mesa Dual Rec, Peavey 5150, Orange amps.
I found this software and was blown away with it. I've used Amplitube in the past but that thing is crap compared to this. I never would have guessed that "1's and 0's" could sound this good. All digital baby. I ran my SG into the back of my Digi 002 and the Digi via USB 2.0 into my 2.6 GHZ AMD 1GB ram on XP. It loved it. IT made love to it. I cranked the trim on the line level signal going in and it sounds money. I like running digital really hot because the hotter you get it the less digital its going to sound since the sample rate takes more accurate pictures and theres more bits closer together to represent the actual signal. You won't get that sweet tape saturation tone, but it'll at least sound usuable. Even pushing the signal into the red a bit is fine! Only pull down if you HEAR clipping, otherwise theres nothing to worry about.

I was shocked at how easy it was to set up. It did crash on me once for picking an invalid soundcard and then wouldnt let me reopen it to change it back? But after I reinstalled it I never had a problem again. I ran my guitar through my M-audio Ozone with some headphones just to see what happened if I used a midi controller instead = Big Mistake. Latency was over 32 milliseconds = Noticable delayed signal. Not just Latency but sounded like an actual delay pedal was in the signal path. Sucked. But with the Digi 002 I raised the sample rate to 96K and lowered the buffersize to 512 and got Latency of <5ms - Which is great.

Alot of the presets are usuable. "You get that sweet SRV tone" haha. (They always describe amps like that in Musicians Friend) Acutally the Carlos tone is cool, alot of them with just minor adjustments can be saved and used. I really like the cabnet/mic placement/amp selection. They did a pretty darn good job emulating their sounds. If you stood out side my studio you wouldn't know I wasn't playing through an amp. Seriously, I like this software. I hope in the future software only get even better than this. The funyn thing is that I hate Line 6 and all their emulated crap products. So I was jaded before even trying this thing. But I've heard even Line 6 has been getting better.

I would give this guy a try esp. if you've used amplitube or amp farm in the past. This isn't the greatest thing in the world, but its the best guitar emulation I've found. If you know a better one - EMAIL ME! I don't know what everyones complaning about a midi footpedal or whatever. I have full version 1.002 and it doesnt require any pedal whatsoever. Thats just if you want wah or tones selectable while playing. I just ran it as an Aux through Pro Tools and recorded everything and it was happy. Makes a pretty darn good scratch guitar track. Good Luck!

I've been playing professionally since 1978, own and have owned many many pieces of hardware. I play mainly a Gibson ES335, and a midi-equipped (Roland GR33) Ibanez Roadstar for all-round work. (As well as many acoustic guitars).
I review GR v.1.1 DEMO here, on a PIV 2.8Ghz HT, 512Mb Ram PC under Win XPpro sp1, via MOTU 2408MkII/PCI324 interface. It's a live rig, and I play on a 1000W HK Audio LUCAS system.

The interface is very userfriendly, no special comments here. Difficult to do better than this, IMO.

Complete midi automation is provided. As I already have the GR33 pedalboard, and the software provides easy to use midi-learn functions, I do not need the included NI pedalboard, and plug in my guitar via an LR Baggs Paracoustic DI, which is perfect for this, providing as a bonus some hands-on EQ'ing in case it's needed. And this saves an extra audio input as well, which would have been used up by the pedalboard controller.

Overall, the ease of use is perfect for me.
I would have rated a 10 here, but I would have preferred a version without pedalboard. Why pay for it if you don't need it?? I'm in love with the demo, but as long as NI doesn't offer a software-only version, I will not buy it :-( (In other words, as soon as they do, I will).

It sounds really good. The most convincing clean/crunchy sounds I ever heard coming out of any modeling device, be it hardware pedals or software emulations. In fact, over my 1000Watt PA, the Twin's sound REALLY amazing.

I want to emphasize the importance of the speaker system you play on. I've read reviews (on this product, but equally on similar products, be it hardware or software emulators) that are totally opposite to my experiences. My guess is that these reviewers do not use an adequate amplification. If you're looking for "ooomph" and the likes, you need WATTS, which small nearfield monitor systems will never give you. Moreover, the quality of the filters and high-frequency drivers in the enclosures can totally change the dynamic response. Real guitar amplifiers do not use two or three-way speaker systems. It's very easy to obtain that "piezo-like" edge on some emulated sounds, and that's not because of the software, but more likely because of the speakers.

Apart from that, Guitar Rig very good at clean/crunchy sounds. The FX are good enough for me. I do not use distorted sounds very much, so I can't comment on those. I don't have the appropriate guitar anyway, neither the technique or the feel to use them.

The presets, as usual, demo a broad range of possibilities. I easily found a couple I'm ready to use out-of-the box on stage, and that is a compliment. Many of the presets do not appeal to me, and that's no surprise: I don't know how to play them. Tweaking is easy, (especially compared to the 2-lines LCD screen equipped hardware pedalboards I own, like the Boss GT6, this is heaven!),the parameters really do what you'd expect. I'm impressed!

Overall rating: Well well well. Difficult. If you don't own a midi-pedalboard already, as well as an active DI, the pricetag, although a bit high, seems justified to me. After all, it's a very well engineered complete solution. But if you DO, you will find yourself laying down extra cash for something that you don't need. The software works perfectly OK with midi-controllers, and there's not so much special about the RIG control pedalboard, which takes up an extra audio input as well. If they only could take $200 off for a downloadable software-only version......

The overall rating I'd like to give doesn't take this into account, because I think NI deserves a high rating for this great piece of sofware. But then again........

PS the plugin uses an average of 15% of my PIV 2.8 HT CPU, and I run it inside the Brawnspawn Forte Ensemble Live-orientated host alongside many many other plugins, using 10 simultaneous audio inputs WITH processing, as well as B4, FM7, Battery, Steinberg's Groove Agent, all live in realtime in realtime without ANY problems regarding latency (128samples is fine) or other issues.

Highly recommendable.

I have been playing for guitar for 10 years, I have been recording audio with Cubase since Cubase Score ver 2.

I have been patiently waiting for something like this to come along.

Version is 1.1 and I use with Cubase SX and M-Audio FW440 all running on XP

My reason for posting is that I have been using WARP Vst from Steinberg for a while now, and something that I was told by Steinberg helpdesk is that the overdrive works best in 24 Bit 96Khz format audio. It is apparently something to do with the overdrive algorhythms (which are Hughes and Kettner's).
Certainly as previously mentioned the level is all important, the actual retail GR comes with a preamp to boost the signal and match impedence.

Maybe the same is true for Guitar Rig ?

Very easy and intuitive for a guitarist,

Effects, cabs and mics all excellent, can't comment on controller as i don't have one :(

Even with headphones full wack, it still doesn't compare to standing in front of my 1961 Simms Watts 100w Valve + 4 x 12" cab :)

Great piece of kit, especially for those with noise worries, I can play a multi stack system all through headphones.

I'm expecting another 'Bass' version to appear as there seems to be no 15" speaker option in the cabs. I would have thought the two could be bundled. I play both Bass and Guitar and will certainly not buy two copies to use with each. I'll just play bass through multiple 12"'s instead.

Yup

Easy to use . Indeed

Ok the qulaity is ok read the other users post. i just wanted to mention that yes the distortion is lacking but it is the best dist. you can get in aplug~in.. My main reason for posting though is to tell people that they need a good line in level to have this plug-in work right.