Hey folks, I'm Sam Loose here with Native Instruments. I want to take a look at Guitar Rig 7, or more accurately, I want to take a look at everything in Guitar Rig 7 because with such a massive application, it's easy to miss things. I want to show you how to use everything to the best of its ability, how you can use these effects for different instruments, how you can really go in depth, and learn to use everything. So, we're going to take our time here. We're not going to rush through things. We're going to go into some detail about how you can use specific features. But first of all, what is Guitar Rig 7? Guitar Rig 7 Pro is a creative effect playground where you can mix and match modules to create the ultimate processing chain. Building on the success of Guitar Rig 6, we've now added a load of new features, new amplifiers that sound better than ever with our new ICM technology, new stomp boxes to give your sound an edge, new effects to help you stay inspired, and some new ways of working, such as Loop machine machine pro to help you create captivating loops and layer ideas. It's not just a processing suite for guitars; you can use this on any instrument you like. And, as you'll see with some audio examples later on, there really is something here for everyone. As is often the case with videos like this, where there's a lot to digest, where we're taking everything into account, you may just want to use the chapters down below to skip to the section that's relevant to you. So, maybe you just want to go straight to the section on the Looper, or maybe you'd want to go straight to some audio examples. That's absolutely cool. I'm not offended, don't worry. But if you want to stick around for the whole thing, stick on a pot of coffee, and let's get into it. So, I think the best way is to jump in and just take a look at the interface. But if you're a brand new user or you've just got Guitar Rig 7, you'll need to activate it. So, maybe you've got it through music production Suite 6, maybe you've got it standalone through the Native Instruments site. However you've got it, you'll be receiving an activation code, a serial number. And what you need to do is jump onto Native Access, which you can download from the Native Instruments site, pop in that serial number. If you've not created an account already, do that. And then you'll be met with the installer within Native Access, so you can download that, PC or Mac, and then you can jump in. So, once you do that, you'll be met with an interface that looks a bit like this. So, I've actually just loaded up basically the first preset, "Tight and Chunky." But let's take a look at the overall interface and see what's what and what is where. The first thing I really want to point out, which is a new feature, is in the bottom right here. This is like your helper, this is your info pane. If you hover over any parameter, then it's going to tell you exactly what's going on and what that parameter is going to do. But it's not just parameters; that is going to work for any of the other sections as well. For example, if I go up to the top, it's going to tell me in the rack tools here that this is the button for showing macros. We're going to get onto macros and the more advanced features a little later on, but for now, let's just take a look. On the left-hand side here, we have a selection of presets, and then we also have components. So, presets are pre-built settings that you can just double click on, and it's going to load up. So, let's just go on to "Chimy Rock," for example, and it's going to bring up my entire rig here, or we can go to "Buzz Light," and it's just going to bring up the entire rig. Let's just stay on "Titan Chunky" for now. It's a familiar one that you may load up as you first start the application. So, this is where you're going to have all your presets, and in the center section, where your actual rig is going to be. So, this is where anything that's essentially going to affect the sound is going to live, anything in this center section. You can see, at the moment, we've got a Noise Gate, we've got "Screamer Deluxe," which is one of the new stompbox-style effects. We've got the "Super Fast 100," which, again, is a new amplifier. We're going to take a look at that. We've got a "Match Cabinet Pro," and this is the cabinet that kind of comes with that amplifier every time you load in an amplifier or a preset that has an amplifier with it. You're going to get the Matched cabinet so that you get something that's kind of familiar for that sound. And then at the end, we've got a "Solid EQ," so you're able to sculpt the sound. So, that's the center section. On the right-hand side here, we've got signal flow. Now, signal flow, again, is a new feature, and it's a great way of navigating your rig. It's a great way of going top to bottom without having to troll through the entire rig. So, if I jump onto a preset that is slightly larger than this, you'll see the beauty of this signal flow. So, let's go for "Michael's Delight." So, this one, as you can see, there is a lot here. Down at the bottom, we're just seeing "Replica," and there's actually something underneath that. Now, the two ways that you can navigate this: you can just come here and you can just scroll down or grab the scroll bar and come down. But an easy way of doing it is over in the signal flow section. You can just click on anything, and it will take you straight down to that. Or come up to the compressor, for example, and it will show you it there, up to the VC 76, and it's going to scroll up. This is great for a number of reasons. It's kind of the best of both worlds in the sense that you have your full rig in the center section; you've got all your amplifiers there. And it's great that you can access all the controls, you can dive in deep, and you can change any parameter. But with that, when you have all the parameters on view, when you have them all there, it can take up quite a lot of real estate on your screen. So, it's great to be able to jump over to this and just go in between and just navigate your rig really easily. You can actually move things around using that signal flow as well, in the same way as we can change the view of the rack. So, we can just collapse modules to get a bit more real estate, we can move things around so we can pop the compressor after the guitar amp before the cab, whatever we want. Undo that; we can actually move things around here as well. So, it's a really great way of being able to see things a little easier, and the ability to move things around using this signal flow, as we'll see in a minute with more advanced patches, is extremely user-friendly, and it really allows you to visualize your rig in a slightly better way. But what's really great is if you have a preset, such as "Arctic," for example, which, as you can see on the right-hand side in the signal flow, has an A and A B rig, which is going through a split mix. So, previously, if you're just looking at the rig section in the center, it can be a little difficult to kind of visualize that A-B section and what's going into A, what's going through the B section. So, having this on the signal flow, there's no mistaking what's going on here. You know exactly that the "Vintage Verb" and the "Solid EQ" are just in the B section. A is completely clean, and then they're getting joined at the split mix. So, it's just a great way of seeing the architecture of the rig and working out what's where and where your signal is actually going. So, as I said, with the info pane down at the bottom, any of these sections that you want to click on, anything you want to hover over, it's going to tell you exactly what's going on. So, if you don't quite know what a split mix exactly is doing, you can click on that, and it's going to tell you in a decent amount of detail exactly what's going on with that specific unit within your rig, which is going to give you an overview of maybe some of these new features that you don't exactly know how to use yet. Well, I'm going to show you how to use them. But if you're then working through a rig in the future, and what was it that Sam said about that specific