Axe-wielders and six string-shredders have some unique options in the software realm.
Nowadays, the digital world offers a multitude of options for enhancing and supplementing your guitar playing, from authentic amp simulations to deep-sampled virtual instruments. With just a handful of plugins you can transform your DAW into a high-end studio complete with an eye-watering array of guitar tones and effects from legendary hardware units.
Whether you’re a rock god or a complete beginner, the guitar can be a hugely important part of your music productions and even act as an extensive sound design tool. This hand-picked curation of the best VST plugins and virtual instruments for guitarists will open you up to a whole new world of six-stringed delight.
Virtual Instruments
There are a bucket load of nuances to the guitar that make it a notoriously difficult instrument to reproduce in the virtual world. Every note can be played in a variety of different ways, whether you’re using downstrokes, upstrokes, palm muting, harmonics, hammer-ons, pulloffs, slides – the list goes on and on!
Read on for a selection of our favourite virtual guitars on Plugin Boutique.
Electri6ity – Vir2 Instruments
After more than three years of development, Vir2 Instruments launched Electri6ity, an epic electric guitar virtual instrument containing a formidable collection of deep-sampled guitars. Available as a Kontakt instrument, Electri6ity contains eight legendary guitar tones – Strat, Tele, P90, Les Paul, Rickenbacker, Danelectro Lipstick, ES-335, L-4 – captured in painstaking detail, with over 24,000 samples per instrument.
The guitars are impressively playable, with seamless morphing across articulations and advanced string and fretboard positioning performed by AI that adapts to your playing. You can shred fluid lines using the legato engine, play chords using a chord detection engine that understands almost two thousand chords, double-track, do unison beds, strum, pick, trill, tremolo, pick and slide, with full editing control available for each parameter.
All of the samples in Electri6ity were recorded clean, but you can harness the instrument’s built-in multi-effects (phaser, flanger, chorus, reverb, and delay), Screamer module, and amp simulation (British, Classic, Clean, Jazz, Metal, Modern and Rock) to add character and life to the sound.
Scoring Guitars & Scoring Acoustic Guitars – Heavyocity
Part of the appeal of the guitar that makes it such a universally beloved instrument is its versatility. Although there are traditional contexts for the guitar that we have become accustomed to over time, acoustic or electric guitars can be applied in almost any genre, provided you have the imagination or playing ability.
Recognising this, Heavyocity harnesses the instrument’s expansive capabilities and visceral energy in two cinematic collections available as Kontakt instruments, Scoring Guitars and Scoring Acoustic Guitars. If you’re looking for indie rock riffs you’ll have to go elsewhere, as these two instrument libraries are fitted out with production-ready atmospheres and ambiences for your next cinematic score or experimental composition.
Scoring Guitars is built on a bed of source audio from classic guitar tones using superior modern and vintage amps, converted by Heavyocity’s award-winning sound design team into a palette of layered pads, rhythmic pulses, crisp harmonics, warm reverses and dramatic phrases. The result is a dynamic virtual instrument that’s perfect for creating ethereal soundscapes, driving tonal beds and emotional underscore.
Turning to the world of nylon and steel-strings, Scoring Acoustic Guitars distils the emotional resonance and rhythmic drive of acoustic guitars into an inspirational resource for modern scoring. Capturing all the organic goodness of the six string in pristine detail, the library takes the acoustic guitar into new realms, with an array of ambient complex pads, tense rhythmic pedals and evolving soundscapes.
Amp Simulators
One of the most rewarding aspects of being a guitar player is being able to hook your instrument up to an amplifier. On its own, the electric guitar is feeble and unimpressive sounding, but plug it into an amp with overdrive and suddenly you have a snarling beast on your hands that you can ride towards rock and roll Valhalla.
The following are two of our favourite amp sims on Plugin Boutique.
Amp Room – Softube
Amplification speaks to that primal part of us that wants things to be bigger, louder, and more powerful, but it’s problematic for the bedroom producer for precisely those reasons. Fortunately, with virtual amps you can make a din that you can confine to your headphones, and Softube Amp Room proves it by giving you the full experience of a high-end studio filled with vintage gear.
