Ableton Live and Guitar Rig, a whole lotta fire-power for Dark Fire

I've been a fan of both Guitar Rig and Ableton Live for years now. Ableton Live was once described to me by a marketing executive as "the best Reason to drop ACID." If you're a home studio geek like me and used both ACID and Reason in your studio, you'll get that joke. I'm going to get into Ableton Live in another post. Today, I want to talk tone and value. And for guitar players recording at home, tone with a computer means Guitar Rig.

I remember the first hands-on experience I had with Guitar Rig. I was skeptical. Why? Well, up until that point the only guitar modeling software I had came in the form of "Nigel" with my UAD-1 card, and frankly it was a massive resource hog even with the use of the card to supposedly take the strain off of my Mac's CPU. I had horrible memories of whatever DAW I was using at the time locking up or my Mac suddenly having one of those dreaded "unexpectedly quit" scenarios in the middle of a session. Not good.

The very idea that a software company had the audacity to suggest I could use their product with my laptop computer as the brains and power for a live concert performance scared the bejeebies out of me. Introduce a computer into a live stage? Are they crazy? I'm from the "if something can go wrong, it will" school. I remember one year deciding I was going to get a fancy Digitech all-in-one effects unit so I wouldn't have to lug a big pedal board around. It made its debut at the Haight Street Fair in a concert I played with my dear late mentor and friend, Merl Saunders. I spent hours programming the patches and sounds I wanted and marched it up to the stage with five minutes to spare in-between bands. I plugged everything in, then looked down at the LEDs on the floor unit and freaked. You couldn't read them in direct sunlight. Oh crap! All that planning and programming for my fancy new toy for naught, I had to engage it in manual mode and hit the ground running. Ouch. That made me think, stomp boxes only for live concerts. 

I recalled trying to record with my now ancient PowerBook during a live show and having the software unexpectedly quit on me a couple of times. Wow, the whole idea of carrying my recording studio in my briefcase sure was attractive, but like most who live on the bleeding edge of technology, I was always trying things before they were really ready for prime-time.

Well, times have changed. The MacBook Pro I travel with now is light years away in power from that old PowerBook. I can honestly say it has never unexpectedly quit on me once during a recording or live show. Still one only has to have the fear put in them a few times before they are afraid to try it again. This was a few years ago, I was still not quite ready to believe a laptop was a good replacement for an effects board of stomp boxes. I wanted to be proved wrong in the worst way 'cause I love my toys, but I was just not convinced. 

I went to a Summer NAMM Show a few years ago determined to spend a lot of time with the guys from Native Instruments and get some hands-on experience with Guitar Rig. They were demoing the software with the same PowerBook I had, using the Rig Kontrol as the audio interface, running the audio out into powered speakers. They had a regular guitar there to use for the demo, certainly nothing as spectacular in tonal choices and modern Robot technology like Dark Fire, just a regular guitar I could use to try my hand at Guitar Rig. I was determined to break it (the software, not the guitar!) They indulged my "yeah but what if" questions for over an hour as I stood there purposely stomping through patch after patch as fast as I could in the middle of my noodling solos as I tried to make Guitar Rig freeze up and crash their laptop.

I couldn't do it. It wouldn't crash on me. I had to eat a big steaming plate of crow. Guitar Rig was indeed stable enough to use for live performance, and you didn't even need a honking bigger than normal system to use it. Maybe my PowerBook needed a good old fashioned new OS installation, because it wasn't as stable as theirs was for some reason. Maybe its the fact that I can't leave well enough alone with technology and tend to open the hood and tinker. Maybe they had done some secret hidden tweaks, I surmised! I was certain they must have done something to trick this thing into running so well. They didn't. This was some solid programming, sound design and the interface was a no-brainer, no-manual-needed-experience right out of the box.

OK, but what would it do at home, away from the experts when they weren't there. Yeah, that's the ticket. I need to get this thing in my studio, with massive amounts of tracks running on my recording system and see what it does. I got ahold of the guys from the NAMM Show and they sent me a loaner unit, which was back then the latest release of Guitar Rig 2, not the newer GR3 that ships with Dark Fire. Guitar Rig 3, which I use now, has even more bells and whistles and has been extraordinarily stable on my computer systems, both my MacBook Pro 2.4 and my Mac Pro. I've run it in Windows XP using Boot Camp on my Mac Pro, same wonderful results.

Guitar Rig as absolutely amazing. By contrast, I have performed with and recorded just about every imaginable combination of guitar amplifiers known to man, from 5 watt one-knob combo tube amps cranked up on a four-twelve cab, to Twins, Deluxes, Marshall Plexi heads on giant stacks, even a genuine boutique monster like the legendary Bogners and a "Trackwreck." I have used just about every pedal ever to grace a beer-soaked frat house stage or posh Nashville studio, from time-honored little green boxes to hand made, point-to-point wired boutique custom pedals, to nifty modeling products like the Line 6 Pod line, the works. All this in search of the perfect guitar tone when playing and recording.