thing, well, jump over to the info pane, and that's going to give you the full rundown of exactly what's going on. So, we know that you can get a range of presets here, and there's really something for everyone there. But what if you want to dig a little deeper into this? Well, let's just see how we can manipulate this left-hand section a little bit better, how we can kind of cherry-pick stuff that we want to use. Over on the left-hand side, here we have the presets and the components. So, presets are ready-built for you, and you can just cherry-pick from whatever you want. But components are going to give you a bit more of an overview of exactly what is available in Guitar Rig 7. So, if I just click on components here, we can see all of the components that are available, and we can dive into this in a little bit more detail in terms of just amplifiers or just cabs or just reverb or whatever we want, really. So, if we wanted a specific kind of amplifier, then we can just go to the amplifier section, and we can just grab that AC box, for example, and we can drag it in or we can drag it in over the top of a different one, and it's just going to replace it. You'll see this has got the yellow bar where it's going to go. So, at the moment, it's going to go in between those two, or in between those two. Or if you wanted to actually replace a module, then just hover it over the top of it, the yellow box is going to go all the way around it, and just drop, and it's going to go there. So, you can choose any kind of module there, you can just pop it into the rig, and that rack is just going to populate with whatever you want to put in there. But we can also get a bit more in-depth with those presets, because this is fine if we want to go really in-depth and choose exactly what we want from the rig. But what if we want a particular kind of sound that we think already exists within the presets? Well, let's go back to the presets, and we can refine our search here. So, for example, if we take a look at these headers, our input source, remember that Guitar Rig 7, as we're going to see a little later on, is not just a Guitar Rig; it's a creative playground where you can choose effects for any instrument. It's going to be for drums, it's going to be for keys, for vocals. So, you can do such a range of things within this application that all of these are for different instruments, and don't feel like it's limiting you. If you're using a guitar, then that's cool; you can click on guitar. But also, just because you're using the guitar, don't feel like you can't click on a mix bus preset and use something there, because it's so you can manipulate things in such a way that it's designed for you to be creative. So, for this instance, let's just say we're going to use something in the guitar bank on the input sources, and then we know that we're maybe going to go for something, let's say something a little bit evolving. So, we want there to be kind of a bit of movement there, and all of these presets, the curated presets, there's going to be fewer of them because they match those specific criteria. So, if we have a look at guitar and evolving, these are all the presets that kind of fit that criteria. If we go to dissonance, then it's going to be a different load of presets. But that sounds cool for me right now, so I'm just going to double-click one of these presets, and 'Space Cowboy' to me, it's just shouting out to me to use this for whatever reason. Let's see how we can get some sound into this and how we can use this as a bit of a sketchboard for getting guitar ideas. Because one thing that is a limitation that some people may kind of have this preconceived notion of when we're using a guitar amp simulator like this is that you have to have a guitar in your hand the whole time, and your left hand is in use, your right hand is in use, so you can't move parameters and you can't change things. Well, that's not necessarily the case, and let's see exactly why. So, let's talk about how we can actually get sound into Guitar Rig. So, if we go up to these three dots at the top here, and we can click on file and go to preferences, and this is where all of our audio settings are going to be. So, let's go to preferences, and if I jump over to audio, then I can see my audio devices here. Now, I've got this set to a guitar input, but wherever your interface is, you need to select your interface within the device pane, and that's going to allow you to bring audio in. So, whatever interface you're using, select that, and if your guitar is plugged into that, then you'll be able to record using that. But this is probably the best time to start talking about all the units at the top here. So, these are the rack tools, and for me, at least, sometimes when I have a plugin or an application, certain parts of it become part of the furniture. I see them, but I don't really see them, you know; they're just kind of there. Maybe I ignore them subconsciously, or maybe I just don't really appreciate what they're for. And these tools at the top here, these seven are really useful, and I'm going to show you exactly why now because we've got this rig, and we want to get some audio into it. Well, I don't have a guitar in my hand at the moment, but I can use one of these. So, let's go to the tape deck, and this is the pre-tape deck as opposed to the post-tape tape deck. So, I'll show you why. If I click on 'pre' here, then we can bring a pre-recorded piece of audio into this tape deck. Now, I've actually already done this. I've got a specific guitar demo that I've recorded, and you can just drag and drop this. So, I'm on guitar demo, something I've recorded; you just drag it into there, and it's going to load up. But also, there are a number that are kind of already there for you. If you go into the folder icon at the top of tape deck 'pre,' then you're going to get a load of separate audio files that you can load in. And these titles are kind of indicative of the type of amps that they may work for. So, you can either record something yourself; you can record it straight in if you just hit 'record,' then you can actually record something in yourself, or you can drag something in, or go to the folder icon and navigate to something that's already pre-made for you. So, this guitar demo is kind of a clean thing, and I'm just going to hit play and just see how it sounds through this rig. Okay, and what you'll see is that it loops. Okay, so I've got my loop locators set at the very beginning and at the very end, and that's just going to loop all the way around. And we can transpose this; we can put it into a different key or we can tune this down or up by a very small amount if we need to. Now, for me, maybe I want to take a little bit of the reverb off. Well, I need to be able to hear it so I can sort of tune that reverb, so I just need to hit play. I can bring this all the way back to the beginning and just bring that reverb down on the amp and really kind of tailor this. [Music] Effect, bring in some treble, maybe. So, using that tape deck pre, we're able to bring in an audio file and have some kind of source material to tune our rack to, which is very handy. Speaking of tuning, you've obviously also got a tuner up here as well, and this is going to just read whatever the input is that you've got. So, if you're playing your guitar, it's automatically going to read. You can set your reference pitch; if you're not necessarily working at 440 for whatever reason, you can actually play a concert A. If you click this one, or you can change that to be whatever note you want, and then you can tune to that. So, it's quite an all-encompassing tuner; it's a utility part of the application. But if you're not in tune, then you're not really anything, are you? So, although it's a small part of it, it is very important. If you don't want to see that anymore, if you don't want to see the tuner, for example, you can just select it up the top here or deselect it, and it will just go away. And the same with the tape deck 'pre,' obviously. Now, the metronome is something if you're songwriting, if you're trying to get something at a certain tempo, then