GUITAR / AMP Section Virtual Guitarist IRON

This area is where you tweak the sound of guitar and amp. Virtual Guitarist IRON offers a large range of sounds from twangy and clean to massively distorted metal.

THRUST

The THRUST knob is a very unique feature of Virtual Guitarist IRON that lets you change the sound in realtime. It adds a sense of boosted velocity and energy to the sound - hence the name.

THRUST adds harmonics that increase in pitch as you turn the knob. In the real world, these harmonics are created by a special playing technique and are physical sub-vibrations of the guitar strings. While a real guitar would “skip” to these harmonics, Thrust adds them.

The THRUST effect depends greatly on the settings of the GUITAR, AMP and DRIVE controls - from a flanger-like effect in clean settings to very pronounced harmonics at heavily distorted settings.

THRUST becomes even more interesting when you move the control during
playback. Thrust is assigned to the Aftertouch MIDI controller. Increasing pressure to your keyboard ''turn'' the THRUST knob from it's set position to maximum.

Advanced tip: Press and hold the Stop key, then play chords while using the Stop key for finer Aftertouch control.

Be aware that using THRUST in combination with odd intervals can lead to clashing pitches. True to the nature of string harmonics, the harmonics added by THRUST resemble third, fifth and octave intervals of the base note. If you set THRUST to a fifth interval but play an augmented fifth, the result will sound “interesting”, but not necessarily correct.

GUITAR 

Electric guitars have one or more pickups – the electromagnetic parts that pick up the vibrations of the strings and convert them into electric signals. By choosing and combining pickups, guitarists have a lot of influence over the characteristics of the guitar sound. Virtual Guitarist IRONs GUITAR parameter offers you the four most suitable pickup combinations for power chord guitars:

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

AMP

Virtual Guitarist IRON features a sophisticated guitar amp and speaker simulation. In other words: The amp sound is not baked into the guitar performance. Instead, as you play, the clean guitar signal is sent to an amp and speaker where the final sound is produced. Not only does this give you full control and flexibility over the sound, it also means that the complex interactions between guitar and amp are produced in realtime for a dynamic and realistic result.
The AMP knob lets you choose between five amplifier presets for a large range of musical styles. Each preset is a pre-configuration of an amp and a speaker cabinet, including pre-set internal parameters that provide the right character and range of sonic possibilities for each preset:

DRIVE

The DRIVE knob adjusts the overdrive level of the tube amp.

Simply put: The lower the DRIVE setting, the cleaner, and the higher the DRIVE
setting, the more distorted the sound of Virtual Guitarist IRON.

The effect is very different depending on the AMP you've chosen. Naturally, cleaner AMP settings such as Clean or Crisp will work better with lower Drive settings, whereas Crunch or Metal benefit from a higher dose of clean signal.

GUITAR MODES

The two knows underneath the THRUST control allow you to retune and duplicate the guitar.

Drop D

Activating this button tunes the strings of the entire guitar down by two semitones. This has two effects:

• You can play chords down to the low D.
  
• The guitar sound becomes fatter and less sharp as in the normal settings. In combination with Metal and high Drive settings this helps creating typical fat and evil sounds.

Doubling

Activate this button has the same effect as if two guitarist played your track at the same time, with minimal variations. Technically, Doubling adds a second guitarist with a separate amp setup 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 2 or 3 doubled guitar tracks playing at the same time.

Two handy tips:

• To create the impression of two guitarists playing even differently, instead of using Doubling set up two instances of Virtual Guitarist IRON with different settings amp settings and pan positions, and pick different phrases for both.
  
• Add a single guitarist with a sharper sound and less distortion to a doubled “wall of doom”, place it in the middle, EQ it slightly to attenuate high and low frequencies but pronounce the mids around 2-3 kHz, 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.