I’m not much of a guitar player, and the guitar I have is of equal quality. So, can using VST guitar plugins make the proverbial silk purse out of a sow’s ear? Yes and no.
Here are some notes about a few demo and freeware versions I’ve used. Your mileage will certainly vary, but at the least it may be something for you to consider.
Also remember that many of these are continually being worked on and improved, so the versions I’m writing about are probably already obsolete as you read this.
Studio Devil BVC (www.studiodevil.com)
+ VST
+ Free version for eval! (BVC variant)
+ Cheap
Pretty nasty distortion tool which can border on shrill. A little of this goes a long way.
ReValver (www.alienconnections.com)
Free versions of this commercial product can be found that have a subset of its entire feature set. This is the ultimate tweaker tool. You have a tool box full of preamp and amp models and processors you can wire together into a virtual rack, sort of like the Reason model. In each device you can actually get in and edit it as though you were actually modifying the device’s electronics. Very powerful and capable of great sounds.
♥ Dirthead 0.80
My favorite single processor. May require a little EQ to tame the “honkiness” you can get from a cheap guitar.
++ FREE!
+ Three levels of distortion
+ “Cabinet” switch is useful and adds good sound
+ Simple to use, stable, extremely light CPU footprint
Voxengo Tube Amp
Voxengo BoogeX
After tinkering with these a lot, it became clear that they often had one or two great characteristics, but alone didn’t do the trick. This is where Ableton’s Rack paradigm comes in handy. It’s simple to create a Rack which is a layer of several of these tools. I have Racks that parallel three or four of them, usually Dirthead, Studio Devil and Boogex. Another channel with a Live Utility device allows you to add some clean signal.
Then you can map Macro controls to easily tweak the amount of contribution to the entire sound from each device.
Now that I’m rich…
Or actually, now that I have an income again–after some research I splurged on my guitar. First I paid an expert (Moze Guitars) to set up and intonate it. It’s a hell of a lot more fun to play now.
I decided my trusty DigiTech RP100 was due for retirement, so after some research I ended up with the Korg Pandora PX5D. The short story is that it’s a great little unit but since this page is supposed about software I’ll write about these things elsewhere.
Last updated 3 Dec 2010
