One of the main good points of the original Pod (and V.2) was the quality of some of the high-gain sounds. This, coincidentally was also one of the gripes people had with Guitar Rig 1 and, to a lesser extent 2. This was probably due to the different goals of the two companies.

Some people thought the Guitar Rig sounds weren’t heavy enough and others thought that while heavy, the sounds were not as accurate as they’d like. Guitar Rig 3 (and especially the free 3.1 upgrade that came out in early 2008) has completelyu resolved this and I think you’d probably need to shell out many thousands of Euros (or Dollars or whathaveyou) to get something even close to what GR3 offers; overall I find the sound of Guitar Rig 3.1 superior to every other modelling software I’ve seen, including for high-gain presets. Having said that I’m not sure how much better to the Pod 2.0 the X3 model is.

The fact that Guitar Rig involves a software component probably makes live performance a bit more awkward (you have to carry a laptop) than the Pod, but it also makes experimenting and preset creation much more fun as you get a visual representation of the amplifiers, pedals and other effect units, instead of a small dot-matrix LCD display and some clumsy controls (if I remember something from the Pod is its horrible controls). Finally, if you’re concerned about playing live, the Kontrol Rig (pedalboards) of Guitar Rig 2 and 3 is a solid piece of hardware, with excellent audio quality and ready for live performances.

I would recommend the Guitar Rig, not only because I’ve had a great experience with it, but because — for me — it realises the dream of every electric guitarist: (almost) total freedom in sound expression and a very intuitive way to get there.

Thanks