you can pop the metronome on, and you can just play along to something that is a specific tempo. You can set it to be whatever you want in a different time signature if you want 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, whatever it is you want. And we also have different kinds of divisions. So, if we were in 5/4, for example, we can have the accents so that it's a group of two and a group of three, or a group of three and a group of two. There really is a lot of thought gone into this in terms of how you can accent things, how you can really keep in time for your specific song, because a 5/4 isn't just a 5/4; a 7/8 isn't just a 7/8; there are different ways of this kind of manifesting, and we're treated to think of all of them here. So, by default, that is, in fact, muted. If you just click the 'X' here, you're going to hear it coming through, and you can turn it up or turn it down. We all know what a click sounds like. And then carrying on, we've got the 'show preset volume.' Now, this is going to do a couple of things. This is great for two reasons. First of all, you can save it within a preset, and you can save it at a certain level. So, perhaps this specific preset is a bit louder than the next one that you've got; well, you can just bring down the volume, or you can bring up the volume of just this specific preset, and that's going to save that volume, which you can then put into the preset. But there's a couple more things as well. We've got this wet mix control here, and then we've got a pre-mix and post-mix. So, the mix control is great for parallel processing. Let's say, for example, you're just using Guitar Rig as an effects processor; you're not using it in terms of an amplifier; you're just using it for reverb or just for delay. Well, you can use the dry-wet mix control to just bring in a little bit of that; you can have it fully to the right to make it fully wet, so fully affected, or you can have it slightly to the left as well. So, let's just bring in that pre-tape deck again, and if we hit play on that all the way to the beginning, fully wet, or we can make it drier or somewhere in between with too. But there's a control on the left, which is premix and post mix, which is a little more in depth, and this is to do with the level at which it kind of matches stuff. So when set to post mix, this is your standard kind of run-of-the-mill wet-dry control, and it's not going to alter the input or the output signal, um, relative to what's going on. But when it's set to premix, this is changing the input and the output signal. So, if you think of it in terms of distortion, when you've got a high input signal, that's going to affect the amount of distortion that's happening. So, post mix is just a standard wet-dry, but the premix is going to take into account the level that's coming in, and it's going to match those two to kind of make a true representation of it. So, premix is going to be if we take a look at the bottom right on the, um, info pane, uh, post mix is blending the dry signal with the wet signal, so there's no real level control going on in the wet-dry control in the mix control. And premix splits the signal before the rack, adjusting both the level of the dry signal and the wet signal. So, if you're on premix, then it's going to be a little bit more intelligent, and it's going to adjust those levels to match them a little bit better, and you can save that within the preset as well. Um, this preset volume is going to be saved within whatever the preset is. In order for you to do that, for you to save the preset, you just go up to the floppy disc icon here, which is kind of known as a save icon, isn't it? You can save that as a new preset, and that will get loaded into your presets. So, let's call that Sam one. I'm just going to go, 'Okay' there, and then this is going to get saved in my user preset. So, if I just get rid of these different parameters here and then go to my presets, it's just saved here. So, all the presets that you save as your own are just going to go to this little icon of a person, and all your own presets are going to get saved there. But you can also kind of switch through some presets using the colors here, because you can color code stuff. If you maybe think that the, I don't know, the green one maybe makes you think of metal, or if the orange one makes you think of something more subdued, then you can label these different presets so that you can go back to them and say, 'Right, I need a metal preset. What was that one that I had before?' So, for example, let's come out of our user presets and let's go into genres, and let's go into metal, for example. Let's say that it's the metal core stereo one that we particularly like. Well, you can see at the top here, we've got the kind of the pinky color. If I click that, it's going to bring up all the presets that I've selected to be that pink color. So, I'm just going to control-click on here or right-click, and here's my pinky color, my fuchsia. If I select that, then whenever I go to my fuchsia, it's going to bring up everything that I've said is in that family. And this is personal to you because it may be that some presets you're using for a metal track but they aren't necessarily in the metal section. They may be for a bridge section that's a little more controlled, a little more subdued, but in your mind, they kind of fit into that metal family, and that's cool. You're personalizing this for your own experience; it's your computer; it's your software. Now you can make it as personal as you like. So, going on the right-hand side again, we've got tape deck post and tape deck pre. Tape deck pre is where we can bring in a piece of audio, and we can send it through the rack. And then, tape deck post is going to sit at the end of the rack, and that's going to record anything into it. So, it may be that you have an awesome idea that you really love the sound of this rack, and you desperately need to record it. Well, you don't have to worry about bringing it into a DAW because we're in Standalone mode at the moment. We don't actually have that recording facility, except we do. We're going to go into tape deck post. So, you can hit record on this, and let's bring up tape deck pre again. We're going to go all the way back to the beginning, so let's just hit record and play on this one, and then play on the tape deck. [Music] Pre. And you can see this is recording into the buffer. Let's hit stop, and then we can play it back, and it's going to be what we just played, but it's going to be through that rig. So, a nice way of recording that, and we can then save this as whatever we want. Typically, it's going to go to our Guitarix 7 presets folder, but we can save that onto the desktop or wherever you want it to go. And that's your recording of what you've just created for your reference or for your songwriting. You can then send that to the rest of your band or whatever it is you want to do. You've got a record of that now. So, if we just remove the preset volume, the tape deck pre, and tape deck post, and we've just got this paperclip along the right-hand side, if we bring that paperclip up, then this is our Global Effect. So, this is going to be separate from any preset that we load. So, let's say, for example, we want to go into components, and we want to go to reverb. Now we know that we always want to have a specific reverb loaded up, let's say it's the RC48. Let's say we really like that reverb. Well, this is always going to be there regardless of whatever preset we load up. So, if we go to presets again and that metal core preset that we had, if we double-click on that, it's going to change, but this Global Effect stays the same. So, Global effects are going to be there regardless of whatever you do, whatever kind of preset you load in. Let's take off the fuchsia and go to simple pleasure, for example. Check out this RC48. It's always going to stay there, no matter what we do with the presets. So, Global effects are going to stay there, regardless of any preset that we change. So, you can see here, I've got quite a selection of different guitar parts, and I'm trying to