Guitar & Mics Section Virtual Guitarist SILK

Guitar & Mics Section

This area is where you tweak the sound of your guitar. Virtual Guitarist SILK offers a large range of sounds from warm, soft and round to brilliant and sparkling.

POSITION

The Position knob emulates moving the picking hand between bridge and neck. The center position represents the recording position - the fingers picking over the sound hole - and is therefore neutral.

Turn the knob to the left (moving the virtual hand towards the neck) for a more full-bodied, hollow sound. 

Turn the knob to the right (moving the virtual hand towards the bridge) for a thinner sound with more attack.

CHARACTER

The CHARACTER knob adjusts the recorded signal before it gets fed into sound processors inside Virtual Guitarist SILK. It offers five distinct settings:

Those descriptions provide just guidelines and technical info. We encourage you to always try out all switch positions for any given track.

MICS

The source material of Virtual Guitarist SILK has been recorded using two different high-end small-diaphragm condenser microphones. The MICS selector lets you choose between five different selections of those two signals:

ANIMATE

Animate is a multi-effect specially designed for Virtual Guitarist SILK. A custom combination of modulating comb filters, saturation and convolution adds rich and vivid harmonics and an airy, spherical feel. Try to apply DAW automation to Animate and intensify your song’s progression, especially in parts of rising tension.

GUITAR MODES

FRET NOISE

When changing from one chord to another, the fingers sliding on the fretboard create characteristic noises that are essential for the authentic character of an acoustic guitar. Virtual Guitarist SILK has an algorithm that produces these noises dynamically exactly where they would occur on a real guitar.

Sometimes you may want a totally clean signal – for example in electronic music – in this case you can deactivate any Fret Noise with this button.

DOUBLING

Activating this button has the same effect as double-tracking your guitar. Technically, Doubling adds a second guitarist and places both at the outer positions of the stereo spectrum.

We recommend to use Doubling with care – it’s great to give more weight to tracks that are a key foundation of your song. On the other hand, a mix gets mushy pretty quick if you have two or three doubled guitar tracks playing at the same time. If it’s just about creating a stereo image, you can use the stereo mic settings without doubling the performance.

Two handy tips:

To create the impression of two guitarists playing even more differently, instead of using Doubling try setting up two instances of Virtual Guitarist SILK with different settings of ANIMATE, CHARACTER, FEEL and POSITION, put them at the ends of the panoramic spectrum and pick different phrases for both.

Add a second instance with a sharper sound to a doubled full-bodied setting and place it in the middle, and you have a very effective way of controlling the presence of that guitar track in the mix by adjusting the single track against the doubled one.