sorry for my absence it's been night here. 

Thanks for all the responses, I will take a proper read and digest all that's said. 

Thank you. 

Hey STinGA,
In case you aren't aware of it, gregjazz who last responded to you is the author/developer of Orange Tree Samples.
Not only is he a sample library developer, he is also a Sonar user!

Yup, just upgraded from Sonar 7 PE to Sonar X1. Took a little while to get used to, but I've been thinking about making a video on how to get accustomed to the new piano roll system (that was the biggest change for me). There are a few useful tricks to getting the piano roll to behave more similarly to X1. :)

Ah cool, that's great, nice to know developers are around to answer questions :-)

Thanks for the responses :-)

BTW, on the LD side of things, after re-listening to some of the demos there I think "Ripper" (amped or direct) sounds like it might have more natural sounding note transitions, compared to say LDi, which sounds much more synthetic, to my ears… plus you get the special effect articulations, etc. That said, you won't get the high end note transitions and such until you go up to EEG and the like...

I have used the Ripper Amped lib from Lyrical Distortion several times. It has some annoying quirks such as never-ending stuck notes when playback is stopped, and it's limited to the one sound. BUT, it's a great sound. You get a nicely-distorted Mesa Boogie tone with very little effort, and at $19 it's quite a bargain.

Since the OP mentioned Theodore Kruger specifically, if you hunt around on the net there is a Yamaha Pacifica guitar library out there by TK. If you can find it, you can download it for free. For a freebie, it was pretty impressive. Sorry, I did not make note of exactly where I found it, so you'll have to consult google.

Other serious bargains are Indiginus' $5 specials, which are all usable libraries. I have all of them except the metal guitar. Lead Guitar One and Nashville Electric Guitar are not bad, the latter being the more usable of the two. Either is a bargain for five bucks. But if you've got $50 to spend, Torch is quite nice, especially for semi-clean tones.

But of course the king of guitar libs is OTS' EEG. There are others in its league, such as the Pettinhouse products and Electri6ity. But EEG offers, IMO, the best bang for the buck. And it's on sale at the moment.

Thanks for everything guys, it certainly seems EEG is the way ahead, I'll do a little more looking and then probably stump for that..... Thanks loads. Some great info here as always!

Can't disagree with that. Greg's libs are the bombiddybomb. (Best product demos too, IMO :) ).

One last thing all you OTS fans... if you don't already have it, be sure to grab Greg's jazz/funk kit freebie from a couple of years back... http://www.orangetreesamp...ample-library/#more-58 Really good for certain genres/moods... especially for FREEEE!!!!

Should probably throw in a plug for Greg's bass guitar libraries while we're enthusing. They sound authentic and believable across many styles and genres.