Remember to close your eyes, look to the ceiling and make a guitar face.  :-)

I have Orange Tree's Steel Strings, Real Guitar LPC and Kontakt's Akkord. Steel Strings and LPC sound great and the ability to do custom chord voicings is really liberating. That said, IMO for acoustic guitar or clean electric it's hard to totally nail the authenticity of strumming when using samples of individual notes. That's where Akkord really excels in that the samples are of actual strummed chords. All three are great tools and, for me, what works best depends on the song.

Barczar


You might want to try SONAR X1 Advanced Workshop: The Next Level .  Craig Anderton has a great video tutorial on this. Sounds pretty good too.

I assume you're referring to the "Virtual MIDI Chapter" that uses the guitar neck in staff view? It's a time-consuming way to create parts, but yes, it can give good results for simple parts.
 
Also, I wrote an article addressing this subject which covers several possible options.

Try Band In A Box's RealTracks - real audio tracks  to your chords, keys, styles.  Excellent.
I'm primarily a guitarist and more often than not I find it's quicker and simpler to use these, and/or RealGuitar2. 

I am a piano player, I have used fake guitar since many years, thinking that guitar players might tell the difference, but ordinary people won't. I do not play them live, I program every guitar part with some patience. I spent around 100 dollars on average every year for a guitar sampled product in the last 8 years.
 
After using sampled instruments for years, I discovered audio loops. There's a lot of specialized rex/acid libraries of guitar loops (acoustic, funky, pop, rock, jazz, metal etc) and you have many tools in Sonar (beatscape, rmx + midi, loop constr. window, audiosnap,dim pro + midi, matrix view) to audition them in contest,  pitch-shift them / stretch them globally or per-slice, take bits of them and combine with others, play bits through keyboard and have much fun in driving them towards what you have in your mind. Outside Sonar, Celemony Melodyne is an amazing piece of software to put added value to guitar loops, the new version can take a real played chord and transform it into another (althought I have not used it).
So loops, to me, are the way to go for realistic sounding. And new products in the near future will give the ability of "playing" starting from loops (think of NI Scarbee funk guitarist, for rythm only, or ueberschall liquid guitar for solo parts), the goal is to customize them. But the source material is specialised and you need many libraries to cover the full range, so I spent hundreds in the end.
 
Not always I find the good loop for my job, so I open Musiclab real guitar. Basically it is a sampled product, so less true, but it has means of thinkin about the voicings freeing you from a lot of guitar knowledge. I programmed realistic parts with that.
Finally, the guitar ampli (Guitar Rig Le, Amp Sim and tube leveler in sonar, IK Amplitube in some other package) can shape the sound if you go for electric guitars (and hide the sampling fakeness).
 
So it seems that there are two ways of approaching faked guitars, which converge:
1. start form loops and mangle them with a software that can do it (natively or in the daw) to give them new flexibility
2. start from sampled sounds and having a software to take care of the playing with an interface at an higher level.
 
Cheers
 

I usually just use a sampled (fake) guitar as a place holder or a scratch pad for ideas to give the real guitar player an idea or starting point of what I'm looking for. Then I replace the fake one with the real thing.

Just a song created in BIAB by entering the chords for the verse and chorus:

http://www.soundclick.com...ault.cfm?bandID=334496

12_30_09

Having troubles connecting to the file directly, sorry.