一个国外网站对 Steinberg Virtual Guitarist 的介绍和评价（英文）
一个国外网站对 Steinberg Virtual Guitarist 的介绍和评价（英文）
Steinberg Virtual Guitarist :: Harvey Alison
=======================
Summary:
The good: It works, and it sounds great!
The bad: Heavy on resources, more preset patterns would be nice:
The verdict: A great sounding VSTi, with unique and useful features
----------------------
The world of the virtual instrument has until recently been dominated by synthesizer, drum machine and sampler emulations. Wizoo broke the mould with The Grand (read The Grand review), an excellent grand piano VSTi. Now they have gone on to the arguably greater challenge of emulating rhythm guitar. Midi played guitar? Harvey Alison screws up his eyes and screws down his hairdo to see if the virtual guitarist goes to eleven……..
Introduction
Virtual Guitarist is a set of two VST instruments containing a variety of rhythm guitar styles. Each style is represented by a player, with a selection of rhythms and variation licks that can be triggered in real time or via a VSTi compatible sequencer midi track. Musically speaking, Virtual Guitarist plays itself, using an intelligent engine that responds to the players chord and key progressions. You can control the phrasing, sound and many other parameters, allowing the sound to be adapted to work within your arrangement.
Virtual Guitarist does not use single note samples or synthesis to imitate guitars. Instead, a huge library of audio tracks recorded by real guitarists in the studio is used as the basis of the sound, allowing a far more realistic result to be achieved. The great touted achievement of Virtual Guitarist is to allow these tracks to be manipulated in real time when a new chord or other setting is played. Tempo changes are no problem, as the tracks have been processed in a way that enables all the beats to be triggered individually, and synced to the sequencer tempo. In addition, you can manually shuffle the beats to create your own parts, but more of this later!
Installation
Virtual Guitarist comes on three CDROMs, and requires 1.6 GB of free disk space. This is a huge footprint by any standards, but modern PCs come with 40GB+ of space as a minimum these days, so most systems should be able to find space comfortably. PCs designed for music use often have separate hard disks for audio and samples, and fortunately the installation routine allows the user to specify a location for the sample data, so that bloating the system disk can be avoided. Indeed, this is recommended to avoid excessive fragmentation, which can seriously reduce performance. Additionally, 256MB of RAM and a 400mhz processor is required, although in practice you will realistically need to increase this to 512MB of RAM and a Ghz processor for maximum performance for use in a typical sequencer environment. Like the Halion virtual sampler, audio quality can be dialled back in use to reduce system strain if you find that your PC is having trouble coping.
Installation on the test system was painless, although it did take 20 minutes to copy the data across from the CDs (!), and I was pleased to note that no intrusive protection system was in evidence. Once installed, Virtual Guitarist is accessible from the VST host as two instruments, which take a few seconds to initialise when selected. It should be noted that you will very likely need to have the latest update for your VST sequencer installed, as older hosts may have some compatibility issues with the VST 2 spec used for Virtual Guitarist. Cubase 5.1 works fine, as does Logic 4.5, but it is worth checking compatibility if you use another sequencer as your main music making environment.
On a related note, I was pleased to see that when a problem was reported on the excellent Virtual Guitarist forums installing Virtual Guitarist on the Mac using Logic, a workaround was speedily made available at
http://vg.clubcubase.net
A bug was noted by one user - on playing the "B" note on any of the electric guitars quickly so as to let the chord ring, Virtual Guitarist plays in mono rather than stereo when doubling is selected. Replacement files and a fix were available on the Virtual Guitarist website in less than 48 hours.
These examples and others I have seen reported since Virtual Guitarist was released demonstrate that Wizoo are very proactive in making their product as widely compatible as possible, and in fixing other problems as they are discovered. Top marks!
Setting up
Once Virtual Guitarist is loaded, you must then select a player from the drop down list, as you would select a patch for any VSTi. Each player takes a small amount of time to load - between 5 and 15 seconds depending on your system, so using the left and right arrow buttons to switch between patches is not recommended as you would with other VSTi. This can make it a time consuming process to audition different players for use in an arrangement. Wizoo have provided an Mp3 of each style to allow a quick pre-listen using the computer audio player, but the comparatively long load time is still a bit tedious on slower computers.
