When Native Instruments first announced Guitar Rig in June 2004, I more or less dismissed it straight away as yet another failed attempt towards the holy grail of software amp/fx modelling. I took the animated NI executive’s enthousiastic presentation at Apple’s WWDC as the archetypal marketing talk, and I obviously didn’t get a feel for the quality of the software through the poor audio of the webcast.

It was only about 6 months later that I decided to download the demo of Guitar Rig and play around with it. I had a M-Audio preamp for use with my mac, and my trusty Ibanez was right there waiting for me to play. Several months later, late in the summer of 2005, I took the plunge and bought Guitar Rig. A short while later, I received a complimentary version of Guitar Rig 2 — I was very lucky — as I had purchased the first version right before the second one had been announced.

I never expected to be so pleasantly surprised by a modelling application and I can now safely say that Guitar Rig has really improved my playing and studying experience with my electric guitar. Ever since 1994, when I first started playing the electric guitar, I always found myself dissatisfied with the tone I was getting from my gear. I stood there dreaming of the gear that I would ideally like to have at my disposal. Gear that would allow me to reproduce the tone and practise on techniques used by the best guitarists around. Unfortunately, being able to reproduce that kind of tone usually requires powerful, expensive head tube amps with large 4x12s, and a rack of effects, good mics, and the appropriate soundproof real estate to put all that stuff in. Yep, back in 1994 it was just an intangible dream. Even today, while I could buy most of that stuff, I’d have nowhere to store them, let alone use them in.
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