Perfomance Controls Virtual Guitarist SILK

Performance controls let you adjust the musical performance of Virtual Guitarist SILK to your song’s feel and tempo.

Perfomance Control

LATCH

When Latch is activated, once you press a key in the Chord range, Virtual Guitarist SILK will keep playing until you press the Stop key.

When Latch is off, Virtual Guitarist SILK only plays as long as you hold at least one key in the Chord range. Latch is convenient when testing or setting up sounds, and is more practical if you build a track by manually entering notes into your MIDI track.

You can use an optional sustain pedal as a temporary Latch. Lifting the sustain pedal unlatches any notes that are no longer held, even if the Latch switch is still on.

SPEED

The Speed switch lets you halve (0.5x) or double (2x) Virtual Guitarist SILK’s tempo relative to the song tempo. This way you can extend the style range to 4 th - or 32nd-note-based, or have Virtual Guitarist SILK styles play at normal grooves even if you use extremely low or high song tempi.

SWING

This function, often also called “Shuffle”, delays the off-beats. Virtual Guitarist SILK will automatically switch the Swing resolution to 8 th or 16th note depending on the selected Style.

At maximum position, the off-beat will have the same timing as the last note of a triplet. Use this control to match the timing of Virtual Guitarist SILK to a shuffled or triplet-based song.

Not all phrases contain 8th or 16th note off-beats. In these cases, the Swing control has no effect.

FEEL

You can tweak the feel of your guitarist’s performance either towards relaxed or rushed using
this control:

• As you move the slider to the left, the player will play off-beats slightly earlier, leading to a
  rushed or driving feel.
  
• In the opposite direction, off-beats will be slightly delayed, creating a laid-back or relaxed
  feel.

Feel has a stronger effect when listened to against other tracks. If you’re not sure what it does,
try playing a drum loop along with Virtual Guitarist SILK and tweak the control. You will notice that the off-beats will play earlier or later than the off-beat drums (usually hi-hats or snares) as you turn the control.

To create advanced doubling, create two instances of Virtual Guitarist SILK, pan both extremely left and right, apply different CHARACTER settings and set the FEEL slightly differently.

TIMING

While FEEL defines a constant offset from the beat, TIMING lets you add realistic timing variations.

This knob controls the timing accuracy of the virtual player. Turning it to the left will lead to a more machine-like precision, turning it to the right will add more and more human feel by bringing in small random timing offsets.

VARIANCE

VARIANCE is a powerful way to tweak the performance’s authenticity. It lets you control the dynamic variation of the performance.

Turn it left, and your guitarist will play with almost robotic steady dynamics – this is often preferred in electronic music. Turn the control to the right adds more and more variation in picking intensity between notes, making the performance way more natural and human.