Producer’s Guide to… Guitar Rig Pro 6
Discover the new gear and sonic possibilities in Native Instruments’ one-stop shop for amp and pedal simulation
With the history of amplifiers spanning nearly 100 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 mic, preamp and room acoustics to record your sound faithfully. For these reasons and more, amp simulation has become a hugely popular part of 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 tech 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 to a huge extent. Guitar Rig 5, released in 2011, quickly became a market leader in the amp-modeling game, and a go-to when it came to software-based multi-effects processing.
Sure, the user interface was a little clunky, but at the time of its release there was noone better at doing what it did, and it took a while for competitors to catch up. Catch up they did, however, and in the nine years since Guitar Rig 5 was released, it slowly became less relevant to guitarists and producers.
In 2021 though, Guitar Rig 6 is a slick, multi-faceted amp and effects modeling software package that brings NIs’ amp simulation
software back to centre stage, and puts a whole host of creative possibilities at your fingertips. A plugin (also available as a standalone application) with this kind of multi-effects processing ability is far more than just the preserve of bedroom guitar players noodling into audio interfaces. Guitar Rig 6 is a complete audio processing workstation, and it can function as a shop floor for all your audio tinkering, even if turning dry, DI guitar signals into stadium-ready amp tones is still its sweet spot. With a redesigned user interface, new amps, new effects, and new machine learning technology to model state-of-the-art hardware makes Native Instruments first major update to the software since 2011 an intriguing proposition.