Native Instruments Guitar Rig VST PC

I have played guitar for around 20 years - a Fender Strat with Lace sensor pickups, at present. The software version is 1.001 (demo version). I have used it for recording indie / fusion / rock into a WinXP PC; an XP2800 CPU - load was up to about 15% for a patch with several FX in it. Five instances, probably more, can run on this computer at 5 ms latency. Listening was through headphones connected to the soundcard.

It can be used without conscious thought really, just drag in amps and FX and play - no manual is needed. The program ran perfectly at 5 ms latency. The full version has a hardware midi controller that can control functions in the FX and amp modules. There are so many knobs, sliders, and ways to route the signal that you can spend hours tweaking. You can, however, just drag in an amp module and start straight away. The only, minor point is saving the preset. After tweaking for ages, I decided to save my sound only to loose it by clicking in another memory slot. Just make sure you know how to save to a new location before tweaking!

I compared the software to a miced-up Mesa Boogie Rectoverb and found the software could give similar results for cleanish tones. The solidity, tightness, and focus of the sound are not quite there in the software, however. The clean Fender-type amp does a pretty good twang with clear presence, but is a little sterile with a bit of that 'DI' guitar tone to it.

The higher gain distortion and overdrive sounds let it down for me. Cold, hollow, tizzy, soft, weak, and nasal are words that spring to mind. The Tube screamer tone is not pleasant to listen to. The tones do not suggest punch and power, maybe because of the solidity, tightness, and focus that I mentioned above is even more important for overdrive tones. Similar results can be obtained with the freeware Guitar Suite I feel. To put this into context, the Guitar Rig is as good as any other software for overdrive.

On a more positive note, the cabinet simulation works well - the best I have tried. It is more than EQ - I believe it is based on a convolution process whereby the sampled sound of a real cab is printed onto the signal. I found it excellent at modifying the tone and moving the sound around in the stereo image. It could go some way to disguising the overdrive tones.

If you could use this software with the line out from a real valve amp, preamp, or Boogie V-twin pedal, or such-like, I would think a better tone could be obtained, since the software drive tones are lacking to my ears. The FX and cabinet simulator are very good, however; I liked the octaver in particular.

So, maybe I'm not being fair by comparing it to a $1500 valve amp but you can get a $200 Laney all valve amp which has a real valve pre and power amp.

At $500 it is too expensive because it fails at the core organic tones for me. An all valve Laney LC15 only costs $200; real pre and poweramp distortion at line level output can be had using a THD Hotplate for another $225. There are lots of cheap or freeware plugins to do chorus, delay, EQ, etc. The freeware Super Impule Reverb does better reverb than Guitar Rig, although delay compensation will have to by bypassed for realtime playing. The Guitar Rig cabinet simulator is better than other solutions, however. Try out the Vox Tonelab @ $300 or the POD 2 @ $120, or take a line out from a real valve amp.

tried with single coil and humbuckers through a behringer tube mic preamp into a Terratec phase 22 pci card. No latency at all playing standalone.
I play mainly blues and rock, from srv to AC DC

Easy as the mechanism of a nail

It is the best sounding modeling item available. better than pods, amplitubes, or whatever! (I tried them all). The best improvement are the clean sounds that in other items sounds crap, here sounds like the real thing, with a real response to the increasing of the volume spot. The twang amp is incredibly real for a SRV sound, and the others are awesome for crunchy and distorted sounds, you got all the sounds you can imagine and all of'em very very close to the real thing.
Don't play atention to the review before that said that no good distorted tones could get out of this thing!! it is absolutely false!
You can use the rectifier as you were playing with Metallica.
Sounds great! (Deutsch qualitat)

This is twice better than amplitube, three times better than warp, rockamp legends, greenmachine, amp farm, ...

It's the best by far BUT it's just software, I think it could be much cheaper

Been playing music for roughly 15 years, started with guitars then moved on to other instruments (bass, drums, piano, some brasses, turntables, and more) but never quit guitar. I currently record music in a studio that I built in an appartment. Not having much money to put on effects I rely a lot on virtual effects and processors.

I think the interface is not so bad, but it really could use window resizing as the amps and effects stacks can get pretty long and even on a higher resolution you are stuck at the same window size. This is pretty much the only bad point I have about the interface. Everything else is clean and easy to find and I love the way you can drag and change the order of the modules in the stack.

