Published on June 18th, 2004.
Author: Kevin.Rossiter
Category: Virtual Instruments.

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(10 votes, average: 3.30 out of 5)  Loading ...

Question: Is it a strummer? Is it a fingerpicker? Is it bass’n'chord player, Is it a soloist? Answer: All of them. Real Guitar is all of them, and more! Real Guitar has three main components.
1).It has a set of acoustic guitar samples (543 mb’s worth), 2). It has a midi engine for manipulating sounds, strums, picks, solos, helping to make everything sound more real. 3). It has an interface that you can play, almost like a guitar, but much easier. In some ways RG is doing for acoustic guitar what BFD did for drums, in that it’s more than just a set of sounds. You get a whole new dedicated interface way of playing. In short, it’s a breakthrough. Traxmusic Gold Award!

On first play I found RG a bit baffling, and I couldn’t see how to make it work. But quite quickly the penny dropped, and I haven’t stopped playing it since. It’s become a must-have.

When considering how to pass on these experiences, it seemed that explaining Real Guitar by describing its “parts” somehow missed the “the whole.”

Instead I’ve tried to focus on how it works, and how to make music with it, while incidentally mentioning all the parts.

Real Guitar is based around five playing modes, which means (you guessed it) five different ways to play your acoustic guitar.

Ever think about learning to play the guitar? Try one of these starter guitars from brands such as fender acoustic guitars and gibson guitars. Hundreds to choose from.

These are:

• Solo guitar.

• Harmony guitar.

• Chord strumming.

• Bass pick and chord strums.

• Bass pick and fingerpick chords.

We’ll look at each of these individually and in some depth.

Solo Guitar Mode

Solo guitar playing is a good place to start as it’s a sound everyone knows and understands and can have a go of.

You start by picking from a choice of sample sets:

• Steel Picked

• Steel Fingered

• Nylon Picked

• Nylon Fingered

• Steel 2 Picked

• Steel 2 (Doubling)

• 12-string

• Steel Stereo 290mb

My current favourite is the new Steel Stereo 290mb set, as it sounds so big and huge in the mix. But rest assured, all the sets are good.

As a yardstick, I already own the highly rated Yellow Tools Pure Guitars, and have played or owned numerous guitar samples over the years, and made my own besides. And I own three guitars.
So first off, let’s pick a sample set. Steel Stereo will definitely do, as more than anything, this is RG’s signature sound.

Let’s say you want to play a solo with that mellow thick sound that you get from around the 7th-10th frets. Most acoustic guitars, even dodgy cheap ones, have a sweet spot for solos on the B string around the 10th fret.

Straightaway RG scores, as every fret has been multisampled. This means we can put the capo on the 7th fret so that when you play an A, you get a 10th fret 2nd string A. Lovely!

Now play and record a few scales or licks. More lovely. With the mod wheel applying vibrato there’s quite good expression to be had, at least as good as anything I’ve used on a PC.
Now we come to the interesting bits. What else can we do to the sound besides just play with the Mod Wheel?

You can adjust Attack, which gives the sound more or less bite. This can be set by adjusting the velocity level slider. A nearby drop-down menu gives a choice of Bend, Slide-Up or Slide-Down. And the Time and Velocity Trigger for these effects can also be set. With a minute or two of midi editing, any track can be beefed up, making it twangier, or slidy-er, or with a bend that reasonably fits the beat.

Body noises like fret and pick/body can also be set by you. These can be surprisingly effective in fooling an audience. Yellow Tools’ Pure Guitars also give you a sample set of fret and body noises, but they don’t automate them in the user selectable way that RG does.

And muting noises like Smack, Mute, Palm Mute or Harmonics can be added.
You can also set the capo on Auto so that if you play around the keyboard, the capo travels around with you, finding a “best fit”.

All of this adds up to a better sound, a more realistic acoustic guitar sound.
On Giga sample sets, something called Key Switching is used to try and emulate the various effects. Key Switching is priceless when compared with having no key switching at all, as it creates diversity of sound on the fly.

