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Saturday, May 24, 2014

VIRTUAL GUITAR! a guide for dummies (with Free Vst instruments inside)


Hello and welcome to this week's article!
After having talked a couple of weeks ago about the Bass Vstis, it's time to dedicate an article about their guitar counterpart.

This article may sound a bit sacrilegious on a guitar oriented blog, since we're talking about replacing the guitarist with a MIDI-written Virtual Instrument that uses real guitar samples or guitar-sounding Synths, but since we are open-minded, we want to cover every aspect of the music production :)

The Virtual Guitar plugins are today very realistic, with many gigabytes of high resolution samples, and doesn't sound anymore like the 80's synth guitar sounds that we used to listen in the old videogames, for example: today a midi guitar sound may result very hard to tell, if well written.
Some of these plugins are libraries that can be used ok Kontakt, others are stand alone, some have already processed sounds (for example a distorted guitar with applied a delay), some others lets you choose which virtual amp to use, and which stompbox.
These last plugins, that are the most complete ones, also lets us  use external Vsts, in order to treat them like they were a real guitar track, recorded clean: we can send them to our favourite Guitar Amp Simulator and apply on it all of our favourite plugins.

Unfortunately, in this world there are not many good free guitar VSTI, since creating them requires a lot of work, sampling the single strings and chords with all the variations (vibrato, legato, tapping...).
These are the best commercial VSTI in the market, and some of them are so realistic (if well programmed) that it becomes very, very hard to tell that they are MIDI written and not played with a real guitar.

- PROMINY V-METAL: a very metal-oriented guitar sampler

- VIR2 ELECTRI6ITY: a very complete virtual guitar sampler, with over 24000 samples

- ORANGETREE EVOLUTION: a 3gb archive of guitar samples compatible with Kontakt

- REFX SLAYER 2: a VSTI with a very complete virtual guitar suite, including stompboxes and ampls

- SHREDDAGE 2: one of the most used virtual guitar plugins, includes a light version of Peavey Revalver

- MUSICLAB REALLPC: a VSTI with a collection of samples taken with a Les Paul Custom

- ROB PAPEN RG: a very interesting virtual guitar plugin that also features an in-built sequencer, with many rhythm patterns already included.


Here instead are some FREE VSTI, that surely worth a try:


- SUPERRIFF GUITAR: a very interesting VSTI of a humbucker guitar on a Marshall Amplifier.

- DSK ELECTRIK GUITARZ: a guitar synth with some built-in effect

- DVS GUITAR: a nice 80's rock sounding VSTI

- MILK GUITAR: a very convincing acoustic guitar VSTI


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2 comments:

  1. I bought REFX Slayer2 in late 13 not knowing it was about to be 'axed'. A brilliant guitar emulation vst plugin. I used it in several Cubase projects. But I upgraded to El Capitan and Slayer2 sadly don't work no more....

    I contacted their support to enquire about an update. No it's been discontinued. I didn't mean the tone of the conversation to degrade to the extent where Mr support started taking offence. but sadly it did. I was merely expressing my surprise. This discussion is now closed. Oh well.

    I'm now short a good virtual guitar VST. I'm a guitarist myself but merely wanted it as an effect.

    Might you know of a similar piece of quality virtual guitar?

    Best Regards - Ken

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  2. hi! I would try one of these in the article, like shreddage. It is pretty good!

    ReplyDelete