RealGuitar VST Overview

Using conventional samplers, even if you have high quality guitar sounds (which in itself is rare), does not allow when playing on the MIDI keyboard to reproduce a number of characteristic techniques of guitar performance, without which the sound of the guitar part becomes unnatural and unconvincing regardless of professional skills and experience of the performer. This is a problem even for professional performers, not to mention amateur musicians with little training.

The new RealGuitar VSTi 5.0.1 product, developed by MusicLab, Inc. RealGuitar is a tool based on high-quality guitar samples and embodies a new approach to modeling guitar sound and performance. RealGuitar is the first and so far the only instrument that both realizes the notasample principle with switching samples at the press of a key and simulates those characteristic techniques of playing a particular musical instrument (in this case, the guitar), which cannot be performed in the usual way on a MIDI-keyboard.

Although MusicLab, Inc. – is a Russian company, its developments are focused more on foreign customers because of peculiarities of domestic software market. Therefore, plug-in interface is in English, and describing it, we should use English terms, explaining them when necessary.

Two new technologies are implemented in RealGuitar VSTi.

Velocity Sensitive sampling and layering technology, which uses chromatic samples. Sounds corresponding to the 19 fret of each of the six strings are sampled while playing different types of beats, including up, down, and muted. Various sounds and noises are also sampled. All this lets you truly imitate the sound of a guitar.
Guitar Touch technology (technology “touch” with the guitar), which allows you to easily play on a MIDI-keyboard basic guitar techniques: strumming (strumming), plucking (plucking), sliding (sliding), pulling (bending), muffled beats (muting), tremolo (tremolo), operating the usual MIDI-controllers.
Another special technology used in RealGuitar has made it possible to get from a set of samples of conventional six-string guitar full sound of twelve-string guitar and a real doubling effect (or double track). Moreover, unlike most artificial choruses and unisons, the signal generated by the plugin is absolutely mono-compatible.

To work with the VST-plugin RealGuitar it is necessary to have a rather productive computer. These are the minimum requirements for it:

512 Mbytes RAM;
1 GHz Pentium 3 processor;
600 Mbytes of free disk space for installing the plug-in;
Windows 98/Me/2000/XP operating system;
A host program that supports VST 2 (for example, FL Studio). And this is the recommended configuration:
1 Gb of RAM;
2 GHz P4 processor.

Such relatively high requirements are not accidental. The big RAM size is required because when you work with the plug-in you have to load all the samples that correspond to the selected guitar type into it, and it’s more than 100 Mbytes. In addition, you should consider the needs of the operating system, add here the memory required for the host program, as well as other virtual instruments used in the project.

During sample playback, the computer must be able to cope with many things at once. The processor is loaded with the work of the plug-in’s internal sampler: playing back samples and processing them with filters, modulators, ADSR envelope generators, etc. In the plug-in, the sound of each note is formed by the simultaneous work of many oscillators. After all, in addition to the actual sound of a string pressed against a particular fret, you’ll hear all kinds of noises you need to simulate guitar playing in a realistic way: the sound of the pickup, the sound of the releasing string, and so on. That’s why, for example, up to 18 oscillators are used simultaneously in the sound of a six-note chord.