Everyone loves Guitar Hero, because it aids in your fantasy of getting up on stage, turning the volume on your Marshall stack up to 11, and really setting your axe on fire. I've heard of real-life guitar gods who regularly tour and play to screaming fans who number in their hundreds, coming home only to pick up the tiny plastic controller for Guitar Hero, and get to playing for a virtual audience right away. If you actually have skills that can win a following on the guitar, a guitar software experience that does such a poor imitation of the the real thing can seem kind of unsatisfying. And this is where the Kontrol Edition of Guitar Rig 4 from Native Instruments, comes in.
If you have fearsome skills as a real guitarist, Guitar Rig offers you a guitarist's dream lineup, all ready for you to pump the best shredding tones out of. You get all the pedal emulations, you get a variety of amps, and you get effects to your heart's content. Did you ever want to play with Eric Clapton's trademark Fender Twin? Did you ever want Van Halen's signature Marshall stack sound? Do you have more ideas for combinations of effects pedals than you have cash for? If so, Guitar Rig 4 Kontrol Edition is creativity at its best in guitar software. Here's how it works.
The system itself, a hardware and software bundle, and it goes for about $400; the hardware is a great pedal board-like device that arrays all the controls out for you that also holds a high-quality audio interface. it allows you to plug your guitar directly into your PC, and then to select from a mind-boggling range of guitar sounds and processing gear. Each one of those pieces of equipment, pedals, processors and what have you, offers the full range of adjustments and settings that you would get with the real stuff, you can even search for effects by the character that you're looking for. And since you'll be playing everything through your own real guitar, it doesn't feel detached and disembodied like it can with a keyboard.
You buy a keyboard, and you'll right away see presets that are named for the classic instruments they copy - 808 for drums, Rhodes for the famous on-stage electric piano, and so on. Guitar Rig 4 does emulate every dream vintage and modern instruments you could want; but it stops short of naming them exactly after their real-world inspirations. Maybe Native Instruments wants to stay free of getting sued for copyright infringement.
Setting your rig up on Guitar Rig 4 is pretty easy. You have your array of processors right in front of you, and you just drag and drop them in your big window. The flexibility you are granted in altering and sculpting how you sound, is staggering. I really like about this guitar software, is rather strangely, the hardware that's bundled with it. It comes with a Guitar Rig for control the truly looks stage worthy and roadworthy for the way it is made. It's a stomp box with foot switches that you can use to control a number of sound parameters onboard the software - you need things, speed up the tempo, turn effects on often so one. An expression pedal to one side lets you control things like from a little and wah. The stomp box includes an audio interface with professional low-latency specifications you need, you connect it to the computer through you a USB connection.
Performance is fast, smooth and preferably sophisticated, guitar rig three brings to top-notch processing at a price anyone can afford. But the/emulations begin.