Steinberg Virtual Guitarist 1 Manual

 
VIRTUAL GUITARIST
“ELECTRIC EDITION”
 
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Players and chords
 
You’ll soon discover that the selection of available chords depends on 
which player you have selected. Some players only offer neutral 
chords. But it’s no problem to control this type of player from a MIDI 
track containing more complex chords—Virtual Guitarist automatically 
selects the most appropriate chords from the available selection. 

 
VIRTUAL GUITARIST
“ELECTRIC EDITION”
 
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Latch mode
 
Latch mode sets whether the Virtual Guitarist continues to play when 
you release the keys on your MIDI keyboard. With latch mode on, the 
Virtual Guitarist plays continuously from the moment you play the first 
key, until you manually force a stop by using the stop button of your 
sequencer, the sustain pedal, or by playing the B remote key.
If you only want to play a lick here and there, set latch mode to off and 
Virtual Guitarist will...

 
VIRTUAL GUITARIST
“ELECTRIC EDITION”
 
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Long chords
 
You can also use Virtual Guitarist to play long (sustained) chords.
• To play long chords, press the sustain pedal and play the chords as 
normal on your MIDI keyboard.
There are two types of long chords, triggered by different MIDI note 
velocities: 
• A light key stroke produces a slowly strummed chord (not available in all 
players).
• A stronger key stroke produces a heavy chord.
 
If you don’t have a sustain pedal, you can...

 
VIRTUAL GUITARIST
“ELECTRIC EDITION”
 
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The keys for the remote octave are mapped out with the following 
functions: 
❐
 
You can select which octave on your MIDI keyboard is used as the remote 
 
octave in the setup window’s key remote octave section (see page 47).
Sustain pedal
The sustain pedal has an important function in Virtual Guitarist, and it 
works differently depending on whether latch mode is activated or not. 
❐If you don’t have a sustain pedal, you can simulate it by using the...

VIRTUAL GUITARIST
“ELECTRIC EDITION”
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Te m p o
Virtual Guitarist automatically adapts itself to the tempo of the current 
song, which is setup in the host application (such as Cubase). Virtual 
Guitarist will also automatically follow tempo changes during playback, 
like an accelerando, for example. 
However, the slowest song tempo that Virtual Guitarist plays correctly 
at is 70 bpm (beats per minute). With high shuffle values (see the next 
page), the minimum tempo played back...

VIRTUAL GUITARIST
“ELECTRIC EDITION”
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Shuffle
The shuffle dial allows you to add a swing factor to the virtual guitar-
ist’s playback, enabling you to fit the rhythmic feel more closely to your 
song. Technically speaking, the shuffle dial sets how far the off-beats 
are placed behind the eighth note positions—you can get Virtual Gui-
tarist to play exact triplets by setting shuffle to 66.7%.
❐If your music has a mostly triplet-based rhythmic feel, Virtual Guitarist will 
sound better if you set...

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“ELECTRIC EDITION”
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So, to alter the timing of the Virtual Guitarist, you can adjust the timing 
dial, and the maximum deviation in milliseconds is displayed just below 
the dial.
❐The maximum timing deviation limit of 25 milliseconds is very modest and will 
hardly be audible if only the virtual guitarist is playing. However, in conjunction 
with other tracks, especially those that have been quantized, it will become 
clearly noticeable. 
Dynamics
The dynamics control...

VIRTUAL GUITARIST
“ELECTRIC EDITION”
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Sound variations
Stereo Width
The Stereo Width dial controls a DSP effect that sets the stereo width 
of the output signal. With the dial in the normal position, the sound 
remains unchanged. If the dial is set to the full left position, it produces 
a monophonic signal, and if it’s set to the full right position, the stereo 
width is doubled using a comb filter effect.
❐Sound engineers will be happy to note that Virtual Guitarist’s stereo width 
effect is...

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The doubling feature is not a DSP effect like the stereo width feature 
because Virtual Guitarist literally plays back two different tracks. This 
means that Virtual  Guitarist’s doubling sounds exactly the same as the 
conventional, but more cumbersome, doubling method.
❐Be careful not to overuse stereo width and doubling. It might be tempting to 
let each guitar track sound rich and fat, but it can lead to a bad final mix.
Sound adjustments
You can...

VIRTUAL GUITARIST
“ELECTRIC EDITION”
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Low Cut
To avoid frequency masking between your guitar tracks and other tracks 
in the mix, it’s often a good idea to slightly reduce the low frequency 
content of the guitar signal. 
By turning the Low Cut control clockwise, you move the highpass filter 
cutoff frequency from 0 Hz to up to 800 Hz. When VG is used within a 
complex mix, the optimal position is somewhere between 9 and 10 
o´clock. In higher positions the sound will become pretty thin and...