Once the player is loaded, you select a part (read phrasing variation) and if you are happy with the sound, you are ready to go. If not, then there is a world of tweaking available from the settings page, accessible by clicking on the graphic of a quarter inch jack labelled 'settings'.
![]()
Ringa racka roses. Rhythmic choices
Each of the players has about eight different standard phrases and a few fills, which appears limiting initially. However, each of these can be bent, stretched and shaped extensively using the available options. The phrase can be set to play at half or double the sequencer tempo, which is useful when programming parts. Shuffle, timing, decay and dynamics can all be varied via a strat style wheel. I found the auto track doubling very convincing, and particularly useful when building a pop tune bed.
You can also control these sound options in real time from your midi controller. Longer chords can be played by holding down the sustain pedal on a keyboard controller, and there is a very authentic mute sound after a long chord when you release the sustain pedal. Light/heavy keystrokes produce slowly/forcefully strummed sounds, making virtual guitarist far more expressive and playable. You can also trigger a fill using the mod wheel, although this feels distinctly odd in practise.
To get yet more variation, you can trigger the individual hits of a phrase to make your own. For some reason, this is only available on midi channel 16 rather than as a separate setting in the options page, which I found confusing at first. This feature is potentially powerful, but the sound results depend very strongly on your keyboard skills if you want to create a realistic sound in real time.
![]()
Chordially yours
Virtual guitarist features an 'intelligent chord recognition system', a phrase seemingly designed expressly to send shivers up the readers spine! In reality, my bontempi auto accompaniment fears were unfounded, as the chord system used is straightforward and simple to use.
Single root notes accompanied by a third can be used by keyboard 'one finger typists' to trigger major and minor chords, with better recognition and more complex chords available by playing the extra notes in the chords. Some players offer a full set of chords, although others (like the muted fifth player) offer a more restricted chord set. In players with a reduced set of chords, a clever algorithm interprets your playing and gives the best possible replacement chord.
The chord being played is indicated in a handy chord display bog on the Virtual Guitarist interface. This is particularly helpful if you play a chord not available in the selected player, showing which chord Virtual Guitarist has chosen to replace it!
Effects
Both the acoustic and electric Virtual Guitarist plugins can access DSP effects to adjust the tone of the guitar sound. The acoustic guitar has a low cut filter and an enhancer, while the electric guitar has a pickup selector and a presence control.
In use these effects function as you would expect, and are very useful for making the Virtual Guitarist fit into a mix. Each of the effects is controlled by a single control, making them perhaps a little simplistic for detailed mixing use. However, for broad brush strokes when creating your guitar sound, they are an excellent addition that will be familiar to guitarists used to guitar tone controls and stomp boxes.
![]()
The sounds abound. Virtual Guitarist in use
Virtual Guitarist sounds great in use, which you would expect because the sound set is based on recordings of real players. Where it really impresses over using a conventional guitar sample CD set is the smoothness of the transitions between chords and patterns. I was hard pressed to get an unrealistic sounding chord change out of Virtual Guitarist using the built in patterns, and in this mode it is a very playable instrument.
The responsiveness is good, subject of course to the latency of your soundcard. The large range on sounds on offer cover most of the standard guitar sounds found on 99% of all pop and rock albums, and should be easily moulded to most musicians needs, especially in the context of a modern midi/audio sequencer within which Virtual Guitarist will mostly be used.
Although Virtual Guitarist works in several of the available VSTi wrapper programs currently available, I couldn't recommend it for use in this context as a performance instrument. This is not a criticism of the functionality of Virtual Guitarist, but it has simply not designed for this use. As a fun experiment, I also tried to use Virtual Guitarist with a midi guitar, which worked as expected, although it did not confer any benefit over using a conventional keyboard controller. As such, Virtual Guitarist is far better suited to recording and arranging applications in my opinion, although having said this I confidently expect to hear that Radiohead are successfully using it live….
The control of the tone is also well implemented in the neat, easy to use GUI. I was easily able to sculpt a wide range of sounds, and saving all settings as a patch is as easy as you would expect in a VSTi. Although nothing special sonically, the grouping of these useful functions enhance the usability of Virtual Guitarist and as such can only be seen as a good thing!