showcase a little bit of everything within Guitar Rig because I'm not trying to just limit myself to guitar. I've gone for some bass, I've gone for some drums as well; there are some other instruments in there just to show you how you can kind of use this as an effect, as opposed to just a guitar rack. As before, you can just jump to the chapters if there's a specific style that you kind of want to see or a specific instrument. The first is like a typical kind of rock sound, and this is from the new super-fast 100 amp. So let's just take a look. I've got the super-fast 100 amp with the matched cab, and then Scream of Deluxe. You will see on some of these plugins, they say ICM in the corner, and you can see this on a number of these. ICM is something I want to discuss here because it's quite important. ICM is intelligent circuit modeling. So, the best way I can describe this is it's about the journey of the amp. It's about the journey of the signal from input to output. So, let's say you have a car traveling from LA to New York, for example, and it's going to get to New York no matter what, but the route that it takes is going to have a different effect on the car. So, if it goes through Chicago, and it's snowing in Chicago, then the car is going to end up in New York in kind of a different state than it would have done if it had taken a different route. And this is what it's all about; it's about that journey. It's about knowing that one slight change in a component has an effect further down the line, just in the same way as we'll see in a moment where we start to reorder things. If we put the distortion before the reverb, then it has a different sound than having the reverb before the distortion. It's about that journey and being aware that this is going to have a real effect on the audio, a real effect on the guitar or whatever instrument is going through it. And this creates such a truer representation of the amplifier and a far truer representation of whatever piece of gear it's replicating because it's replicating every step of the way. If step number two is different, then step number three is going to be affected in some way. It's not just a strict A to B; it's about that journey. So just bear that in mind anytime you see something that has the ICM next to it; that's the intelligent circuit modeling. So, we've got the super-fast 100 here, and I've got the Scream of Deluxe as well. So these are two new modules, and they sound great. I just want to give you a little bit of an overview of these two. So first off, I'm actually going to get rid of this Scream of Deluxe, and there's a reason for that. I'm going to use on the Superfast 100 the overdrive channel and just play you some guitar. So this is some rock guitar, let's take a listen. [Music] Okay, so a fairly dirty sound, and the Scream of Deluxe and kind of distortion pedals that go before the amp really give a little bit of extra drive. And this is a great time to talk about the input and output controls. If you have your signal at whatever level it is, if you've got it really hot, then it's going to be putting a lot of signal into Guitar Rig, and that's going to lead to more overdrive essentially. So, I just want to bring this Scream of Deluxe in now, and you're going to hear that it changes the tonality, but it also gives it more distortion. Just take a listen. So, it's giving it more grit, a little more top end there as well, but we can kind of affect that. We can change the level at which it goes into the amps by just altering the input control up here. Just listen as I bring this down, how much less distortion you're going to get. Because as long as it's not clipping, there's nothing that's like too much or too little; it's kind of what you're expecting, just in the same way as guitarists will turn down their volume control if they're getting a little bit too much. Think of this as your volume control on your guitar, so if we bring this down, we're going to get a little bit less grit, a little bit less. [Music] There, it's about in terms of distortion and overdrive pedals and distorted amps, it's about the level that you're hitting it at, and I would really recommend that before you start reaching for other stuff within the rack, you do start with this input control and make sure that you're hitting it at the right level. But to me, this Scream of Deluxe just adds a little bit of extra bite, a little bit of extra grit, and this is one of the modules with ICM, as is the Alfier. So we've got two kind of sounds on this super-fast 100; we've got the overdrive which is what you listened to at the moment, then we've got the normal, well, the normal may be a little bit more suited if we've got an overdrive beforehand, if we've got something distorted going into it. So this is going to be a little bit cleaner, but let's just take a listen. I would have said that's edging more towards a kind of a classic rock sound than the original modern rock sound that we had. So, a couple of different channels on here; we've got the crunch and we've got the clean. And we've got our bright switch as well, which you can play around with and make sure it's kind of fitting your sound that you're after. But in general, the bright sound is obviously going to add a little bit more top end there. So let's hear it without and then switch it on. Cool, so just adding a little bit of treble there. You'll notice that when we bring an amp in, as I said before, Match Cabinet Pro kind of comes in with it. This is the, as it says, the Match Cabinet, the one that kind of matches that rig, but just because it's matched to it doesn't mean you have to use it. And we're going to take a look at the custom IR loader a little bit later on. But just be aware that you can cycle through these different cabinets, and you can use a different cabinet than the one that's kind of recommended to you. You don't have to settle for that; you can use whatever you want in here. So, let's just search through a few of these different cabinets. And they're all going to have a completely different sound because the actual sound of the speakers and the construction of a cabinet makes such a vast difference to the amplifier. It's worth checking out and just making sure that there's not something that's a little bit better suited for you. This next sound is using some of the older presets. It's not necessarily using a brand new amplifier, but it's using some brand new components that I think is going to be a really good way of kind of explaining some stuff to you. So let's load this one up; this is kind of a solo lead sound. This is the Jens Bogren sound. So we've got a number of presets; we've got a number of kind of artists that we can choose from. So if we just go over to the presets and go to artists, we've got a load of artists that we can make stuff sound like these particular artists. Jens Bogren has created some custom IRs for this as well, which we're going to take a look at in a moment. This is just a really cool kind of lead sound. It's got some delay in there; it's got some phaser. It's actually a really good example of using the signal flow, where we can just switch stuff around and really show you the beauty of the signal flow section. Because if I just move this info pane down for a second, you can see this is quite a substantial chain, and there's just loads to it, and we want to keep stuff visible so that we can actually change stuff, move stuff around. But having this signal flow is just a super, super easy way of displaying all that information while still having access to all the controls. So if I want to go up to my phaser, I can just click the phaser, and it's going to go straight up there. If I want to go down to my cabinet IR loader, I can just click it, and it's going to jump to it. Let's take a listen to this first of all, and then we're going to take a look at exactly what the custom IR loader is, what it does, how you can use it. Okay, so we heard a kind of a lead sound there. It's just the lead sound that I've just picked. It's not particularly the best one for this sound, but it's the best one to demonstrate exactly what's going on with these