Steinberg Virtual Guitarist 1 Manual
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ENGLISH Virtual Guitarist “Electric Edition” Operation Manual by Peter Gorges
VIRTUAL GUITARIST “ELECTRIC EDITION” 2 English The information in this documentation is subject to change without no- tice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Steinberg Media Technologies AG. The software described by this document is subject to a License Agree- ment and may not be copied to other media. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, or otherwise transmitted or recorded, for any purpose, without prior written permis- sion by Steinberg Media Technologies AG. All product and company names are ™ or ® trademarks of their respective owners. OSQ (“Original Sound Quality“) is a lossless audio compression for- mat. Copyright by Philippe Goutier 2001. OSQ is a native WaveLab format. © Wizoo Sound Design GmbH & Steinberg Media Technologies AG, 2002. All rights reserved.
VIRTUAL GUITARIST “ELECTRIC EDITION” English 3 ENGLISH Table of contents 5 The success story continues … 6 Congratulations! 7 How do I use Virtual Guitarist ? 7 What is Virtual Guitarist ? 8 How does Virtual Guitarist work ? 9 What you can and can’t do with Virtual Guitarist 9 Register your software ! 10 Optimizing the hard disk before installation 10 System requirements (PC version) 11 Installing Virtual Guitarist (PC version) 12 System requirements (Mac version) 12 Installing Virtual Guitarist (Mac version) 13 Setting up Virtual Guitarist as a VST instrument in your host application 15 First test 15 How to play Virtual Guitarist 16 Players 18 Parts 19 Chord recognition 22 Latch mode 22 Expression and timing variations 28 Sound variations 31 Multi-effect board 42 Plug-in version of the effect board 44 MIDI controller assignments 46 Global settings (setup) 53 Bonus feature: creating your own phrasings 55 Reference
VIRTUAL GUITARIST “ELECTRIC EDITION” English 5 ENGLISH The success story continues … The overwhelming success of our Virtual Guitarist VSTi released in April 2002 almost automatically lead to people asking for more players. Especially in the field of electric guitars styles there is such a vast range of sounds, styles, eras and musical styles. It was impossible to cover all these with one electric guitar that was just one part of a hybrid acoustic/electric guitarist. Simply to release more players wouldn’t have done the job as we found out while laying out the Electric Edition. To just add additional players to the original VG would just not have been enough. Also, if you focus on electric guitars, you can’t ignore the issue of effects being an integral part of the game. Guitar, amp, speaker and effect are inseparable. Therefore we decided the Electric Edition had to become a full-blown product in its own right—with special advanced features to meet the requirements for electric guitar sounds. With the programmable Multi FX Board seamlessly integrated, a perfectly sounding, flexible rhythm guitarist is just a push of a button away. On top you get a range of first-class guitar effects in a separate plug-in that you can use for any audio track. Apart from the totally new design, the Multi FX Board and the new 29 players we have changed very little—we want owners of the original Virtual Guitarist to be surprised only by the new sounds and styles, not by an unfamiliar user interface. Before we start, I sincerely want to thank and praise the person who was confident enough to let us capture his extraordinary guitar playing and instrument/amp collection in VG Electric Edition: professional session guitarist Thomas Blug. A similar incorporation of playing skills, perfectionism and feel for sound associated with an incredible stylistic versatility is hard to find—we’re all lucky we did, and you’re too. I strongly believe you’ll have a lot of pleasure, fun and success with Virtual Guitarist “Electric Edition”! Yours sincerely,
VIRTUAL GUITARIST “ELECTRIC EDITION” 6 English Congratulations! Virtual Guitarist is your own personal rhythm guitarist, letting you choose between 29 guitar players, each of which is a perfectionist: perfect sound, perfect timing, and the ability to flexibly adapt to suit most musical styles. Using Virtual Guitarist you can easily add professional-sounding rhythm guitar tracks to your songs, without the need for a real player, and get a perfect take every time. Even if you use real guitarists in your music as well, Virtual Guitarist has the big advantage of enabling you to experiment with rhythm guitar parts at any time, and in any place, without the need for special recording equipment. You could even be laying down tracks on your laptop computer while flying to Mongolia.
