Review: Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3

To give you a good idea of my guitar playing prowess I’ll confess that I’m self-taught and avoided B-minor chords for about the first five years. Getting four fingers to act independently was just too tricky. When it came to performing difficult songs, instead of wasting my valuable youth (and precious drinking time) rehearsing, I simply stomped on more effects pedals and smothered my incompetence with grunge and delay.

I don’t mind telling you because I know I’m not alone.

Things haven’t changed much, except that nowadays my guitar playing ping-pongs between DAW projects in my studio, where amplifier modelling plug-ins make me sound awesome, and the occasional pub gig where I still need to dredge up all the talent I can muster. Thankfully, for the latter, help has now arrived.

It’s come in a box with Native Instrument’s Guitar Rig 3 and its USB 2.0 Foot Kontroller. And before you ask, it’s unclear whether ‘Kontroller’ is a literal German translation or one of those crazy, ‘Hey, let’s spell it badly!’ marketing ideas. Straight away, I got interested in checking out the practicality of using Guitar Rig 3 on stage in stand-alone mode as well as the obvious studio applications.

PLACING YOUR ORDER

But before we assume the ‘goblet of fire’ pose, let’s look at the software. Guitar Rig 3 carries on from previous incarnations by offering a vertical – and virtual – rack configuration for your sounds. To set up a rig, simply drag & drop a choice of components into the rack, starting with (if you like) an amplifier head that automatically includes a matching speaker cabinet… but more on that in a moment. The order in which you connect the components is entirely up to you, and like a real-world signal path, varying the arrangement of the various speakers, heads and effects has a dramatic affect on the outcome. There’s a good selection of available devices and most mimic famous real-life products (and probably flirt dangerously close to somebody’s copyright). For example, you can have a tube-driven distortion module called the Skreamer, which is suspiciously coloured the same green as a certain classic Ibanez Tube Screamer pedal. The effects presets use similar themes like ‘Eric’s Creamy Lead’ and ‘Stevie’s Rhythm’, too. But let’s not call the lawyers just yet. Some of the components have outrageous settings that give you synthesizer and pad-like sounds from your guitar. A lot of fun.

WALL OF SOUND

While Guitar Rig 3 offers a huge range of great presets arranged in a browser window, for once I’ve actually gotten more satisfaction from building my own rigs from scratch. Unless you’re attempting something quite radical, the logical steps of starting with an amp head, then adding an array of effects can quickly result in some excellent noises. Changing the amps gave me a better variety of bite and grunge, rather than adding distortion effects, but each to their own. You might prefer the metal-shredding noise of the Sledgehammer module. Simply put, you can create almost any sound you’ll need with GR3’s components.

But because Guitar Rig leans so much towards electric guitar and bass, I eventually hit a snag. Trying to build a nice, natural acoustic guitar preset took a while and I ended up using the ‘Jazz’ amp head (emulating the Roland Jazz Chorus amplifier) without any accompanying cabinet. Only then did things lose that harsher, coiled pickup kind of sound. The lesson learned was not to assume the cabinet was necessary. At the same time I struggled to find a compressor that wasn’t more suited to crushing Eddie Van Halen into submission and didn’t smother the acoustic’s tone. I finally got a nice sound by placing the compressor at the very bottom of the signal chain, though it didn’t really make sense. First on my wishlist to Native Instruments is for a nice, clean compressor and preamp to be added to the rig.

Other morsels in the virtual rig include Input and Output modules, a good tuner – the usual guitar goodies. But perhaps even more noteworthy are two virtual tape decks – one at the top of the rig and the second at the end. Tape One can play back audio files of many flavours at different speeds and pitch for you to jam along with, while Tape Two records the results. Clever! There’s also a basic sequencer – again for programming simpler accompaniments.