I just bought Guitar Rig 5 Pro....

Yeah, man. It's epic and yet another reason why I bought X1. I wanted to upgrade this month but sadly it'll have to wait. GR4 LE will do what I need for now. Have fun.

@vintage vibe... The only real experience I have with Guitar Rig is from GR2 (maybe earlier) and I would NOT have trusted it as my effects processor for a guitar track. However, I did find myself reaching for it to add a little extra this that or the other... even on non guitar tracks. Especially when it came to adding just a little extra gain or presence. But for straight effects I found it to be too squashy and squonky for my tastes and relied on more traditional approaches and blended GR in when I felt the need. I had been freaking out a little as to what exactly I was going to do for proper guitar signals but as soon as I started messing around with GR4 LE it became quite apparent dialing in what I wanted would be easy peasy. Most of the tones I like are pretty standard but slightly tweaked to my personal tastes. I like to roll off the really low freqs but give a boost to the hi-lows, give a bit of a scoop out on the low mid but draw up the high mids for punch, take down the super high frequencies and then bring up the presence. This is something I've done for years on any amp I get my hands on and actually I prefer playing my guit through nice bass amps that have a proper EQ to accomplish this and then toss on a stomp box. Well messing around with just the sample presets on GR4LE it took me seconds to get those sounds on the various presets because the GUI is so good and emulative of the real amps dials... and it sounded pretty damned close to to the real deal. The mic position, amp/cabinet combos, EQs, sim rack effects options? ... well, let's just say I am extremely eager to get my hands on GR5 Pro. I'm gonna make some very sick things happen with that plug. Very sick indeed. Cheers.

djwayne


Isn't Redwire IR a different company ?? I don't see any reference to it in the GR5 program....??

Yes.  Redwire is a separate company known for the their guitar cab IR's.

Another good sounding one is the Scuffham program...I may have to get both !!

GR5 also has some very nice ambient sounds that you don't normaly find in a amp sim program.

I like the ease of it's GUI, and I can recognize some of the amps...so it makes it easy for me to dial in a good sound that I would like. I found the knobs on the amps to be very responsive, and work very well as far as coloring the sound. Programs that I tried many years ago were garbage compared to this. This has many nice sounding usable sounds in it. I think it makes a great addition to Sonar X1.

Even though I mostly use Scuffham S-Gear for cleanish electric guitar, I couldn't do without GR5!

Tip 1: Try the "Vintage Verb" module! It's frikking awesome! The springs are by far the best I've tried and the plates have recently started to take the place of the UAD EMT140 for vocals in my projects (mostly because GR adds no latency, but the quality is actually quite comparable).
Tip 2: Try the "Van 51" (Peavey) amp model. IMO the most underrated model inside GR. Warm and defined all the way from clean to a bit of crunch to more crunch to all out metal gain. 

Guitar rig 5 pro is Awesome and I use it ALL the time. "Foo Monkeys" patch is killer, split into 1 amp left and 1 amp on right. :) make sure it's interleave is set to stereo to hear. Used it on a blues vocal yesterday. (they've had me since the grt3 demo). Easy to browse and find exactly what you're looking for Or for what you didn't know you were looking for. I also use Komplete 8 (great jewels in there), traktor pro (best re-mix software hands down), Razor (Whoa, listen to it, Kontakt version of Broadway Big Band (owned the halion and crossgraded). Mashine is killer too and reminds me of when I got my Roland S-50 in 7th grade...FUN(sampling, beat laying, looping) Mashine has great sound palette. Native instruments= Great software/hardware. (low latency USB drivers)

The way I figured it, the upgrade cost for X1 Producer owners is $99.00 bucks. One decent stomp box can easily cost more than that. With GR5, you're gtting a slew of effects, amp simulations, mics, cabinet simulations all in a nice package that'll work perfectly in X1. I can run drums, vocals, synths thru this as well. Like I said this is a mixer's dream, because it gives you so many options on where you can go with your sound.

It didn't take long at all for me to make my D-18 sound like a million bucks !! Once I did the A/B test, I was hooked. I don't know how I got by without it !! 

I'm kind of burnt out today after all the sound checks I did yesterday, but I went back to hear the D-18 with fresh ears...wow what a difference GR5 adds !! My guitar is now sounding very rich and full and with the program off it sounds bland. The tone difference is unbelieveable. The difference is night and day. This was definitely a great addition to my arsenal of audio tools.

Ya there is a lot you can do with GR5. I've only scratched the surface and I'm blown away on how great it sounds. I barely know how to get around it, once I learn the ropes, it'll be incredible. The presets are great, they can get you started in the right direction and you can tweak from there to get the sound you want. Then you can save that setting too !! It really is a heck of a tool.

 

Even though I mostly use Scuffham S-Gear for cleanish electric guitar, I couldn't without GR5!

Really? I'm surprised. I've only found the S-gear excellent at the blues / driven tones. Can't get a good clean sound out of it (in a fender kind of way) and always use Pad farm for cleans.

I'll give it another go..

GR5 is awsome for many tones too and a big step up from gt4

  @HeatherHaze

It depends what else you may be using / happy with. if you are happy with your current sounds, maybe you don't need GT5.

All I can say from my own experience, is that I really didn't like GT4. I thought it was just special effect box, only good if you were looking for "out there" sounds, but not if you wanted "good" tone.

I upgraded to GT5 after reading a review, and in my opinion, it is night and day with GT4. the new amps do sound great with whatever guitar I use, and it has become my default guitar plugin.

Having said that, I still prefer Pod farm for the "pure clean" sounds.

isn't there a demo you can try to see if it is worth the upgrade for you?

Here's what I did...In Sonar I recorded a simple 12 bar boogie beat and looped it to use for auditioning sounds in Guitar Rig 5. I'd play the loop and click on each amplifier and then double click on the various presets for that amp...doing this gives me a good feel for each seperate amp. I also was able to find many clean settings as well as distorted ones. I'm starting to find out which of the amps are my favorites, but it's hard because most of them sound very good !! You can also give that preset up to a 5 star rating so you can easily find your favorites later.

I'm still learning the program so bear with me. There's lots to learn.

Just for kicks I went back to Sonar's amp simulation effect settings, and too late, I'm spoiled by GR5. There's no comparison. Getting GR5 is like getting a huge warehouse full of amps, speaker cabinets, mics, and effects to add to your sound.

For those of you who want to try out Guitar Rig 4, I found that I had to download the 4.2 upgrade from the Native Instruments site to get it to work for me. The GR4 that comes on the X1 disk doesn't work very well at all.

Another Note...I had a little routing problem with my guitar's input to GR5, I had to adjust the Right/Left input in the preferences menu to get it to work. Once I did that, I was good to go.

@HeatherHaze... In the Anderton Next Level video he shows a really cool way to get guitar effect/amp sims sounding much nicer and less hairy with one of the X1 compressors (I forget the name of it but it's the one that looks like an old timey rack compressor). I'm looking forward to using that trick.

Are you gonna get the foot controller?