What is Virtual Guitarist?
Virtual Guitarist is a VST instrument with the capacity to render a variety of rhythm guitar styles. In this case, a style entails not only a specific playing technique, but also the type of guitar, amp, phrasing and effect. You can easily determine via MIDI the desired key and chord. As soon as you do, Virtual Guitarist starts accompanying your song - without making mistakes, but always with perfect timing. You are free to modify the sound, phrasing and other playing parameters on the fly and in real time. With all these options at your fingertips, you can conjure the perfect guitar tracks to suit your taste and the song.
How does Virtual Guitarist 2 work?
Rather than synthesizing sounds that emulate guitars, Virtual Guitarist 2 taps real guitar tracks recorded by professional studio guitarists. This is why Virtual Guitarist 2 sounds so animated and authentic rather than static and artificial. It’s realism is uncanny, almost as if a flesh-and-blood guitarist is playing your song. Nonetheless, Virtual Guitarist 2 is nearly as versatile as a synthesizer. Instead of fixed loops, it works with slices enabling every attack to be triggered and edited any way you wish.
Audio quality and sound library
All sounds archived in the 6.8-GB library were recorded with premium equipment and post-processed by pro audio engineers to attain remarkably warm, transparent and punchy tones. A battery of excellent electric and acoustic guitars were employed for the recordings, among them genuine classics and valuable custom models. Every one of the 88 styles comprises up to 14 parts played with different techniques and recorded in 12 different keys. And that puts at your fingertips a vast selection of riffs, licks, grooves and fills covering almost every conceivable style of music.
The Part Editor
The Part Editor presents a view of the phrase’s structure and enables radical manipulations. Its waveforms serve to visualize the individual attacks, indicating pitch along the vertical axis and time along the horizontal axis. Dragging a slice to the left or right changes its timing within the bar. The decay, pitch and volume of every slice may also be edited. Other options include deleting, muting and totally rearranging the slices that make up a part to create entirely new phrases.
Groove settings
Every phrase’s micro-timing can be edited in the Part Editor’s Groove area. You can select various swing values and adapt the part to suit any MIDI groove. For example, you could impose a drum groove directly on a rhythm guitar. To this end, Virtual Guitarist 2 analyzes MIDI data and automatically adapts the timing to match this incoming data (GrooveMatch).
The Effect section
The Effect section of Virtual Guitarist 2 offers every sound-sculpting tool required to shape professional guitar tones. Virtual stomp box effects such as a wah-wah, compressor, fuzz, tremolo, chorus, flanger, phaser, reverb and delay are on board. The amp section offers a selection of solid-state, tube and rectifier amps. As an added benefit, these FX section may be employed not only for Virtual Guitarist 2, but also as an independent plug-in for other instruments and host application tracks.
The Output section
In a real studio you can set up different speaker combinations. This section offers the same option of selecting various speaker configurations to shape guitar sounds. Virtual Guitarist 2 features four different speakers providing the combinations and sounds favored by the majority of guitarists. You can elect to record these speakers using dynamic or capacitor microphones, positioning them directly in front of the speaker membrane (on axis) or at its edge (off axis).