Tech Talk - best software for electric guitar

best software for electric guitar

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Forum Name: Tech Talk
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Topic: best software for electric guitar

Posted By: candleroom
Subject: best software for electric guitar
Date Posted: April 18 2017 at 11:05

Hi, I am looking for best electric guitar software synth. What options do i have ?

Replies:

Posted By: Davesax1965
Date Posted: June 29 2017 at 04:58

I think you mean "best DAW software for guitars ?"

GTR Waves or Native Instruments Guitar Rig, basically.

Both sound awful. Really, the only way to get a good recording of a guitar is still to use a guitar, some effects, an amp and a microphone.

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Posted By: jayem
Date Posted: June 29 2017 at 13:06

Things are getting better for DAW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh-hzbG5FzI

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Posted By: Raccoon
Date Posted: June 29 2017 at 19:19

Definitely Evolution Orangetree, I have multiple of their samples and electric and acoustic, it's all quite vibrant.

Posted By: Raccoon
Date Posted: June 29 2017 at 19:21

Try out the Short Fuse track, it's an amazing showcase of the guitar.

https://www.orangetreesamples.com/products/evolution-electric-guitar-strawberry
Oddly, a great song, besides being just a good demo of the software.

Posted By: Replayer
Date Posted: June 29 2017 at 22:42

I remembered these posts on the difficulty of modeling a guitar's sound on a synth or using software. As Dave said, there is really no substitute to playing a real guitar. That being said, Johannes Schmoelling managed to get a fair approximation of guitar on his synth while playing with Tangerine Dream in the early 80s.

http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=99782&KW=module&PID=5053806#5053806

Dean wrote:

Davesax1965 wrote:

He's right, you know, folks. ;-)

It's all very complicated, really. What happens with non musicians is that they tend to get the impression that making music with a plethora of electronic gubbins is easy, therefore they get upset and think that all electronic / computer devices produce bad music.

Not so. Bad musicians produce bad music, whether they've got a digital sampler, a Moog Modular, a sackbut or a kazoo.

Cheers Dave Thumbs Up

A pointless anecdote:

When I first started constructing music using computers the one thing I was unhappy with was the guitar sound, so I printed out the score and attempted to play it on my Kramer but it was too difficult for my limited playing skills.. I then asked a guitarist friend of mine to play it for me, which he duly did and after a lot of swearing and fumbled notes, he got it note perfect, so I recorded it and mixed it back into my piece of music and everything was lovely. One thing I noticed when he played the piece was I'd not taken into account the simple fact that a guitar has six strings and a guitarists hands cannot span from the 1st fret to the 12th simultaneously. Using that simple observation from then on I modelled the guitar using six guitar modules, one for each string, and put a lot of careful thought into which notes could be played and which could not. Now the guitar tracks sounded far more natural and I could play chords that sounded right, I could also arpeggio and rake those chords if I so desired and that sounded more like a real guitar than using a single polyphonic module. Also, when I then printed out the score I found I could play it, albeit poorly.

http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=99782&KW=&PID=5054308#5054308

Dean wrote:

Gerinski wrote:

BTW Dean, as I said, it is extremely difficult to get a "natural" sounding electric guitar from a computer sound library (nylon or acoustic guitars are a bit better but still unsatisfactory). Intuitively I understand why that is, but I can not express it in technical words, I would appreciate your technical knowledge to explain why guitars digital renditions are so disappointing compared to those of other instruments.

Good question. I suspect it is partly because a guitar is not a perfect instrument. Before I expand on that...

...another pointless anecdote:

Years ago I bought a Yamaha Portasound keyboard, these used FM synthesis and sounded great. While I was show my new toy to a friend of mine (who was an excellent piano player and a good guitarist) I pointed out that disappointingly the "guitar" preset didn't sound much like a guitar, and demonstrated that by playing a few bars of Life On Mars, "See" I said, "it sounds like a keyboard". He smiled and said, "that's because you are playing it like one". He took the keyboard from me and played it. Low and behold it sounded a hell of a lot more guitar-like when he played it, not exactly like a guitar, but enough to make me hear that the guitar preset was indeed a guitar sound.

...anyway. A guitar is not a perfect instrument...what do I mean by that? Unlike a concert violinist in an orchestra, a guitarist is not trying to make his guitar sound exactly like every other guitar. While the violinist strives to play the perfect ideal note, the guitarist has no truck with that. A sampled "perfect" guitar note played on a midi-keyboard will be perfect every time, guitars aren't like that because that's not how guitarists play them. As you observed, a sampled acoustic guitar is better, not much, but better and that's partly due to our expectations of how an acoustic guitar should be played and how it should sound, with each note approaching the perfect ideal note.

In my earlier pointless anecdote I explained that I modelled a guitar using 6 modules, one for each string, but there was more to it than that. A guitar is, as we know, polyphonic so it can play more than one note at once, even when playing with a plectrum picking single notes one at a time the sound is polyphonic with each string adding to the total sound. However, each string is monophonic - if I play a C on one string and then an E on another I will get a chord but if I play the C on one string and then an E on the same string I do not. This is a very obvious thing when you read it, it isn't quite so obvious when you play it on a polyphonic keyboard or computer score. When a guitarist solos he uses all strings with some notes still ringing out as the next is played on a different string and some not if they are on the same string, this is something that is quite difficult (or perhaps even impossible) on a keyboard. But on the computer score you can do this quite easily so I programmed my six guitar modules to be monophonic and carefully chose which note to put on which "string", deciding which notes I wanted to harmonise and which I didn't.