Some chord changes generate a fret noise and others don't, due to the nature of the guitar/musician/recording used as the basis for the Virtual Guitarist sound. I was initially concerned that these sounds, although authentic, might become quickly irritating like the one bad sample in a sample set. Fortunately, I then discovered that they can be turned off - very cool!
The Decay slider can cause VG to make some very odd staccato or over-compressed effect when used at either extreme. This can be used to good musical effect, but was way too extreme for 'normal' use. I found this to be true of many of the controls. The usable range for creating a realistic guitar sound was quite limited. Even moderate settings of both the dynamics and timing sliders caused odd sounds to emerge, and I would have liked to hear them only at the extremes, if at all.
The included 'Latch' mode makes playing Virtual Guitarist a no brainer, and is certainly useful for blocking out a rhythm guitar arrangement. However, it does convey a disturbing sense of 'playing guitar by numbers', and I would personally not use it for a final recording as I felt it took out a lot of the interaction between the musician and the music. This, of course, is a personal and subjective opinion, and I expect that a layering approach to composition may well find creatively useful applications of the latch mode!
Virtual Guitarist plays at the tempo of the host sequencer, and it works great, end of story. At very low tempos (below 70 BPM, or 85 BPM when shuffle is set to 67%) some gaps start to appear between the strums, and extremely high tempos (greater than 150 BPM) also sound unnatural. This will not be relevant for most pieces, and using the tempo selection control/ varying the sequencer tempo appropriately can work around any problems that do arise.
Conclusion
You can't always get what you want from Virtual guitarist, but if you try you can usually get what you need! Where Virtual guitarist really excels is as a compositional tool and arranging aid. The ability to sketch and tweak an authentic quality recorded guitar sound without needing to set up and recorded a performance is fantastic. You may even keep the sound through production to the finished recording. It really is that good.
If I was going to be picky, I would say that there could be a greater variety of sounds and patterns on offer, if Virtual Guitarist was to be used convincingly in all musical settings. Wizoo have indicated that additional sound sets may become available in time, although none are currently planned.
Whats next? Given the success with which Wizoo are tackling acoustic instrument emulations that have previously seemed unapproachable, I have to wonder when we will see virtual vocalist version 1. I'm not sure whether to be excited or terrified at the prospect!
Virtual Guitarist reviewed by Harvey Alison
=======================
Summary:
The good: It works, and it sounds great!
The bad: Heavy on resources, more preset patterns would be nice:
The verdict: A great sounding VSTi, with unique and useful features
----------------------
The world of the virtual instrument has until recently been dominated by synthesizer, drum machine and sampler emulations. Wizoo broke the mould with The Grand (read The Grand review), an excellent grand piano VSTi. Now they have gone on to the arguably greater challenge of emulating rhythm guitar. Midi played guitar? Harvey Alison screws up his eyes and screws down his hairdo to see if the virtual guitarist goes to eleven……..
Introduction
Virtual Guitarist is a set of two VST instruments containing a variety of rhythm guitar styles. Each style is represented by a player, with a selection of rhythms and variation licks that can be triggered in real time or via a VSTi compatible sequencer midi track. Musically speaking, Virtual Guitarist plays itself, using an intelligent engine that responds to the players chord and key progressions. You can control the phrasing, sound and many other parameters, allowing the sound to be adapted to work within your arrangement.
Virtual Guitarist does not use single note samples or synthesis to imitate guitars. Instead, a huge library of audio tracks recorded by real guitarists in the studio is used as the basis of the sound, allowing a far more realistic result to be achieved. The great touted achievement of Virtual Guitarist is to allow these tracks to be manipulated in real time when a new chord or other setting is played. Tempo changes are no problem, as the tracks have been processed in a way that enables all the beats to be triggered individually, and synced to the sequencer tempo. In addition, you can manually shuffle the beats to create your own parts, but more of this later!
Installation
Virtual Guitarist comes on three CDROMs, and requires 1.6 GB of free disk space. This is a huge footprint by any standards, but modern PCs come with 40GB+ of space as a minimum these days, so most systems should be able to find space comfortably. PCs designed for music use often have separate hard disks for audio and samples, and fortunately the installation routine allows the user to specify a location for the sample data, so that bloating the system disk can be avoided. Indeed, this is recommended to avoid excessive fragmentation, which can seriously reduce performance. Additionally, 256MB of RAM and a 400mhz processor is required, although in practice you will realistically need to increase this to 512MB of RAM and a Ghz processor for maximum performance for use in a typical sequencer environment. Like the Halion virtual sampler, audio quality can be dialled back in use to reduce system strain if you find that your PC is having trouble coping.