I have to say I really expected that one a lot. I was introduced to virtual amp modelling with Amplitube, and knowing Native Instruments reputation I expected a lot from Guitar Rig, it was gonna be the ultimate virtual guitar amp... or thats what I hoped it to be. The Guitar rig offers great clean sounds, althought I find some configurations have a very digital feel to the sound, but it really falls short when it comes to getting a real good distortion. No matter how much effort and time you put tweaking you might get a good sound, but never any better than ones you can make with Amplitube, or even freeware ones like SimulAnalog Guitar Suite or Green Machine.

While I am not totally disapointed by Guitar Rig and I can find many uses for it, Its not even close to what I dreamed it would be. I don't find it useless, but I will stick to other amps mentionned above.

NI Guitar Rig--30 day demo/30 minutes per session. My two cents: I've been playing with this stand alone(Windows XP) for a few days now using humbuckers and single coils, no other fx, and, it must be me, but I cannot get a distortion/OD that even comes close to my analog pedals/rack units from this software. I've tweaked and squeaked, but nada...

The interface is very easy to use. No install problems, no crashes. The menu is simple to understand. Mac or PC.

The best features to me are the on board fx: excellent spring reverb, trippy reverse delay, Whammy simul., Boss chorus simul., good Leslie, the E-H small stone falls short, good tremolo, colorful graphics. The clean settings are very good, but with a little searching, I can find good clean as freeware elsewhere, not to mention again my rackmounts. Even though the four amplifiers include extensive editing, I only like the Fender Twin model---It's not that you can't get distortion, but it just doesn't measure up, at least not to what I'm used to. The Ibanez tube screamer model will have nobody rushing to trade-in their real 808's. The pre-sets on this demo are very fx heavy, the SVR patch is just awful, Stevie Ray would laugh at this one, Jimmy will. The cabinet choices are superb--mic models, placement, "air", speaker size and style, more than one cab if needed, very flexible--but isn't this really just EQing?

There's a lot to like about this baby, but at $499, NI is going to have a tough sell. I can't get a rig like this as freeware, very true, and I'd pay for that Fender spring reverb model, but to my ears I can get better distortion/OD from freebies like Green Machine, Tri-Dirt, many others. I thank NI for letting us try it for 30 days, and not ruining the sound or nagging us with pop-ups.

I just want to mention a few thoughts.

Tried GuitarRig thru E-MU 1820 soundcard, and didn't like results very much, thought latency was almost non-existent.
Seems to me that i can get mush better sounds using my SansAmp Tri-A.C. + some software compressor.
But the tweakability of plug-in is VERY impressive, and some good sounds really is there.

I've been for around 10 years playing piano, guitar, and singing. I have studio experience that make those 10 years worth like 15. I have Guitar Rig version 1.0.0 and I use it in the studio with ProTools (in a Mac G4) and at my home studio, with Nuendo 2 (in a PC). I have a hard rock/modern rock/nu metal project, so I had to learn the great importance of a perfect mic'ed guitar sound, big, punchy, with a valve texture, in the overall mix.
I'm used to listening everything in my Yamaha MSP5 monitors.

Great interface. Had some problems when saving presets (overwritten some by accident), but that's a minor detail, and I could have avoid it if I read the manual.
No problems installing it. The pedal board is great =)
You have to really understand how a guitar is well captured in studio, and how should a guitar sound, to make use of this. If you know what to do and what to look for, you can achieve a great guitar sound.

Sounds awesome. The clean presets are awesome, but the distorted ones need a lot of tweaking. I have improved some of them, but I'm still tweaking and making it better. I can't see the point where I feel I can't get a better sound out of it! It's always improving! Almost anoying...gives me a feeling of lack of control =)

I just give it a 9 because the perfect 10 would be a plugin with infinite possibilities, with low CPU needs, and a perfect Chevelle or Linkin Park guitar sound coming out of my monitors right after pluging the guitar. Impossible? Maybe 10 years from now, it can be done... But for now, It's the best amp simulation plugin available in the market. Don't know about hardware though...I'd like to try the POD Pro XT... Because this is still a plugin, and a plugin has the inconvenient of being demanding on the CPU.