Guitar Rig delivers tone. Four simple words. Every single combination of it you can think of, with unlimited ways you can mix and match meticulously modeled classic amps, effects, signal processors, cabinets, even microphones giving you a universe of ways you can custom configure every dream combination you can imagine, and you can make them perform for you in stereo to boot, which makes for some astounding sonic choices when you're mixing and producing music, not to mention sending sound out to your house PA or a pair of amps on stage. 

I brought my old friend Bob Welch, the 70's platinum solo artist formerly from Fleetwood Mac, over to my house to perform on Second Life with me for the grand opening of the Gibson Island there. (Read my other blog, The Lawson Letter, for all things Second Life for musicians). He got there hours early to allow us to setup and run through the system to test for the show having never done one of those virtual concerts before. Like a kid with a shiny new fire truck to show off after Christmas, I had to start showing off my toys. Bob records amazing stuff at home. I mean this guy has some chops you won't believe, and he's been faithfully recording using the Line 6 system. He'd never seen Guitar Rig fired up on a Mac Pro Quad 2.66GHz system with 5GB of RAM, played back through a pair of Mackie HR824 monitors. Like me, he was skeptical. What old-schooler wouldn't be? I loaded it up as a stand-alone application, patched up my white Les Paul Custom, and handed it to him. Here's a guy who's recorded multi-platinum selling albums and had mega hits, who had worked in the finest studios in the country, checking out this software and dropping his jaw with every patch he pulled up. I felt like an evangelist with a new convert. Needless to say, he was impressed. He never thought you could make a computer sound like that. Neither did I. And neither will you. 

I'm gushing about Guitar Rig in this post for a couple of reasons. First, its just the best software on the market for guitar players, ever. Period. It sounds amazing. The price is perfect. The pre-sets are spectacular. You can tell right away that the guys who did the sound design work on this loved their jobs. The customization possible with it means if you can think it, you can do it. When Gibson's CEO said Dark Fire was coming with the full version of Guitar Rig, plus an audio recording device called the "RIP' that will let you use your Dark Fire live with Guitar Rig live or in the studio (just add your favorite Windows or Mac computer or laptop), I was blown away. I know this software like the back of my hand, and know that anyone who gets it is going to be impressed. Its worth the $300 it sells for (without the Rig Kontrol foot pedal). The new Dark Fire for the same price as the original Robot, and you're including Guitar Rig 3 and Ableton Live Lite? Really?

It was cool enough that this tricked-out new Dark Fire was selling for the same price as the original Robot, but throwing in a recording/live interface with a full version of Guitar Rig and Live Lite, all at the same price? Wow! Seriously. That's a honking good deal. This has to be the single-most versatile guitar any manufacturer has ever offered, but when you consider the hardware and software its selling with for the same price, this makes this the best value for a Gibson Les Paul ever offered. I mean, its not some stripped down Les Paul, either. Its a beautiful flame-top with a sexy dark red stain, black binding, futuristic-looking pickup covers give the appearance of carbon fiber, a "flower-pot" inlay on the headstock and inlayed logo, and more. Read the spec. You'll be impressed for the guitar build alone, plus the array of sounds that will come from it without ever plugging it into Guitar Rig. 

This is NOT a modeling guitar. You want modeling? Plug into Guitar Rig. You want good-old-fashioned guitar tone straight from a time-honored legend like a Les Paul, the will also sound like just about any other guitar you can think of right out of the box, you get it in the Dark Fire guitar all by itself. That's what really amazed me about this whole package. Its a turn key solution for analog and digital. Wow!

I mean, the fact that the Robot II has almost unlimited tone choices all by itself between the acoustic pickup built into it, the coil tapping for the humbucking pickup, the humbucker itself, plus the P90H and the myriad of tones you can make it with, coupled with the next generation of Robot technology allowing automatic uber-fast tuning and open tunings, that new version of the Robot guitar itself selling for the same price is mind-blowing, but to throw into the mix for the same price the recording device (the RIP), plus over $400 worth of free software, makes this perhaps the best value Gibson has ever offered.

Am I saying this because I work for them? Nope. I want one. I am a player. I am a Gibson fan, and now, I've found something else for which I have no choice but become an evangelist for, because the combination of the next generation Robot technology, the pickups, the RIP, the software all combined for under $3500.00 is simply heavenly for any serious guitar tone seeker. 

I thought I'd open up the blog with my thoughts on the whole idea of using a guitar modeling software in a live concert setting, tell you how I was converted into a believer in the idea, and why I think this new Dark Fire is HOT!

Tune in again, I plan to get into some details about using Live and Guitar Rig.