Installation on the test system was painless, although it did take 20 minutes to copy the data across from the CDs (!), and I was pleased to note that no intrusive protection system was in evidence. Once installed, Virtual Guitarist is accessible from the VST host as two instruments, which take a few seconds to initialise when selected. It should be noted that you will very likely need to have the latest update for your VST sequencer installed, as older hosts may have some compatibility issues with the VST 2 spec used for Virtual Guitarist. Cubase 5.1 works fine, as does Logic 4.5, but it is worth checking compatibility if you use another sequencer as your main music making environment.
On a related note, I was pleased to see that when a problem was reported on the excellent Virtual Guitarist forums installing Virtual Guitarist on the Mac using Logic, a workaround was speedily made available at
http://vg.clubcubase.net
A bug was noted by one user - on playing the "B" note on any of the electric guitars quickly so as to let the chord ring, Virtual Guitarist plays in mono rather than stereo when doubling is selected. Replacement files and a fix were available on the Virtual Guitarist website in less than 48 hours.
These examples and others I have seen reported since Virtual Guitarist was released demonstrate that Wizoo are very proactive in making their product as widely compatible as possible, and in fixing other problems as they are discovered. Top marks!
Setting up
Once Virtual Guitarist is loaded, you must then select a player from the drop down list, as you would select a patch for any VSTi. Each player takes a small amount of time to load - between 5 and 15 seconds depending on your system, so using the left and right arrow buttons to switch between patches is not recommended as you would with other VSTi. This can make it a time consuming process to audition different players for use in an arrangement. Wizoo have provided an Mp3 of each style to allow a quick pre-listen using the computer audio player, but the comparatively long load time is still a bit tedious on slower computers.
Once the player is loaded, you select a part (read phrasing variation) and if you are happy with the sound, you are ready to go. If not, then there is a world of tweaking available from the settings page, accessible by clicking on the graphic of a quarter inch jack labelled 'settings'.
Ringa racka roses. Rhythmic choices
Each of the players has about eight different standard phrases and a few fills, which appears limiting initially. However, each of these can be bent, stretched and shaped extensively using the available options. The phrase can be set to play at half or double the sequencer tempo, which is useful when programming parts. Shuffle, timing, decay and dynamics can all be varied via a strat style wheel. I found the auto track doubling very convincing, and particularly useful when building a pop tune bed.
You can also control these sound options in real time from your midi controller. Longer chords can be played by holding down the sustain pedal on a keyboard controller, and there is a very authentic mute sound after a long chord when you release the sustain pedal. Light/heavy keystrokes produce slowly/forcefully strummed sounds, making virtual guitarist far more expressive and playable. You can also trigger a fill using the mod wheel, although this feels distinctly odd in practise.
To get yet more variation, you can trigger the individual hits of a phrase to make your own. For some reason, this is only available on midi channel 16 rather than as a separate setting in the options page, which I found confusing at first. This feature is potentially powerful, but the sound results depend very strongly on your keyboard skills if you want to create a realistic sound in real time.
Chordially yours
Virtual guitarist features an 'intelligent chord recognition system', a phrase seemingly designed expressly to send shivers up the readers spine! In reality, my bontempi auto accompaniment fears were unfounded, as the chord system used is straightforward and simple to use.
Single root notes accompanied by a third can be used by keyboard 'one finger typists' to trigger major and minor chords, with better recognition and more complex chords available by playing the extra notes in the chords. Some players offer a full set of chords, although others (like the muted fifth player) offer a more restricted chord set. In players with a reduced set of chords, a clever algorithm interprets your playing and gives the best possible replacement chord.
The chord being played is indicated in a handy chord display bog on the Virtual Guitarist interface. This is particularly helpful if you play a chord not available in the selected player, showing which chord Virtual Guitarist has chosen to replace it!
Effects
Both the acoustic and electric Virtual Guitarist plugins can access DSP effects to adjust the tone of the guitar sound. The acoustic guitar has a low cut filter and an enhancer, while the electric guitar has a pickup selector and a presence control.
