Guitar & AMP Section Virtual Guitarist SPARKLE1

Guitar & AMP Section

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

GRIT

Named for exactly what it does, this knob lets you dial in an overdriven component with a high-mid boost, creating a beefier sound that cuts through in a mix without you having to overdrive the entire signal. GRIT works well with all GUITAR, AMP and DRIVE settings.

GUITAR

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

AMP

This knob lets you select from five carefully selected and set up combinations of typical guitar amps and speakers, providing a large range of rhythm guitar sounds at the turn of a single control:

DRIVE

This knob adjusts the overdrive level and therefore the amount of distortion of the guitar signal. The effect is very different depending on the AMP setup you’ve chosen. Naturally, bottom positions of the switch will work better with higher DRIVE settings, whereas the top ones are better suited for creating clean guitar characters.

GUITAR MODES

The two buttons in the lower left allow you to re-tune or duplicate the guitar.

DROP D

This switch lets you activate what guitarists know as Drop (or Drop D) tuning. In Virtual Guitarist SPARKLE all strings get tuned down by 2 semitones, the lowest string plays D.

Therefore, when Drop D is activated (pitch is unaffected, of course), Virtual Guitarist SPARKLE sounds a little thicker and warmer in general.

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.

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 SPARKLE with different settings of GRIT, GUITAR, AMP and DRIVE, 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.