different sections. So what an IR loader is doing is it's loading in an Impulse response; that's the IR. An Impulse response is essentially the sound of a specific speaker or the sound of a specific speaker with a specific microphone in a specific cabinet. So it's the sound of that speaker at that moment in time, and it's an Impulse, so it's just one kind of sound. We can see here; it's just like a pulse, just kind of a tick, and that captures the behavioral characteristics of that speaker at that moment in time, and we can use that to manipulate the sound. We can make our amplifier sound like it's going through that cabinet. There are a few things to be aware of here; this is the overall interface for the cabinet IR loader. So you can see that you've got a number of faders. You can have up to four IRS loaded at once, and you can blend between them and pan some of them to the left, some of them to the right, whatever you want to do. This is where you load your impulses, so at the moment, I've got two loaded, and there's nothing in three and four, so they are empty. There's nothing in them. But if I were to trash number two, that one's now empty as well, and I can click here to load any kind of impulse responses. As standard, we get a load within the actual plugin itself, so we have some from three sigma audio; we have some from Bogan digital cab IR. There's a load in here that we can choose from, but we can also load in our own. So in here in our custom IRS, I've got my IRS that I've created, and I can load them in whenever I want. So let's look at how we can actually use this because I want to load in a second IR here. I'm just going to go for something that's not by the same manufacturer, and there's a reason for that. So the first one is Bogan digital; let's go for three sigma audio, let's go for the first one. So you'll see that I've got Auto align selected, and what this is going to do is it's automatically going to sync those up for us. So that pulse needs to happen at the same time on both of the channels, or else we're going to get some stuff that's out of phase, and that's automatically going to do it for us. So if we load one in that I know is not actually in phase with that one, you can see here, these are almost perfectly out of phase. We've got an upward movement on the first one and a downward movement on the second one, so this is not going to sound the best, this is not going to sound great, it's going to be out of phase. So if we click Auto align, it's going to align the phase for us and make sure that they are absolutely perfectly aligned. You need that because if you bring in a sound that is out of phase with the original, then you're going to be losing more than you'd want, you're going to be taking out bottom end, you're going to be adding some kind of filtering, which is just not really desirable in this kind of context. Let's take a listen and let's start off with the first IR and then we'll bring in the second one and see what kind of sound it's adding. Okay, so we can create a blend of those two IRS, and just for fun, let's take a listen to one that is completely out of line without that auto-align engaged, and we're going to hear how when we bring that auto-align back in, it actually does solidify things somewhat. So this is going to be out of phase; you'll see that the red is considerably before the green, so these two are not perfectly aligned, and we're going to hear that in the sound, but then when I pop auto-align... They just become a little more together, the whole thing just kind of fits together a little bit. You're not actually cutting out any frequencies; you're actually adding, and that's going to be far better in the mix if you've got loads of instruments in there, and everything is in phase. That's really, really beneficial to your mix. Within this IR loader, you've also got an EQ as well. I've got it switched on for this one. So we've got a low cut, a high cut, we've got an overall tone control, so bass, middle, and treble for each of these IRS. If we find that one of them is a little too bright, for example, or not quite bright enough, then we can brighten it up or take out some of that top end. That's really useful because sometimes an IR, or indeed an amp or anything in the amp rack, has 90% of the characteristics that you like, but you don't like the top end, and you can just notch out the top end, and it's helpful to have that on a module basis, so you don't have to take out the high end on the amp; you can have it get rid of the high end on that particular IR, and that's really beneficial. So now we've got this IR loaded in, we can see the beauty of this signal flow when we're shifting stuff around. As it stands, we've got a phaser into a Screamy Deluxe into an EQ, and then after that, it comes into the amp into a compressor, etc. But we can actually move things around and hot swap, as it were. We don't have to stop and move it and start it again; it's just going to seamlessly flow through. Let's use that now; let's use signal flow to move some stuff around and see how we can affect the signal. I think that if we have the Screamy Deluxe after the EQ, that's going to have a slightly different sound than it is at the moment, and we can just do a bit of trial and error and see which one we like. [Music] That one, especially, changes things considerably because we've got the delay going into all the overdrive, so we're going to be overdriving the delay instead of delaying the overdrive, if that makes sense. We've got to think about the signal chain, and anything that comes before anything else is going to be affected by that next point in the chain. Being able to just switch these around really easily creates another world of possibilities, and you can do it within the actual rack itself. You can still drag things around and grab them and move them, but it's just kind of easier, much simpler to do them within this signal flow area because you can just get a view of the entire thing. Remember that the plug-in window itself is actually resizable. So if you did want to just jump in and take a look at the full rig, you can do that, and being able to resize stuff is really quite a good thing in terms of having that large rig. However you want to work it, it kind of allows you to do that. Whether you don't want to jump over to the signal flow way of thinking just yet, that's cool; you can stay with the rack, and you can just make it larger and work with the real estate that you have on your screen. I've got something kind of bluesy here, which is using a rhythm track and then a lead track and some drums as well. I'm just using this to lightly process the drums. So I've got the amps going on, and we're going to take a little look at those now. Let's bring up Guitar Rig again. I'm using a combination here. This is the AC Box 15, and then I've got two stomp boxes going into it, but only one in use at the moment. This is the IVP Stomp, and I was just kind of A/B'ing between the two, and it's really cool to be able to do that within the signal flow, just to kind of turn stuff on, turn stuff off, and move stuff around. This is an example of you can just kind of switch stuff around, and it makes it really intuitive. Let's take a listen to the rhythm track on its own to start off with. Let's bring that spring reverb back to the very end, and then we'll take it to the beginning and just see what the difference is. So when we have the spring reverb further back in the chain, it's being overdriven, so we're actually overdriving that reverb as well, so it's going to give it a drastically different sound. But we can also just take the IVP Stomp out and bring in the Screamy Deluxe, which is going to give us a slightly different kind of overdrive. It's kind of a little tamer. And on the Screamy Deluxe, we've actually got three different ways of doing this, so we've got the classic, we've got the LED, which is a slightly different sound, and then we've got an EQ as well. So we can actually EQ into the amp, which is really handy. In the same way as we're doing on this IVP Stomp, the EQ is built into it, so the bass and treble controls are set before the