Tough but true: Just a fortunate few can afford to keep a pro guitarist on a retainer to answer a late-night call to lay down a sweet 12-string track to spice up a ballad or a slamming metal groove for an ad soundtrack. But everyone else can fall back on Virtual Guitarist 2. The perfect rhythm guitarist, it plays both acoustic and electric guitar, offering the right riff for almost every style of music. Steinberg's virtual guitarist can play in any key, master even the most challenging chords, automatically play in time with your song’s tempo, and even sync up to the drum’s groove, if you wish.
- Utterly authentic-sounding guitar parts, tracked by professional studio guitarists
- A vast array of styles ranging from silky arpeggios to fat-and-juicy electric guitars riffs
- Warm, transparent and assertive tone
- Easy handling and outstanding playability
- Integrated GrooveMatch technology adapts guitar parts to other MIDI grooves
- Different amp models and numerous stomp box FX (also employable as an external effect rack)
- Cross-platform (Mac/PC); supports all standard plug-in formats (VST, DXi, AU, Rewire) and standalone mode
New Features
Virtual Guitarist 2 offers all the content of Virtual Guitarist and Virtual Guitarist Electric Edition, plus 32 brand-new styles. The new Part Editor lets you create entirely new guitar licks, riffs and grooves at will. The enhanced version also ships with a battery of new stomp box effects, amp models and workflow refinements.
- More styles & sounds - 32 brand-new styles recorded by world-class guitarists, plus 56 styles originally featured in Virtual Guitarist and Electric Edition. A 6.8 GB archive of high-end recordings covers just about every musical style.
- New Part Editor - The new Part Editor lets you revise and revamp every phrase rendered by Virtual Guitarist 2. And every slice can be moved, deleted, muted and transposed at will.
- GrooveMatch technology - Courtesy of the new GrooveMatch technology, you can modify Virtual Guitarist parts to match existing MIDI grooves. Incoming MIDI data are analyzed and the part’s slices are automatically adapted.
- New stomp box effects - The new virtual stomp box FX turn Virtual Guitarist 2 into a nifty effects rack for crafting professional-class sounds. The FX arsenal holds all the classic guitar effects - wah-wah, compressor, fuzz, tremolo, chorus, flanger, phaser, reverb and delay. Guitar-centric EQs are also available.
- Amp, speaker & microphone type - For added sound-shaping power, Virtual Guitarist 2 now offers three different types of amps and four speaker models, as well as two microphones and two mic positioning options.
- MIDI Learn - All crucial editing knobs are now endowed with a practical MIDI learn function. In a matter of seconds, you can assign every sound parameter of Virtual Guitarist 2 to your external MIDI controller.
- Enhanced compatibility - Supporting for all standard plug-in formats such as VST, DXi, AU and Rewire, Virtual Guitarist 2 now readily integrates into every professional host application. The standalone version now also supports multiple outputs.
What is Virtual Guitarist?
Virtual Guitarist is a VST instrument with the capacity to render a variety of rhythm guitar styles. In this case, a style entails not only a specific playing technique, but also the type of guitar, amp, phrasing and effect. You can easily determine via MIDI the desired key and chord. As soon as you do, Virtual Guitarist starts accompanying your song - without making mistakes, but always with perfect timing. You are free to modify the sound, phrasing and other playing parameters on the fly and in real time. With all these options at your fingertips, you can conjure the perfect guitar tracks to suit your taste and the song.
How does Virtual Guitarist 2 work?
Rather than synthesizing sounds that emulate guitars, Virtual Guitarist 2 taps real guitar tracks recorded by professional studio guitarists. This is why Virtual Guitarist 2 sounds so animated and authentic rather than static and artificial. It’s realism is uncanny, almost as if a flesh-and-blood guitarist is playing your song. Nonetheless, Virtual Guitarist 2 is nearly as versatile as a synthesizer. Instead of fixed loops, it works with slices enabling every attack to be triggered and edited any way you wish.
Audio quality and sound library
All sounds archived in the 6.8-GB library were recorded with premium equipment and post-processed by pro audio engineers to attain remarkably warm, transparent and punchy tones. A battery of excellent electric and acoustic guitars were employed for the recordings, among them genuine classics and valuable custom models. Every one of the 88 styles comprises up to 14 parts played with different techniques and recorded in 12 different keys. And that puts at your fingertips a vast selection of riffs, licks, grooves and fills covering almost every conceivable style of music.
The Part Editor
The Part Editor presents a view of the phrase’s structure and enables radical manipulations. Its waveforms serve to visualize the individual attacks, indicating pitch along the vertical axis and time along the horizontal axis. Dragging a slice to the left or right changes its timing within the bar. The decay, pitch and volume of every slice may also be edited. Other options include deleting, muting and totally rearranging the slices that make up a part to create entirely new phrases.
Groove settings
Every phrase’s micro-timing can be edited in the Part Editor’s Groove area. You can select various swing values and adapt the part to suit any MIDI groove. For example, you could impose a drum groove directly on a rhythm guitar. To this end, Virtual Guitarist 2 analyzes MIDI data and automatically adapts the timing to match this incoming data (GrooveMatch).
The Effect section
The Effect section of Virtual Guitarist 2 offers every sound-sculpting tool required to shape professional guitar tones. Virtual stomp box effects such as a wah-wah, compressor, fuzz, tremolo, chorus, flanger, phaser, reverb and delay are on board. The amp section offers a selection of solid-state, tube and rectifier amps. As an added benefit, these FX section may be employed not only for Virtual Guitarist 2, but also as an independent plug-in for other instruments and host application tracks.
The Output section
In a real studio you can set up different speaker combinations. This section offers the same option of selecting various speaker configurations to shape guitar sounds. Virtual Guitarist 2 features four different speakers providing the combinations and sounds favored by the majority of guitarists. You can elect to record these speakers using dynamic or capacitor microphones, positioning them directly in front of the speaker membrane (on axis) or at its edge (off axis).
Minimum System Requirements
The minimum system requirements state the minimal specification your computer must have to be able to use the software. A more powerful system may be required for certain tasks or larger projects. You can find more information about computer system specification and setup here.
Mac
- Mac OS X v10.4
- Power Mac G4 1.25 GHz / Intel core Solo 1.5 GHz
- 512 MB RAM
- DVD drive required for installation
- CoreAudio compatible audio hardware is required
- Steinberg Key (copy protection device) and USB port required*
- Internet connection required for license activation
- For usage as plug-in, a VST (VST 2.3 or higher) or AU compatible host is required (AU hosting is compatible with Logic 7.1.1 or
- Digital Performer 4.6). For usage as Rewire slave device, a Rewire compatible host is required.
PC
- Windows XP Home or XP Professional
- Intel / AMD Prozessor 1.4 GHz minimum
- 512 MB RAM
- DVD drive required for installation
- Windows MME compatible audio hardware is required (ASIO compatible audio hardware required for low latency operation).
- Steinberg Key (copy protection device) and USB port required*
- Internet connection required for license activation
- For usage as plug-in, a VST (VST 2.3 or higher) or DXi2 compatible host is required. For usage as Rewire slave device, a Rewire compatible host is required.
*The Steinberg Key (USB copy protection device) required to run this product is not included. Customers who do not own a Steinberg Key must purchase one separately. The same Steinberg Key copy protection device is then used for all Steinberg products that require it.
