Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3 Review - High Quality, Fast, and just Cool… |
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October 16th, 2007 Music Production Software | |
After reading some positive reviews I finally purchased Native Instrument’s Guitar Rig 3 this past weekend.
For those unfamiliar with this piece of software, Guitar Rig is designed to provide guitar and bass solutions by modeling the world’s most popular amplifiers, cabinets, microphones, and effect pedals…
First impressions: incredible range of effects and presents, fun & easy to use interface, slightly disappointing distortion.
What makes this software unique is the drag and drop interface of assembling your sound. It’s quite easy to use. First, choose an amplifier for your sound. Native Instruments has modeled classic Fender, Marshall, and Mesa Boogie amps. You can further sculpt your tone by selecting the size of your cabinet. This variable makes more difference to overall tone than you would imagine. The larger the cabinet, the wider your tone.
Next, the fun begins. Stack up as many effects as possible or choose from literally thousands of presets. I had a lot of fun mixing and matching all the different stompboxes and such. Make sure your computer has a decent amount of RAM (I have 2 gigs) as adding more effects will certainly tax your system - especially if Guitar Rig is being used as a VST plugin in Protools or Cubase, etc.
In total, for about $300 you can have 12 amps, 15 guitar and 4 bass cabinets, 4 rotary speakers, 9 microphones with adjustable positioning and 44 effects. Pretty damn empowering, I must admit. Delays are rich, flangers are full of texture, and pitch shifting effects sound studio quality (up to 48k samples). However, even with a high-end guitar and quality pre-amps, it takes MUCH more tweaking to find an acceptable distortion. When recorded, the distortion ends up sounding a bit thin, noisy, and at times, even annoying. But this shouldn’t be a surprise. Everyone knows that a real tube amp cannot be replicated digitally (not yet at least). Maybe I’m overreacting. I did have surprisingly good results blending two different types of distortions together in Protools when multi-tracking demos. Overall, Guitar Rig from Native Instruments is worth the money - so I will hold onto it. Plus it’s just fun to use.
To be able to sit in my studio and have tons of cool sounding high quality effects at my disposal is quite a luxury, and despite my gripes with the distortion I have to say I’m satisfied with Guitar Rig.
Live Results:
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NATIVE INSTRUMENTS Guitar Rig 3 Kontrol Edition NEW US $489.00 Auction Ends: Wednesday Jul-30-2008 14:05:07 PDT Buy this Item | Watch this Item |
Features:
12 supreme-sounding guitar and bass amps
New matched cabinet module provides tried and true classic sounds in seconds
44 perfectly emulated guitar effects
18 guitar and 6 bass cabinets, 4 rotary speakers and 9 microphones
Intelligent preset management for fast access to a huge selection of sounds for all styles
Essential tools: Integrated tuner, metronome and 2 tapedeck modules for easy recording
Premium special features include a loop machine and powerful modifiers
Dedicated “Live View” for performing on stage
Dynamic Tube Response Technology delivers a profound sonic quality
Technical Info
Supported Interfaces
Audio Units, VST, RTAS on ProTools 7, DXi, ASIO, Core Audio, Core MIDI, DirectSound
System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.3.x, G4 733 MHz or Intel� Core� Duo 1.66 GHz, 512 MB RAM
Universal Binary included - Intel-Mac ready!
Windows XP SP2, Pentium 700 MHz / Athlon XP 1.33 GHz, 256 MB RAM
