Virtual Guitarist

Virtual Guitarist was advertised as a Rythm Guitar, and to me, it is nothing more. I love the acoustic guitars and a small selection of electrics, but the rest are useless. Virtual Guitarist's feature to play your own parts DOES NOT WORK WITH FL STUDIO 4! After going through the painfully long installation, I loaded the plugin up only to find more waiting for each instrument to load. Once the instrument is loaded, it is easy to figure out the interface (though I still have yet to figure out a few complex and useless features). The sound quality is good, but it is hard to use most guitars. The features are all listed on the Virtual Guitarist website. What you see there is what you get. The only feature I didn't get to try out was the channel 16 play your own parts feature. The manual is fine, but I didn't need it to figure VG out. I contacted customer support to check on how to use the channel 16 feature on VG, but they were unable to help...but then again, the producers of FL Studio 4 couldn't help me.

OVERALL:
Virtual Guitarist is a must despite its lack of flexibility. It provides a rythm guitarist for you and nothing more. You will fine acoustic guitars that sound wonderful and electrics that....well, don't. It's very easy to use, and you shouldn't have to use customer support unless you have compatability problems. The plugin is somewhat stable (with an ocasional crash in FL Studio 4), and is worth the money to buy.Read Review

Well,

I went into this expecting a rhythm guitarist, and it exceeded my expectations. True you really can't play individual strings with it, and it may be somewhat limited sonically. However, a rhythm guitarist is never supposed to stand out in a mix, and all that I am using it for is to add an organic quality to my mostly electronic sounding music. A great use for this plug is to quickly figure out chord progressions for a song and get it arranged very quickly, then add the "real" music to the arrangement.

About the plug it self. The sound is for the most part(especially on the acoustic) superb. Some of the electrics didn't impress me much, but I am not really all that into heavy distorted guitars anyway.

One note- you need more than 256MB of RAM to run a few instances of this plug in. I had to upgrade to 768 to comfortably run this plugin. I noticed problems with FL crashing when I ran out of memory and the swap file was being used. this will take 1.6GB of hd space too.

In FL 3.56, I have seen some crashes and hiccupps, but it is pretty stable for the most part. This mainly happens when I save an flp in FL or when I use all my memory.

As with all Steinberg plugins, the value for the money isn't its biggest selling point, and it is kind of expensive at 200 dollars, I don't think that any VSTi should be more than 100-150 for even the most complex plugin, but If you think of it in terms of getting a VST plus 1.6 Gb of samples its not too bad.

Anyway,if you aren't expecting all of your guitar needs packaged in a box, and just want a rhythm guitarist to strum along with your compositions, you will be happy with this plug.Read Review

If you need rhythm git's than you should at least take a look at this VSTi. It has excellent sound and is easy to use. With the channal 16 control you have total control of how you want it to play. It does take some practice, but folks should get the hang of it in a short time.

If you want screaming leads this is not for you.

The players (patches) all sound very good, and the styles are pretty handy.

Only downfall IMHO is not enough funk:(

dwRead Review

I am very impressed with this software. It is an amazing idea that was executed very well.

I disagree with people who claim that this is merely a "Loop Player". The way the software was designed gives the player enormous flexibility to strum the rhythms they seek.

The style I am interested would be a fusion of old Rush(Hemispheres and 2112) with Bach counterpoint using synth sounds (e.g., like Wendy Carlos or Don Dorsey's "Bach Busters"). Before this software, I wasn't able to add the guitar "edge" I wanted to my synth lines. This product is a godsend for me.

Well almost. . . For the type of music I am interested, I am extremely distressed the real heavy guitars are only available in "Neutral" chord (root and fifth). For the type of music I want to compose, this is somewhat limiting. I compensated by using synth lines to add the rest of the chord. I hope a future upgrade will make all the chords available for the heavy guitars.

This software begs to be expanded, and I hope Steinberg/Wizoo gives some flexibility to third party developers to create different libraries for use in this program. For example, I could envision separate heavy metal guitars (with all the chords and scrapes, chugs and sound effects galore), a jazz guitar upgrade, a reggae guitar upgrade, a classical guitar upgrade. You get the point.

They are on to something with this program. They clearly dropped the ball by limiting the heavy guitars the way they did. But this is a great program for me, that has the potential for satisfying an enormous range of people who wish to write in many different styles.

If you would like to hear my original rock instrumental pieces featuring Virtual Guitarists' heavy rhythm guitars, check out "Ignition" and (my newest piece) "Frenetic Passage" at:

http://www.soundclick.com/jeffreynanessRead Review

Very disapointed !!
It's a good loop player ! We can use it just for chord forget real melody out of this.

Other bad point, In the next production we 'll automaticly recgonise the few chords preset of VGuitarist so hard to define your fingerprint.

I'm also very disapointed about the WhaWha !!!! Very poor !

There is better in Sample CD akai .



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