The other difference that the sampled keyboard has difficulty coping with is the other simple observation that an "E" played on the open top "E" string sounds different to the same "E" played on the 5th fret of the "B" string and that in turn sounds different again when played on the 9th fret of the "G" string (and so on for the D & bottom E string). On a keyboard all these notes sound exactly the same because they are the same, there is only one E2 key on the keyboard. My solution couldn't really cope with that, but I could at least make each "open" string sound tonally different to its neighbour. [this is something that some people forget when layering many copies of the same instrument in Cubase or whatever, two violin modules playing the same score does not sound like two violins, it sounds like one violin played twice as loud].

Well... there is loads more to it than that and I could prattle on about sympathetic vibration and formant and stuff like that, but I hope I've explained it as clearly as it is in my head.

Posted By: Davesax1965
Date Posted: June 30 2017 at 03:23

Well, not only software for *emulating* a guitar, just forget that, to be honest - "not possible at the moment given modern technology" but even home recording and effects technology.

Let's say that the gold standard is a decent electric guitar or bass, some form of effects, a decent amp or stack and a good quality microphone going into a preamp and / or audio interface. Expensive. Loud. Neighbours complain etc etc.

Along comes Native Instruments Guitar Rig. There are various alternatives, but to be honest, Guitar Rig is all you'd use (given that you could afford it.)

Oh dear. Well, I am a reasonably competent guitarist, but .... oh dear. It sounds rotten. Just dead and flat and lifeless. All the subtleties disappear. You can arguably get away with it on bass, but guitar ? Sorry. You need a decent setup as well unless you want to suffer from lag.

Just got a new audio interface - Lexicon Omega - which sounds fabulous. I know when I plug a guitar into it, it'll probably sound disappointing. So I'm just using it for keyboards at the moment. The problem is, like with saxes, there ain't no way to recreate the instrument successfully unless you use the actual physical instrument with a good microphone, preamp and interface.

Of course, the alternative is to stick a guitar through Guitar Rig or Waves and apply so many effects that you barely hear the guitar. Hardly an improvement.

And someone will inevitably come back and tell me how good VSTs are nowadays. "Did you know you can get an emulated Moog Modular for $200 and it sounds exactly the same ? " No it doesn't. Arturia tell you that to get you to buy it. Doesn't sound the same, and, as someone with the actual hardware (but not a Moog) I have to say that you get what you pay for.

You can get an unprofessional result using software to record guitar. If that's all your budget will stretch to and you're happy with the results, there you go.

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Posted By: Davesax1965
Date Posted: June 30 2017 at 03:27

PS a guitarists' hands cannot stretch from the first fret to the 12th, indeedy.

I generally go up two strings and two frets if I want to play an octave. ;-)

If you look at guitarists whose hands fly all over the fretboard, that's showboating at best. A guitar neck is generally about two octaves long, but over three octaves wide. ;-)

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Posted By: Vompatti
Date Posted: June 30 2017 at 04:34

The layman can't hear the difference.

Posted By: Davesax1965
Date Posted: June 30 2017 at 04:52

Yep. Except you don't record for laymen. You record for yourself and do the best job you can.

The layman can't tell the difference between King Crimson and Britney Spiers. Doesn't change the reality of a situation.

Laymen also do like to tell musicians all about music.

One problem which comes up time and time again is that recording beginners tend to think that since they have a computer with some form of music recording software on it, they'll get results as good as in a studio even if they buy crappy USB microphones and use dreadful soundcards. There's then an enormous learning curve to get decent results.

Recording live instruments is especially difficult and takes a lot of practice. No, you don't need a £500 Neumann condenser microphone. Personally, I use MXL microphones, as they're good bang for the buck and there's usually so much going on in a mix that it becomes "good enough". I really should replace the capsule in one and change some capacitors on the PCB, now I come to think of it.

Mixing is usually difficult for newbies. Most people new to sound recording bang recording levels right up into the red and then wonder why it distorts. (If you want a louder sounding recording, guess what, turn the volume up on the MP3 player or CD player.) Getting the balance right is difficult and this is especially true with drums. I tend to use a lot of volume and speaker pans - keeping things active and moving creates interest.

It takes a long time to get used to all this, and - yep - at the end of the day, most people in the street can't actually hear the difference between a good and bad recording. If a guitar sounds dreadful, most of the listening public out there can't tell. But you will. And there's the key to this thread above, the OP is asking for "the best software".

Software is only one aspect of recording good music.

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Posted By: Davesax1965
Date Posted: June 30 2017 at 07:17

jayem wrote:

Things are getting better for DAW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh-hzbG5FzI

That's pretty good, but. It misses out subtleties like up and down plectrum strokes. Impressive - until you get to the whammy bar section which is a bit of a mess.

I have the feeling that it's good within a narrow dynamic range. Thanks for the post !!!

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