But compared with RG’s unique interface approach, key switching is looking increasingly long in the tooth, and definitely more awkward to use. But in fairness to key switching I know a guitarist who thinks it’s much better with his Giga sample set than in RG. I just happen think he’s wrong.
My own feeling is why settle for a sample set with a now-outdated key switching system, when RG offers so much more, and is implemented in a better way.

Looking further:
RG’s Solo guitar also offers Mono and Legato, as well as a Hold button. And to cap it all, all the buttons and knobs are read/writable (except the Hold button for some funny reason)
So to sum up Solo guitar:

You get 8 sample sets to choose from.
You can add:

• Mono

• Legato

• Slide Up/Slide Down/Bend

• Capo or Autocapo

• Hold ( a kind of sustain)

• User defined velocity switching

• Mutes, Palm Mutes, Smacks and Harmonics

Also you can set levels and triggers for everything, plus apply bass & treble eq, chorus, tremelo, and body and fret noises. Not bad.

On top of this, everything can be controlled by midi read/write. Examples of how you could use midi read/write might include:

• Changing from a slide effect to a bend effect, mid-song

• Sharpening the attack, or mellowing it back, again mid-song

• Going from a tight mono to a more spacious open legato string, also mid-song.

• Moving from a 12th fret sound to an open string or 5th fret sound, and also mid-song.

I can’t do a fraction of these things with Halion and Nylon Guitar. Nor with Pure Guitars. My anti-RG friend suggested he could do wonders with Key Switching and midi with his Giga samples, but I’ve never had the same luck. Usually there’s a struggle, and a lot of very fiddly midi editing. It can be a pain in the butt. Believe me. I’ve been there.

And while monotony is the bane of even the best sample sets, RG offers rich diversity.

It’s extensive set of controls do a lot to relieve the monotony that comes with using samples over a long period of time (such as a 3 minute song).

I even patched an RG solo into a guitar amp sim distortion init and got quite a respectable NuMetal sound (can a NuMetal sound ever be respectable

So far, so good.

Now let’s look at Harmony

Harmony Mode

This to me is one of the hidden jewels in the crown.

Harmony mode offers a choice of:

• 4th down

• 5th Up

• Octave

• Power chord 1

• Power chord 2

• 2 octave

As a list this doesn’t sound much. In fact it’s partly misleading as this section of RG is both phenomenal and unique, and little words like “Power Chord 1″ don’t do justice to what’s creatively possible. Take a step back with me a moment. It’ll be worth it.

Think how really cool acoustic guitarists play? How often do you see a pro guitarist hit a straight G major, other than when strumming an accompaniment? Not often.

Mostly you’ll see all sorts of fiddly fingerwork that leaves you wondering where on earth those chords came from. Well, the good news is that RG in Harmony Mode is the closest I’ve come on a computer to approximating those cool chords that real acoustic guitarists play.

For instance, Power Chord 2 sounds like a description for rock power chords. But no. Playing RG Power Chords is closer to playing in an open-tuned middle string chord style, the sort of chords where you see guitarists running up and down the neck.

Except that with RG it’s so easy to do. After Solo Mode, Harmony Mode is my favourite.

Here’s an example of how you might use it.

Start with option 5th Up and work up a riff. Now a real guitarist, for variety, might well replay the riff but using a different style of chord, while still keeping to the overall melodic feel of the tune.

With RG you click on Midi Write and record the preset change from 5th Up to Power Chord 2.
Whoo hoo! Sounds different. Not too different, but interestingly different. Or you could switch to Power Chord 1 or 4th Down.

In other words you can switch playing styles on the fly in the same way that a real guitarist does. That’s a lot of flexibility. And of course you can still add slides and set accent levels, as you did in Solo Mode.

(2.3mb) using solo and harmony modes together. It gets a bit cheesy and you might well spot authenticity flaws, but it clearly shows how guitarry RG can sound.

Chord Mode

This for many people will be the bread and butter mode of RG. It’s all about strumming accompaniment to songs.

And it’s simple to use.