gain, so you're EQ'ing into the gain. Again, this is another example of kind of staging things, and if you're sticking a load of top end onto it, and then it's going into the gain, it's going to saturate the top end a little bit more. Just be aware of that kind of staging of things, but this EQ1 is going to give a little bit more, a little crunchier, and you're able to manipulate the frequency spectrum a little bit easier as well. Nice, just gives it a little bit of extra crunch. Let's take a listen to this other Blues lead kind of track, and this is using a very similar rig. Let's take a listen, but obviously I'm going to have a little bit more Reverb on this one because it is a lead. [Music] Line. So we're overdriving that Reverb now before the [Music] amp. This AC box, again, is one of the ICM amps, and it's a really nice representation of a really bluesy amp, something that's not got as much drive as some of the other amps that we've got in here, but something that can be a little bit laid-back if you want it to be. But you can get a bit of extra something out of it if you're driving into it. And then the drums are an interesting one because I've chosen to process these using Guitar Rig because there's some great tools in Guitar Rig that are not just for guitar. For example, we've got the solid EQ, we've got a compressor, and then we've got the iZotope Ozone maximizer as well. Just take a listen to these drums without any processing engaged and then with the processing engaged, and you're going to hear a great difference. So, let's take it off first using the bypass switch at the [Music] top. It sounds great; it's just a drum loop; it's nothing special. It's just something that I've dragged in. Using this EQ and this compressor and this limiter, it just kind of brings it to life and gives it a bit of extra squash and just sort of brings it up a touch. Now, I'm not doing too much; I'm just adding a little bit in the bottom end and then just compressing a touch. And this VC 160 that you get within Guitar Rig is really, people say it's kind of knocky, you know, on the transients. It really kind of chops off the transient and creates a knocking kind of percussive effect, and I think that really works here. So let's take a listen to all three together and just see how they sound. [Music] Nice. So this maximizer is just taming things a little bit, just chopping off the peaks, and just ensuring that nothing's going into the red too much. It's just adding a little bit of transient control there and just sweetening things a little bit. Now, Lo-fi as a genre is something that we're all kind of aware of now. I think something that we need to be aware of is that Lo-fi is not just one thing. It's not just like this entity; it's something that we can span across loads of different genres, and we can add some great subtle tones to any kind of music. But let's take a listen to this one as it is. I've called it Lo-fi chords because it kind of seems a bit Lo-fi to me. This is using the Reverb Delight amp; this is a new ICM amp. But before that, we've got Color, and this is using a load of different distortion algorithms from Trash, which is the iZotope plugin. And it's utilizing them, but just adding them to... You can just do a little bit more with them. You can do some wet-dry stuff. You can add a little bit more gain, you can add a little bit more drive, and the Bass Saver is really cool because the Bass Saver means that it's not distorting the low end too much, and it is effectively saving that low end. That's a real consideration when you're using distortion or any kind of overdrive on the bottom end; it just kills the low end, and this is really going to save that. So let's take a listen to what we've got here, and we're going to move some stuff around and just see what's going on. So I'm actually using the tape wobble and vintage vibrato here, and these are really just adding a layer on top. They're not too much of a massive part of the sound. They're just adding a little bit of subtlety. So if we listen to it without them first and then with, we're going to hear what they [Music] are doing. Then bring the vibrato [Music] in, and this is mainly on the chorus [Music] sound. Tape [Music] wobble, and we can hear that this Color is just adding a little extra drive, a little bit of dirtiness into there. It's just coloring the signal a little bit. It's not making it too distorted. It's not as if we're using it as a fuzz box; we're just using it as a bit of a character control. And I'm actually putting that before the amp because I think that sounds kind of cool. But we can just switch this round, put it after the amp. But it before the tape wobble in front of the Vintage vibr, whatever we want, we can kind of just manipulate this and move things around. But let's take a listen to a few of the different distortion algorithms within this Color module [Music]. A little more [Music] subdued [Music]. Sweeter [Music]. Clippy [Music]. Nice. I think that when we listen to a lead sound in this kind of Lo-fi vibe, I've got a different kind of way of thinking here. I'm using the amp first of all, going into the matched cabinet, and then I'm using all my effects afterward. I've also got the noise machine, which is just adding some overall noise, some crackle, some hiss, and kind of giving us that stereotypical Lo-fi kind of thing where it's as if something's been recorded to a really bad, misaligned cassette tape. You know, it's got all that noise, it's got all that hiss, and we've got varying different kind of algorithms here. We can go through a few different ones, 50 HZ hum, 60 HZ hum, Transformer kind of hum, normal Power hum, amp hum, and we can just bring in these kind of tonal sounds just at varying degrees, and we can do this with noise as well. We've got some vinyl stuff. So let's have a little listen to this. [Music] Now it's just creating a kind of vibe to [Music] it. And we can really bend pitch with this with the wow and flutter, so this is emulating the sound of a misaligned tape. In a tape machine, if something was not quite aligned properly, if it's not quite set up properly, then we'd get fluctuations in pitch, and we'd get fluctuations with noise, and kind of degrade the sound a touch. This is really emulating that kind of sound, but we can use it to our advantage because we can control it. We can say, 'Well, I want this much,' or, 'I don't want quite that much; let's bring it back a touch.' It's really a cool kind of thing to be able to add, and it's especially fun if you're putting it on drums. So let's go on to some drums and just see what we've got going on. I'm using a preset here, which is too hot to handle, and I think it sounds... it's crunchy, it's cool, it's using again the limiter, it's using tape wobble and a couple of the older modules, so input level and bite, which is just giving it an extra bit of crunch. But let's take a listen to this here, and I'm using that noise machine. Let's bring that wow [Music] [Music] up. It's just like a really cool way of almost destroying the sound. You know, you can be as destructive or as subtle as you really like. I think the great thing about tape wobble is, especially with this saturation and age, with the age, as we can see down in the info pane, it's taking a little bit of that top end off but then adding some hiss, and it's just kind of shaping it. It's making it sound like it was originally recorded to tape. Just using this way of thinking about what is it that sounds old to us, what is it that sounds vintage, and tape wobble, tape in itself is kind of old, and it just creates this real aesthetic. And again, Color is adding some vibe to this, some real destructive kind of element, which is just helping chop off some transients, which is sounding really nice. There are two examples of bass here, one which is like a really rock version and the what you would maybe think of when someone's going to demo a kind of bass sound and then one that's a little more melodic and a little higher up the neck and a little more interesting where we've got some different types of effects being used. So let's take a look at a more stereotypical