VIRTUAL GUITARIST “ELECTRIC EDITION” English 7 ENGLISH How do I use Virtual Guitarist ? Using Virtual Guitarist is simple, especially if you think of the plug-in as a real rhythm guitar player—tell them what to play and they will play it. The playing is precise and the guitarist won’t complain, which, aside from the clever programming, is a worldwide first in itself! Virtual Guitarist is used exactly like any other VST Instrument: • Prepare a track and load Virtual Guitarist. • Select a player from the menu. • Use a MIDI keyboard to trigger the Virtual Guitarist or, alternatively, manually add the chords to a MIDI track via the sequencer’s editor. • Swap guitars, throw in fills or long chords, and improve your guitar track until you’re happy with it. You can change any parameter at a later time, and, in con- trast to recording real” guitars, you can change the key of the song at any time without having to repeat the whole recording session! What is Virtual Guitarist ? Technically speaking, Virtual Guitarist is a set of two VST Instruments containing a variety of rhythm guitar styles. Each style is represented by a player, and is ready-to-go with the correct guitar, microphone or amp, and a selection of phrasing controls. Musically speaking, Virtual Guitarist plays itself, and all you have to do is play the chord and key progressions via a MIDI keyboard. You can control the phrasing, sound, and many other play parameters, using either the mouse, or by triggering them in real time by using a MIDI controller. This enables you to adapt the rhythm guitar to seamlessly work within your song, and in any given musical style.
VIRTUAL GUITARIST “ELECTRIC EDITION” 8 English How does Virtual Guitarist work ? To clear up a common misconception, Virtual Guitarist doesn’t use common single-note samples or synthesis to imitate guitars. The result would be extremely artificial, and if you’ve ever tried to simulate guitar playing on a MIDI keyboard, you’ll know exactly what we’re talking about. Perhaps surprisingly, the Virtual Guitarist concept is actually much sim- pler and is based on a huge library of audio tracks recorded by real liv- ing and breathing (not to mention drinking) guitar players. This means the result really is a genuine guitar recording—and not an artificial approximation. Virtual Guitarist’s ground-breaking approach makes it possible to select from these recordings in real time when you change a chord or any other parameter. Tempo changes are no problem as the guitar recordings have been processed in a way that enables all the beats to be triggered individually. And, in addition, you can manually shuffle the individual beats to create your own parts—the eight parts you can select from for each player are all examples of what’s possible, which we’ll look more closely at later. In Virtual Guitarist “Electric Edition”, the output signal of “guitar and amp” gets fed into the FX section— just like in real life. Here the sound gets beefed up using Wahwah, AutoFilter, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Tremolo and Delay.
VIRTUAL GUITARIST “ELECTRIC EDITION” English 9 ENGLISH What you can and can’t do with Virtual Guitarist Virtual Guitarist has many advantages when compared with a real guitar player: • The virtual guitar players are convenient and available at any time. • Using a virtual guitarist is cheap and easy, especially since you won’t need a studio to record in. • You can save time because there’s no setup, tuning, preparation, microphone positioning, or audio recording. • Virtual guitarists don’t play wrong notes and there isn’t going to be any timing problems. • You can work with several guitar players simultaneously. • You have complete control over the sound and phrasing of the guitar. • Virtual Guitarist supports your creativity, allowing you to experiment as much as you want, and giving you the possibility of creating tracks that couldn’t be played on a real” guitar. • It’s possible to make alterations at any stage, even after recording or during the mixing process. You can change the instrument, phrasing, and sound with- out having to recreate the chord data from scratch. Despite all of these advantages, it’s important to remember that Virtual Guitarist is a computer program and will inevitably have some disadvantages when compared to a real player. It would be impossi- ble for Virtual Guitarist to provide everything a real guitarist might the- oretically be able to offer, although the included virtual players do cover a broad range of musical styles capable of suiting most needs. Register your software ! Before getting carried away with the software, which we’re sure you will do, please take a moment to complete and return the registration card enclosed with Virtual Guitarist. This will entitle you to technical support, and we’ll also keep you up to date with the latest news and updates.
VIRTUAL GUITARIST “ELECTRIC EDITION” 10 English Optimizing the hard disk before installation Virtual Guitarist installs 1.6 GB of data on your hard disk, and if your drive is quite full, or has not been defragmented recently, it’s possible that the install data will get split (fragmented) into many parts over the disk. Although it won’t affect the performance of the plug-in, it can lead to longer loading times of the players, which can become very frustrating. To optimize the loading times, we recommend you defragment the hard disk you want to install Virtual Guitarist on before you start. This can be done with the defragmentation system software on Windows, or with Norton Utilities (or another defragmentation program) on the Macintosh. System requirements (PC version) To run Virtual Guitarist you’ll need at least: • A PC with a 400 MHz Pentium® II processor, or compatible AMD processor • 256 MB RAM (512 MB recommended) • 1.6 GB of free hard disk space • Windows® 98, Windows® ME, Windows® 2000, or Windows® XP • Cubase VST 5.1, Cubase SX/SL, Nuendo 1.5, or another VST 2.0 compatible host application ❐ Please also observe the system requirements of your host application.