In use these effects function as you would expect, and are very useful for making the Virtual Guitarist fit into a mix. Each of the effects is controlled by a single control, making them perhaps a little simplistic for detailed mixing use. However, for broad brush strokes when creating your guitar sound, they are an excellent addition that will be familiar to guitarists used to guitar tone controls and stomp boxes.
The sounds abound. Virtual Guitarist in use
Virtual Guitarist sounds great in use, which you would expect because the sound set is based on recordings of real players. Where it really impresses over using a conventional guitar sample CD set is the smoothness of the transitions between chords and patterns. I was hard pressed to get an unrealistic sounding chord change out of Virtual Guitarist using the built in patterns, and in this mode it is a very playable instrument.
The responsiveness is good, subject of course to the latency of your soundcard. The large range on sounds on offer cover most of the standard guitar sounds found on 99% of all pop and rock albums, and should be easily moulded to most musicians needs, especially in the context of a modern midi/audio sequencer within which Virtual Guitarist will mostly be used.
Although Virtual Guitarist works in several of the available VSTi wrapper programs currently available, I couldn't recommend it for use in this context as a performance instrument. This is not a criticism of the functionality of Virtual Guitarist, but it has simply not designed for this use. As a fun experiment, I also tried to use Virtual Guitarist with a midi guitar, which worked as expected, although it did not confer any benefit over using a conventional keyboard controller. As such, Virtual Guitarist is far better suited to recording and arranging applications in my opinion, although having said this I confidently expect to hear that Radiohead are successfully using it live….
The control of the tone is also well implemented in the neat, easy to use GUI. I was easily able to sculpt a wide range of sounds, and saving all settings as a patch is as easy as you would expect in a VSTi. Although nothing special sonically, the grouping of these useful functions enhance the usability of Virtual Guitarist and as such can only be seen as a good thing!
Some chord changes generate a fret noise and others don't, due to the nature of the guitar/musician/recording used as the basis for the Virtual Guitarist sound. I was initially concerned that these sounds, although authentic, might become quickly irritating like the one bad sample in a sample set. Fortunately, I then discovered that they can be turned off - very cool!
The Decay slider can cause VG to make some very odd staccato or over-compressed effect when used at either extreme. This can be used to good musical effect, but was way too extreme for 'normal' use. I found this to be true of many of the controls. The usable range for creating a realistic guitar sound was quite limited. Even moderate settings of both the dynamics and timing sliders caused odd sounds to emerge, and I would have liked to hear them only at the extremes, if at all.
The included 'Latch' mode makes playing Virtual Guitarist a no brainer, and is certainly useful for blocking out a rhythm guitar arrangement. However, it does convey a disturbing sense of 'playing guitar by numbers', and I would personally not use it for a final recording as I felt it took out a lot of the interaction between the musician and the music. This, of course, is a personal and subjective opinion, and I expect that a layering approach to composition may well find creatively useful applications of the latch mode!
Virtual Guitarist plays at the tempo of the host sequencer, and it works great, end of story. At very low tempos (below 70 BPM, or 85 BPM when shuffle is set to 67%) some gaps start to appear between the strums, and extremely high tempos (greater than 150 BPM) also sound unnatural. This will not be relevant for most pieces, and using the tempo selection control/ varying the sequencer tempo appropriately can work around any problems that do arise.
Conclusion
You can't always get what you want from Virtual guitarist, but if you try you can usually get what you need! Where Virtual guitarist really excels is as a compositional tool and arranging aid. The ability to sketch and tweak an authentic quality recorded guitar sound without needing to set up and recorded a performance is fantastic. You may even keep the sound through production to the finished recording. It really is that good.
If I was going to be picky, I would say that there could be a greater variety of sounds and patterns on offer, if Virtual Guitarist was to be used convincingly in all musical settings. Wizoo have indicated that additional sound sets may become available in time, although none are currently planned.
Whats next? Given the success with which Wizoo are tackling acoustic instrument emulations that have previously seemed unapproachable, I have to wonder when we will see virtual vocalist version 1. I'm not sure whether to be excited or terrified at the prospect!
Virtual Guitarist reviewed by Harvey Alison