The left hand holds down the chord, and the right hand plays higher up the keyboard, with each note on the keyboard equivalent to a strum.

There’s a common keyboard shorthand for chords, so that a C note in the left hand will automatically give a C major chord to strum with the right hand. Similar shorthands exist for minor, minor seventh, and seventh chords.

But if you want a minor 9th chord and you know which notes to hold down to get a minor ninth, then RG will play you a minor 9th. Not bad, eh. Just strum away with your right hand.

Many people will buy RG just for this, as strummed guitar is such a nice sound to include in a song.

What if like me you like 12th fret chords with that high ringing tone that sounds like a dulcimer on steroids? Cool. Just set the capo on the 12th.

And smacks and mutes? Set them, or midi-write them on the fly.

A word of warning: Don’t expect RG’s smacks and mutes to sound chunka-chunka like a pro guitarist playing live. No machine will ever replace the love that a pro guitarist brings to their playing.

But careful addition and editing of RG’s smacks and mutes will fool a lot of people, especially inside a songful of other instruments.

One last key feature (lest we forget): Strum speed is controllable by velocity. In other words, play softly and the strum will spread out into a longer ripple, while if you hit hard then you get a sharper snappier chord. Excellent for accents and variation.

The beauty of this is that the strum speed and the velocity trigger can be set by the user, so that the spread of the strum is set by you. Or set in reverse, ie, a softer hit equals a faster strum. Nice, eh. Choices!

Bass Pick & Chord Strums

This works in a similar way to chords except that when you hold down the chord with the left hand, you get the bass picked note of the chord.

And correspondingly when you play the strum with the right hand, you get – a strum.
Pick-strum, pick strum.

Or pick-strum-strum-strum, or whatever you like. RG is not a machine that manufactures perfectly quantised rhythms. You play the rhythm with one, two or three fingers of your right hand, and what-you-play-is-what-you-get.

This is incredibly easy. No slogging for two years trying to learn bar chords. With RG it’s done for you.

As with Chord Mode, you can also specify whether you want to play chords in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th position, which for non-guitarists means how high up the fretboard you play your chords, and what sort of tone this delivers. You can also specify how many strings are played, whether 6, 5 or 4, though annoyingly you can only specify how many strings from the bottom up.

You can’t create really your own chord inversions easily either, which is another pain, as it is so cool to specify open strings or weird drones in guitar chords.

And you can’t specify open tuning. RG is strictly EADGBE. No DADGAD. Oh well. Maybe in a future update.

Bass & Pick Mode

A lot of people will like this as it automates the business of fingerpicking.

As in Bass & Chord mode, you hold down the chord with the left hand to get the bass note (played solo as a pick), then ripple your left hand across the keys to get the 5 other strings of the guitar, as if fingerpicking the chord.

Again, no factory automated fingerpicking licks here. Your fingers do the walking. You choose the pick you want.

Obviously, might want to start by playing slowly and then speed it up later with midi tempo until you sound like you’ve got lightning in your fingers

I should mention that alternating bass is an option here. This can get a bit oompah-oompah to my taste, but nonetheless it’s good to have.

The main point is for that very little dexterity, you can sound like someone who can play fingerpicked guitar (and no one will ever know

The Samples

So how good are the RG samples? After all, no amount of diversity will cover up a poor sound.

Pretty good is my impression.

Having said that, people will always have personal preferences with something as subjective as a sampled acoustic instrument, whether guitar, piano, violin or whatever.

The steel strings, whether picked or fingered, are first class, especially the 290mb Stereo Steel.
The 12 string is nice too, though I’m no great judge of 12 string guitars, having never owned one for longer than 3 months.

The nylon doesn’t have quite the sweetness or liquidity of the Pure Guitars nylon. And some will argue that the multi-gigabyte Vienna Concert guitar is the nylon to end all nylons, complete with its many articulations and extras.

Another important contender to consider is Matt Ragan’s Maximum Strength Martin 000-16 guitar from NemeSys. The demos sound great and there are midi files and articulations supplied. I nearly bought it, but went for Yellow Tools as they offer more variety.