kind of rock-based sound. This is using the new ICM, the Bass Rage amplifier. [Music] So, this is creating a really warm, kind of bottom-endy sound, but it's got some of that familiar Clank, and we can add that even more by using this ultra-high [Music] button. It's adding a really nice kind of top-end Clank to it, and it's getting something that's going to cut through the mix really, really nicely. Just adding in that Scream Deluxe just gives it a beautiful kind of edge. It's not so much a fuzz; it's more of an overdrive and just something an extra edge that's going to help it sit with some distorted guitars. For me personally, that's what I love to utilize on basses, just to add a little bit of drive, just to help it sit with everything else. And then the other one that I've got is, as I said, a little bit more of a subdued kind of sound. This one is still using the same Bass Rage, but we've got some stuff going into it. Just take a listen to this because it's quite an interesting sound. We've got a Psych Delay, Vintage Vibrat, and then Tape Wobble as well. And we're kind of breaking all the rules here, like people tell you you shouldn't, but delay or reverb on bass, you know? But why not if you've got all the tools here? Then, if it's creating something that sounds good to you, then you should do anything that sounds [Music] great. [Music] So, here I'm making it sound almost not like a bass anymore and really going a polar opposite to the previous bass sound that we had. I'm using the Match Cabinet Pro again, but I'm using a different cab than comes with it as standard. And it's great that we can just flick through them and choose a different cabinet at the click of a button that we think is maybe going to be more interesting and more creative [Music] sound. [Music] Some more of a typical kind of bass sound, much more midrangey, bring in some of the room [Music] sound. So, I want to take a look at some of the slightly more advanced features in Guitar Rig now, and previously, I kind of brushed over the macros, and that's for a good reason because it deserves a section to go into on its own where we can kind of go into it in a little more depth. Macros are a really useful way of being able to control parameters within plugins or being able to control more than one parameter at the turn of a knob. Now I've got a MIDI controller plugged in at the moment. I've got the Komplete Kontrol A49 keyboard, and I want to use that to send MIDI data to Guitar Rig 7, and I can do that really easily. So I'm just going to go up to my preferences, as before, File > Preferences, and go across to my MIDI. So it may be at General to start off with, go across to MIDI, and I need to check this box. So this is my MIDI controller. Whatever MIDI controller you're using, just make sure you tick that box, and I'm going to use MIDI Channel Omni because it's the only one that I've got plugged in. So I just want it to read all channels. That's fine; that's set up. Now, I've got Tape Deck Pro here; I just want to have it with some audio in it, so it's got some loaded in already. But just to remind ourselves, let's go to the folder and let's bring in Fu Monkeys, so we've got kind of a nice modern rock sound. Let's bring up a preset. So, Titan Chunky, that's as good of one as any. Let's press play, and we should hear some [Music] audio. Okay, great; we can hear some audio there. So, let's go to the macros now. As it stands, these macros are automatically going to be assigned. So if I want to turn up this first one, for example, it's set to overdrive. So if I turn that up, you'll see on the screen of Deluxe that is bringing up the overdrive on there. The tone is also mapped; the bass is mapped to the amplifier. But what if I want to change those? What if I want to set that to something else? Well, we can do that, or we can do it to two at once, and it's a real nice way of being able to control more than one parameter. So, first of all, let's see how we can control it using the keyboard. I'm going to go to my macros, and I'm actually going to bring up two layers so we can see all 16 that we have available on the first one. Overdrive, I'm going to right-click and go learn MIDI control. I'm going to turn a knob on my controller keyboard. When I turn that knob, it's now going to turn the knob on the macros, but also on the Scream Deluxe. So we've got tactile control over these parameters. Not only that, we can control two at once. If I go to the four arrows in the top left-hand side, I can just drag that onto, for example, the normal gain on the amplifier. Let's go to normal. As I turn that control, it's going to turn both of them. We're going to be affecting both the gain of the normal channel on the amp and the Scream Deluxe as well. But we can take it one step further. What if we only want to turn up or turn down those parameters within a certain kind of range? Well, let's go to the Expert view, which is in the top left-hand corner of the macros pane here. We can see down the bottom we've got Scream Deluxe overdrive and Super-Fast 100 normal. So let's say that I don't want to turn up the Scream Deluxe too much. Well, as it stands, if I turn this knob all the way, it's going to go all the way, and Super-Fast 100 is going to go at the same rate as well. Let's say that I want to keep Super-Fast 100 at the full range, but I only want the Scream Deluxe to be able to go to half. So let's take that down to 50, and this is the maximum. Now when I turn this down all the way, it will go all the way, but when I turn it up all the way, it's going to be set at a maximum of 50% for the Scream Deluxe, and Super-Fast 100 is going to go all the way. So you can set the range within that. We can set the range of the Super-Fast 100 to be a minimum of around 50, around halfway. When we turn that down all the way, overdrive on the Scream Deluxe is going to go to zero, but the normal control on the Super-Fast 100 is going to be set to a minimum of halfway, kind of 12:00. As I turn that up, we're seeing that we're kind of scaling these, so we can set a minimum and a maximum for each of these. It means that we can have a little more control over them. It's not just that turning the knob all the way down means completely down. We can set what the minimum is. Similarly, we can set what the maximum is as well. So many of the controls within Guitar Rig are assignable to MIDI. Let's say the play button, for example. If we control-click on that and go learn MIDI control, and then I just press a C on my controller keyboard, then it's going to play when I press that C. You can get really tactile with this. You can get really hands-on with your controller keyboard or whether it's a keyboard or maybe it's just a control surface, maybe it's something else that you've got that is MIDI controllable, and you can control all the parameters within Guitar Rig. Macros are a really good way of doing that, of controlling more than one parameter at once and being really hands-on with how you can control this rig. Now, Loop Machine Pro is a feature that's been much spoken about, and I want to spend a bit of time taking a look at the features, the controls, and how you can use this in kind of day-to-day looping and getting ideas down. First of all, if we take a look at the interface, we've got two places we can record audio into: A and B. We can switch this over using just the AB there. So this is MIDI assignable, again, as with the macros. You can assign this to a foot pedal. You can assign this to something that is going to allow you to be hands-free with this because your hands are going to be on a guitar, and you need to be able to control this without having to go to a mouse, which is really integral to the whole Loop Machine Pro kind of way of thinking. Just to run you through how you can actually record with this, we've got our record, play, and stop buttons down here. Our record length is how long we're actually going to be looping for. So I've got this set to one bar at the moment. We can have this set to three, so we can record as much as we want or any kind of multiples of bars. Then the record start, we can start it with a count-in, so the