Decent inexpensive strat guitar vsti for chords, rhythm...

I'm happy with MusicLab - I have their Les Paul VST and it's really quite good. I imagine their Stat is of the same quality.
 
BTW, have you played around with Strum Session, it's included with Platinum.

deep question<G>...
 
My go-to guitar libraries are, well, my guitars most of the time. But for some strange reason I can't stop fiddling with guitar libraries!

You mentioned Orange Tree, I think they are among the best guitar libraries available, and they just keep getting better. However, with great power comes a learning curve. You can do some really amazing things - more than you are probably aiming to do right now, but you will have to spend some time taming them. I've been using them for a while now, so I'm not the best judge on ease of use - you might just fall into them?

My other favorite is Indiginus - Torch is cool, and he just released a Tele library that is amazing. These are not quite as feature rich, but they are a lot easier to learn.

I'll add that both developers are as good as it gets with respect to taking care of their customers.

Have fun!

Do you have the full version of Kontakt?

Indiginus and Ilya Eftimov have good products but need the full version.

Most of the Orange Tree guitars will work in player.

I would say Orange Tree is the best, followed by Ilya Eftimov, both have very good strum engines.

Renegade is very good but much simpler and cheaper. But its very effective for manual strumming.

I find Music Lab stuff good for leads but much prefer Orange Tree and Ilya Eftomov for strumming.

TerraSin
Another vote for Orange Tree. They are hands down the best guitar libraries available at the moment. Little more than $100 but wait for a sale and you can get it cheaper.

Same here. My main instrument is keyboard, but can hack out some tunes and chords on my real Strat. I studied the manuals for Orange Street Strat and Kontakt5 and you can do amazing stuff with the CC commands. 
 
Walt

dang... i guess I have the kontakt player and not the sampler... and really don't want to spend $400.
 
tried the strum session and it works pretty good...for free.  I had the old strum 1.0 installed and it kept crashing and i had not enabled the newer strum 2.0.

Love Renegade, but it's a Tele, not a Strat. To date I've heard no Strat library that nails every classic Strat tone (e.g. that beautiful Mark Knopfler semi-clean hollow tone), but Orange Tree Samples' Stratosphere is very good. I'd sure like to see Greg add polarity switches, but AFAIK nobody else has done that, either.

Maarkr
dang... i guess I have the kontakt player and not the sampler... and really don't want to spend $400.

Yup, full Kontakt's a big investment. But totally worth it, IMO. And this spoken by a permanently-broke tightwad who has to justify every little expense.
 
Fact is, if you're planning on making sampled instruments a major part of your toolkit, owning the full product will actually save you money in the long run. This is because every player-compatible library has a license fee to Native Instruments baked in, and it's not just a couple bucks. Consequently, products that run under the free player are almost always going to be significantly more expensive (with rare exceptions such as close-outs).
 
That's why companies such as Indiginus, Wavesfactory, Bolder Sounds, Cinematique Instruments, Analogue Drums, Hollow Sun and Sampleism can offer useful instruments for under $60. As noted above, OTS is in the process of migrating to the free player, but then OTS has always been at the high end of the price scale for full-Kontakt libraries anyway. If those products end up being too pricey for you, there's still Pettinhouse and Ilya Efimov.