Fact is, there is a good choice of fine guitar sample sets available, and they don’t have to cost the earth.

So let me stop and express a personal opinion which you can judge for yourself:

The truth is that I’m fed up with sample sets that include every possible articulation as an extra. I find switching sets to include hammers and slides is a slow counter-productive process, where the medium (the instrument) gets in the way of the message (the music). I just want to play a sample set like I do a real instrument.

RG is the closest I get to this experience.

Because of its dedicated interface it plays more like a guitar, it doesn’t force me to use somebody else’s idea of a chord or insert a special slide (however nice it may be), and it’s a doddle to edit with midi read / write.

‘Nuff said.

Of course, the question on everyone’s lips is: What guitars are used for the RG samples?

The answer is that MusicLab aren’t telling.

Here is their reply:

MusicLab: “We tried to sample a lot of guitars both factory and hand made, with various string sets and mikes, and selected the ones best working within RealGuitar. Finally we decided not to specify the guitars in the description in order to avoid undesirable discussions about various guitar brands, sound specifications, music styles, and the like.”

This is an unusual reply as most samplists are only too keen to tell you they used this instrument and that instrument. But, in a way I don’t blame MusicLab for keeping quiet about it. The choice of guitars is enough to start a flame war in most musician’s pubs.

In The Mix

Taking the RG sound further into the real world of song writing and mixing: Once your track is laid down in the song, you’re going to eq it (you are, aren’t you?) so that it sits in the mix. For example, the 12 string gained a nice sheen by adding a few db around 6khz, and adding some serious low end shelf cut so it didn’t muffle other instruments. And the solo steel guitar got more penetration by boosting around 2.5khz, and so on.

What we’re doing with eq is taking an initial set of guitar characteristics and tuning them into the mix. For example the 6khz boost to the 12 string is specifically done to avoid clashing with all the other instruments, while still retaining that nice 12 string sheen.

In other words, regardless of the sample set, Real Guitar needs thoughtful eq to really sit well in a mix.

The same applies to comping. A nice opto-compressor with a slow attack captures the dynamics and adds punch.

 

Pros and Cons

In overwhelming favour is RG’s authentic sound as a very playable acoustic guitar. As a solo guitar I love it.

And it is super-easy and very convenient to strum or pick and get a natural sound (complete with real timing errors

And there are so many options for authenticising your performances, all of which can be changed on the fly with midi read / write.

Against RG I have to say that the bends and slides won’t fool a pro. But having said that they’re quite musical to use. They don’t sound bad, just not like a pro bending or sliding a note into place. Maybe a dedicated sample set with special articulations like Max Strength overcomes this, but it’s awkward to use.

The same applies to RG’s smacks and mutes. Sometimes they sound very good, but there are things they can’t do that a pro guitarist can and will. I’m still not certain about the nylon guitar. It took more getting used to than the steel guitar sounds, which was pretty well instantaneous. But judging a nylon guitar is always a very difficult call. I studied classical guitar and found the differences between Ramirez and Peterson guitars were colossal. Nylon guitar is arguably one of the most difficult instruments to sample.

To my ears, RG’s nylon is better than Wizoo’s Nylon, which has a pearly soft sound that is neither soft nor hard, while Pure Guitars nylon is more powerful, ranging from strident to bell-like sweet. But none of these have RG’s capo, which is central to getting a realistic variety of tones.

Having said all this, if Nylon isn’t your main direction, then the nylon guitar in RG will probably outshine your sf2 nylon samples in seconds flat. Add realistic fret and body noises while you play and you’ll fool many

Kev’s Top Tip

Use Bodilizer with RG for a truly fabulous warm sound.

Bodilizer is a specialist eq plug that was originally designed to bring back the life to recorded acoustic guitar, which often sounds flat when recorded direct from the piezo pickup under the bridge. Even with a good mike it never sounds quite as lively and dynamic as live playing.

Bodilizer was designed by a Swede, Ingemar Johansson, who studied all the sound characteristics of the acoustic guitar body, and brought them together inside a unique EQ’ing device.

