PERFECT VIRTUAL GUITAR!

Need a great guitar sound, but lacking any guitar-playing contacts, or the skills to play it yourself? Have no fear, your computer is here! With a few pointers, buying advice and hands-on tips, you and your PC or Mac can emulate the greatest guitarists in the world…

We don’t know about you, but one of the reasons – okay, the reason – we took up using a computer to help us make music, was simply because we were more geeky than musically able. We were (and still are) more suited to click a mouse than pluck a string, and better at pressing Command+R than playing notes in time. Put simply, where we lack all the skills to make music, we don’t mind throwing some cash at RAM and processors to do the heavy lifting. We are musical and capable of creating music, of course we are. We’re just not very good at physically moving bows, hitting strings in the right place or doing anything in time. And nothing confirms that more to us than when we pick up a guitar and try and play it.

It’s not that we haven’t tried, of course. The guitar was right up as our target instrument at one time – the sex appeal of a guitarist always somehow outweighing that of a computer user. But try as we might, we could never better the instrument; actually never master more than a couple of chords, if we’re honest. From then on it was keyboards and mice (mouses?) all the way.

And with computers, of course, we did not need to be – or even know – a guitarist. That was the big promise, anyway. The computer was supposed to do it all for us. Only that didn’t turn out as planned at first. Up until recent years, computers have tried, and largely failed, to emulate the sound of the guitar. But now, things have changed…

In 2024, there are a huge number of options to emulate the sound of the guitar, and many will have our fingertips thanking us, after all – it really is possible to sound like you can play like a guitar god, without physically strumming a chord or picking a melody.

Come with us, then, as we explore the various hi-tech ways to get a great guitar sound, without the need to be a great guitarist (or to own a great guitar). It’s axe appeal, without the hassle. Let’s rock, and roll that mouse.