Virtual electric guitarist Vis. While there’s no shortage of high quality sample-based electric guitar simulations on the software instrument market, coaxing realistic performances out of them in your DAW’s MIDI editor can be challenging to say the least. Thankfully, a handful of forward-thinking developers are addressing that particular issue with virtual axes that all not only sound phenomenal, but also come complete with onboard sequencing and playback systems, enabling you to trigger preset and user-designed riffs and strumming patterns with your own chord progressions. Here are four of our favourite ranges.

UJAM Virtual Guitarists

Formed by music biz heavyweights Hans Zimmer, Pharrell Williams and Peter Gorges, and the development team behind Steinberg’s groundbreaking Virtual Guitarist (released in 2002), UJAM are known for an ever-expanding range of virtual instruments and effects that successfully balance exemplary ease of use with impressive flexibility and stellar sound quality. Chief among them is their reboot of the Virtual Guitarist series, which, at the time of writing, consists of five separate plugin guitars/guitarists: three electric and two acoustic, the latter of which we’ll look at in a future round-up.

Virtual Guitarists Iron, Sparkle and Carbon serve up chords and riffs for rock (humbucker loaded singlecut), pop (“customised vintage guitar with single-coil pickups”) and action-packed ‘cinematic’ contexts (”Nu Metal 8-string”) respectively. Each one is built on its own vast library of sampled clips, which are triggered and manipulated within a perfectly straightforward interface – simply pick a Style, then keyswitch between phrases and chords within it to piece together convincing riffs, progressions and licks. Tone shaping, amplification and effects are provided via readily accessible macro controls, and the newest in the range, Carbon, introduced a number of new features to the Virtual Guitarist engine, including Instrument Mode, for designing custom riffs, and the Layerer, for positioning up to four guitarists in a virtual soundstage.

Whether you’re after metal power chords, chart-friendly janglings, or heavily processed rhythm guitar, the Virtual Guitarist range is without doubt the quickest and easiest way to get it into your projects.

Review of IRON

Review of SPARKLE

Use Pattern Switching To Generate Songwriting Ideas With SPARKLE

Native Instruments Session Guitarist

Running in the free Kontakt Player engine, the three electric offerings in NI’s sextet of virtual guitarist instruments put you in command of a Gibson Les Paul (Session Guitarist – Electric Sunburst and Electric Sunburst Deluxe) or a 1950s Fender Telecaster (Session Guitarist – Vintage Electric), triggered by the captured strums, riffs, chords and arpeggios of a top-notch session player. The multisample banks behind them range in size from around 6GB to 9GB, and you get 154 diverse patterns with Electric Sunburst, 237 with Electric Sunburst Deluxe and 231 with Electric Vintage. The patterns are handled in a slick and intuitive browser, and the scripted Kontakt interface makes it easy to organise them into keyswitchable sets for performance – hold a chord to have it played using the selected pattern, synced to host tempo. The engine gives control over timing, pitch, voicing, articulation selection (open, muted, harmonics, etc, in both plectrum- and finger-style variations), humanising, swing and more, and a wealth of effects, mixing and amplification options are onboard for extensive tone shaping. Electric Sunburst Deluxe and Electric Vintage also include a second instrument for creating melodies and solos, which can be combined with the patterns.

Pushing the Kontakt engine to its limits, and powered by two of the most beautifully multisampled electric guitars you’ll ever hear, the Session Guitarist series delivers incredibly realistic rhythm and lead guitar parts, and lets you really go to town shaping and processing them. 

Ample Sound Ample Guitar

Ample Sound’s roster of sample-based virtual instruments centres on a raft of virtual guitars and basses, with a colourful array of lovingly realised emulations in the electric guitar category, from a Gibson SG Vintage 61 and PRS Custom 24 Artist, to a Schecter Hellraiser 9-string and ESP Eclipse 1. Each library weighs in at up to 10GB and takes in all the articulations you could reasonably ask for beyond the essential sustains, including hammer ons/pull off, palm mute, harmonics, legato slides and more.

The proprietary engine common to the whole Ample Sound range has matured over the years, and the slightly kludgy earlier incarnations are now long forgotten, with the latest ‘Rectangles’ interface looking great and giving you everything you need within its tabbed pages to tweak the sound of the guitar itself; sequence strummed chord progressions and riffs in exquisite detail, with a ton of presets in the bank; import and play back multiple tablature formats; shape your tone with six fully adjustable amps, seven cabs and eight mics (three mic channels plus DI); and apply compression, EQ, reverb and delay effects. It’s a comprehensive toolbox with which to wrangle the superb recordings at the heart of each instrument into spectacularly lifelike and sonically engaging guitar tracks.

MusicLab Real 5

Among MusicLabs’ five-strong catalogue of virtual guitars, the four electric entrants comprise deeply multisampled emulations of a Fender Stratocaster (RealStrat), Les Paul Custom (RealLPC), Rickenbacker (RealRick) and an unspecified 8-string (RealEight), each captured in several configurations (standard and baritone tuning, 12-string, double tracked, etc), with up to 30 samples per fret for authentic variation with repeated notes. Five performance modes – Solo, Harmony, Chords, Bass’n’Chord, Bass’n’Pick – cater to various styles of playback, and an arsenal of keyboard-controllable performance effects (bends, slides, taps, trills, tremolo, wah-wah, etc) can be worked in for amazingly expressive solos and riffs. The ‘guitarist’ angle comes into play in the Pattern and Song tabs, where 1250 categorised rhythm pattern MIDI files are made to follow your chosen chord progressions, with drag and drop export to the host DAW.

With the multisamples recorded totally dry, and no amplification or effects built in, these are intentionally ’purist’ guitar sims intended for processing with other plugins in your DAW; and with that single-minded focus comes an unrivalled degree of playability and nuancing that makes the Real series arguably the most adaptable virtual guitar system available today.

Do you use virtual guitarist plugins in your productions? Tell us about it in the comments.