Real Guitar doesn’t need to have Bodilizer any more than any other guitar sample set does, but if you’re dead serious about acoustic guitar, then at least try the demo. I bought my copy after 5 minutes of listening. It’ll cost you $100, but it’ll make any acoustic guitar sound better.

You can grab the Bodilizer demo here.

Support and The Future

Music Lab have a long track record with guitar sounds. Years ago they developed Rhythm and Chords which auto-generated midi chords in your sequencer, in a variety of pre-packed styles.
Today they assure me that we can expect more sample sets in the future (yes!), with a guitar piezo on the drawing board already.

Other goodies to look forward to are:

• A Mac version very soon.

• A large midi pattern library, which will be based on Rhythm and Chords library. This will be a goodie when it comes, and incidentally brings Real Guitar even closer to the BFD dedicated instrument concept, which provides a 1,000 plus ready made midi loops.

• There are also plans to develop a special Electric Edition of RG, based on a Strat.

On the support side, I can vouch from experience that MusicLab respond well. They have their own forum where users can ask questions and get prompt replies.

I should also add that my RG installation was flawless, the manual reasonably easy to follow, and certainly detailed enough, and that RG doesn’t overtax my cpu. Four RGs open on my 2.4 P4 was fine.

All in all a bright picture for the future, and good for users.

Summary

Real Guitar outshines many acoustic guitar sample sets, and can compete with the best (almost). But while other sample sets may have tonal qualities you especially like, none of them can play a solo on the 10th fret, then switch to open strings, on the fly.

And while a few basic chord strums and articulations are usually an add-on to regular sample sets, RG has four Modes for strumming and picking, with all manner of variations, and, it sounds like you’re playing a guitar!

RG goes well beyond the sample set. It’s a dedicated midi engine that can bring life to your playing that nothing else can do without great skill or tedious midi editing.

This is in line with the current desirable trend towards specialist sample instruments, a sign of the times.

So many superlatives here! I’ve spent the last 3 years using guitar samples, aiming for a realistic “wooden music” sound. I’ve spent days editing midi guitar data to death trying to make it sound more real.
Real Guitar has solved my problem for me. No doubt other “real guitars” will emerge, but for now RG has a clear field.

And while it ain’t perfect, it’s damn close!

Competitors

There aren’t really any competitors in the dedicated guitar instrument field.

You can find other sample sets which you may well like, such as the previously mentioned Yellow Tools Pure Guitars, or for nylon, then the Vienna Concert Guitar, or Maximum Strength.

But they all lack RG’s unique midi engine.

Steinberg’s Virtual Guitar has to be considered, but it is very limited when compared to Real Guitar. Virtual Guitar only plays it’s own sampled strums, while RG plays what you tell it.

The price?

$149, which is what you’ll pay for a top line synth, and about what you’ll pay for many guitar sample sets.

I see this $149 as great value as RG gives you a set of top line acoustic guitars that sound and play like acoustic guitars.

Rating: Traxmusic Gold Award!

We base ratings here on Traxmusic, on a scale of 1-4

Outstanding.
Good.
Okay.
Not so good.

 

I give Real Guitar an overall rating of 4 stars as I love it, and there’s nothing else like it. I’d be happy to give it a Traxmusic Gold Award.

But if someone wants to quibble about the bends and slides, or lack of complex articulations then I’ll drop it to 3 1/2

Value for Money

Again 4 stars. At the $149 asking price there’s no real competition, other than specialist to-your-taste sample sets, offering only a fraction of RG’s functionality and diversity.

Demos and Details

to a tune I put together using only RG solo and harmony modes, with some ethnic percs.

RG demos by guitarist, Victor Borilov, can be found here at musiclab.com.

At the same link you can also find video demos, though I found them confusing at first. Be patient and maybe view them twice til the penny drops.

As with sample sets, there is no try-out download, only audio and video demos.

So head over and check whats happening @ Musiclab.com

Review brought to you by Kevin Rossiter.
www: Traxmusic.Org.

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