GUITAR RIG PRO 6

With the history of amplifiers spanning nearly a hundred years, nowadays there are more ways to send an electrical signal from a guitar pickup rattling through a loudspeaker than you can shake a six-stringed stick at. Tube, solid state, modeling, hybrid; heads, cabinets, parallel or series – it’s enough to make your head melt.

For the average home producer, trying out every possible model and mode of amplification would be enough to make your wallet melt too, added to the cost of finding the right microphone, preamp and room acoustics to record your sound faithfully. For these reasons and more, amp simulation has become a hugely popular part of music production.

An amp simulator is a plugin that mimics the sound of a real-life hardware amplifier. With only a laptop, audio interface and amp simulator software, you can put anything with an output jack through its paces, whether you’re looking for smooth tube overdrive or a sparkly clean solid-state amp feel. As you can imagine, any piece of software that manages to do this successfully could potentially save consumers a great deal of money and floor space, so it’s no surprise that audio technology companies have been trying to mine the idea for a number of years now.

Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig was first introduced for both Mac and Windows in 2004 as a hardware and software hybrid. The program was simple, featuring only three tube amp emulations, but in the iterations since, the software has been refined and enhanced to a huge extent. Guitar