metronome is going to count us in, in this instance, two bars. We can go to direct, so automatically, as soon as we hit record, it's going to start playing, which, if you've got a foot pedal, this is going to be great for you. And then we've got auto start, which is going to wait for a signal that exceeds minus 60 dB. So basically, as soon as you start playing, that's going to start recording for you, which is really handy if you're not wanting to get your hand on the mouse too much, and you're wanting to be completely free of those kind of chains. You can use your feet; you can use just the audio signal to trigger that recording, which is handy. I like to have this set to count in, so that I've got the metronome, which is going to count in my bars. The metronome is at the top, and this is just going to automatically unmute when we come into play. So I can record into this buffer here, and I can press play to start anything as well. I can also drag in some audio files. So I can drag in, perhaps, a drum loop to get the creative juices flowing. So we'll come on to that in a moment, but let's just see how we can actually record into this looper. So my record length is just set to one bar; my count-in is two bars. I can hit record, and after the count-in, I can start playing. [Music] Okay, and that's just going to loop over and over. Maybe I want to record something else over the top of that. Okay, great. So I've got that one-bar system going, but maybe I want to record something that is longer than one bar. Well, that's where this Auto-grow comes into play because typically, if we've got just a one-bar loop, then it can be a little bit stale. But if we want to record something over the top that's going to be slightly longer than that, we can check this Auto-grow, and this is going to record for longer than one bar. In fact, it's going to record for as long as we want it to. So it automatically grows with your playing and just goes for as long as you need. [Music] There; cool. So I've got a little phrase there that started after the initial kind of motifs, so we can hear those, and then we can come in and hear those kind of two bars that I played. Okay, cool. And we've also got these buttons here, which are forwards and backward, so we can record stuff backward or we can just play stuff backward. But we can record something backward and then play it back the normal way around. So we've got kind of a reverse effect going on. So I'm just going to take Auto-grow off; I'm just going to record for one bar. I'll hit [Music] backward, and then when it sets back to the normal way around, if I just hit play, we've got a reverse guitar effect going on there, which can be really effective. And if you just want to play back the whole thing backward for a unique effect, you can do that. But being able to record in backward as well is a really nice charm. So let's just get rid of everything that I've just done there. Let's just hit the loop delete, and we can drag some loops into this to kind of start off. So let's just go to a drum loop. Let's drag this into the first buffer, and we can record over the top of [Music] this [Music]. Nice. Then when we play it back, we're going to have the drums, and we're going to have those two lead [Music] lines. But in our second buffer, we can put a different drum track, so another rock drum loop, but with a slightly different flavor here. [Music]. Okay. I think I can do something over [Music] that. Okay, nice. And we can play this back, and with our foot switch or, in this instance, just with our mouse, we can flick between the two, so we can go from the A section to the B section. [Music]. Nice. So our metronome, we can have this not active at all; we can have this on just the counting, so it's just going to count us in. Then we're kind of free with our own timing, or we can have this as I've got it set to here so that it counts in but then it plays on the record as well. That's just really going to keep us in time if you're just laying down some initial ideas. Then it's going to be cool to have that. But once you've got that initial line down or if you've got a drum track already in there kind of keeping you in time, then you might not need that. So being able to take that out is quite valuable. You'll notice that I've got Loop Machine last in the chain here because I don't want the Loop Machine to be going through any of the guitar amps or anything like that. Remember, we run top to bottom here, so the signal comes in the top and it comes straight out the bottom. So we can actually switch patches seamlessly as we go through. So if we went for Chimy Rock, then we can record using this preset this time. [Music] Something a little bit cleaner. If we want to just get rid of the one that we've just done, we can just hit the undo here, and that's just going to get rid of the previous one. We can go back a few steps or go forward a few steps if we want to bring that back in. But you'll notice down here on the left we have record pan. So I currently have this set to the center, and there's something interesting we can do with this. For example, if I want to record something just in the left-hand channel, then I can bring this over to the left; that's fine. Or I can bring it over to the right-hand side, and that's going to track the recording pan, essentially. So anything that I've recorded when it's set to the right, it's just going to record into the right-hand side. But we can also modulate this using a feature within Guitar Rig. So if I go to Components and type in LFO and bring this in, then this LFO is a low-frequency oscillator. So this is essentially going to create some movement, and we can link it to that pan. So if we bring up the advanced controls, come down to our Loop Machine, and we can just select this with the four arrows, bring it to our record pan, and then that is going to be sweeping from left to right. So I'm just going to bring this to a sine wave, and you'll see that that is going to come left to right. So we can change the rate of that; we can make it so does it faster or slower or whatever we want to do. And that's going to be a nice smooth left to right motion. So if I wanted to now record another line, in this one's going to be panning from left to right as I play. So you can hear that left to right movement. This is a really effective way of creating some kind of movement with your tracks and utilizing that pan and assigning an LFO to it is kind of an advanced trick that allows us to be a little more creative with how we're using this Loop Machine Pro. So we can record into the initial A buffer; we can record into the B buffer. We can switch between them, one and two. Remember, this becomes a lot more kind of tactile if you do have a MIDI controller available to you that you can use with your feet, a foot pedal of some sort. Then you can switch so easily, start recording, and create some really interesting ideas without having to use your mouse, and your hands can be on your guitar at all times. Thanks for checking it out. There are so many new features in Guitar Rig 7 Pro that it's impossible for me to go through absolutely everything in just one video. The new ICM-enabled amps, stompboxes, and effects are really going to take your creativity to the next level. As I said, don't feel like you have to be restricted to using this just on guitars. You can use it on drums, as we saw; you can use it on vocals. It has so much within it that you can really expand upon your toolset. So you can really use this to mix absolutely anything. You've got all kinds of compressors in here, the VC 76, the VC 160, the VC 2A, different flavors of compression, different flavors of EQ, reverbs, everything that's going to give you the toolset to mix your tracks effectively. And this can work great on vocals with the new Ozone maximizer. It can work great on a master bus as well. So jump over to Native-instruments.com to see what it's all about and get your free trial. If you've already purchased it, then there's so much in here to keep you busy; I'm sure you'll be working for a long time. Thanks so much for checking it out. I'll see you again soon. Take care