Amp Room contains 9 amps, 16 cabs, 18 pedals, and three studio FX options, modelled with the trademark obsessive attention to sound quality of the manufacturer who describe themselves as “Rock and Roll Scientists”. The plugin’s LoadIR also allows you to call up impulse response producer packs from well-known studios and guitar players to borrow their top shelf tone.
For guitar players who want lifelike results, this package is an excellent option. Softube lean on their relationships with heavyweight hardware brands like to deliver authentically modelled amplifiers that sound and behave like the real thing. If you want amps and cabs that are officially licensed and endorsed by Marshall, for example, Amp Room is the only place you’ll find them.
Amplifikation Vermilion – Kuassa
A combo amp is an all-in-one amplifier that integrates both the tone generating amplifier and the speaker in one unit. In comparison to an amp stack containing an amplifier head connected to one or more cabinets, combo amps offer more practicality and portability while sacrificing on raw power.
Amplifikation Vermilion by Kuassa models three amp types to deliver a true vintage guitar combo amp experience in your DAW. While collections like Softube Amp Room promise versatility, this plugin caters for players looking for a concentrated, authentic experience that doesn’t stray outside its remit.
The amp simulator’s sound is tight, punchy and warm, with plenty of tonal variation whether you’re looking for jangly cleans, raw tube saturation, bouncy reverb or a trippy tremolo circuit. The warm, chimney, and slightly gritty clean channel will suit rootsy styles of music like soul and blues, but also won’t sound out of place handling more modern indie or pop riffage.
The GUI is simple and satisfying, with a photorealistic graphic of a combo amp providing a familiar experience for guitarists. Like many real combo amps, there are two channels – Clean and Lead – as well as a faithful recreation of an analog spring reverb. You can adjust the dual miking setup with four microphone types, and use Amplifikation Vermilion’s IR Loader with its Resample function to load custom tones.
Effects
While the type of guitar you play and the model of amp you run it through contribute to the foundation of your tone, effects like reverb and delay can be utterly transformative and take things to the next level. Remove the effects from the Edge’s signal chain, for example, and you’d be left with something that sounds entirely unrecognisable from the U2 man’s signature stadium sound.
Check out two effects on Plugin Boutique that pair well with guitars below.
Springs – AudioThing
Spring reverb originated as a mechanical reverb, created by sending an instrument signal into one end of an actual metal spring inside a guitar amp. It was all the rage in the 1960s, with the likes of the Beatles and the Beach Boys popularizing the metallic, “springy” tone, but its unique sound is still widely used today.
AudioThing Springs is a reverb plugin that features a collection of vintage spring reverbs paired with an authentic Baxandall EQ emulation. AudioThing used a combination of convolution and modelling techniques to emulate eight types of spring reverbs, ranging from a long 6-spring pipe to a tiny battery-powered single-spring unit.
The Baxandall EQ is a classic type of EQ that is mostly found in guitar amps, known for its smooth and musical EQ curves. Although usually limited to a single tone or two bands (bass and treble) Springs’ Baxandall EQ module has a mid band with Q control to shape the reverb further.
Echorec – Pulsar Audio
The Binson Echorec is an iconic echo unit that relies on vacuum tubes for a rich, warm tube preamp that buttered up the signal before it’s sent spiralling through space with a series of colourful echoes. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame is one of its most famous disciples, while outside the guitar realm John Bonham used it on drums and Delia Derbyshire, the composer of the original Dr. Who theme, also had one in her studio.
French audio engineering wizards Pulsar Audio were the midwives who birthed the Binson Echorec into the digital world, meeting deservedly widespread acclaim with the Pulsar Echorec plugin. The software perfectly captures the saturation, self-oscillation and over-sound of the original device, and sounds truly analog in a way that’s hard to believe.
Along with paying homage to the legendary echo hardware Pulsar have also added modern workflow updates, including the ability to change the motor speed in real time or sync it to any tempo. You can get an assortment of creative pitch modulations or wow and flutter effects on the delayed signal, or even just keep Echorec in Off Mode and grab all of the colour and grit of the effect without any delay.
