What are the most realistic guitar sounds available ?

[chrisredmayne]

So I tried recording guitar straight into my Mac with a rocksmith guitar cable and it just sounds too quiet and muffled. Maybe it's just my playing I'm not the best guitarist! Bit I have been using the convert audio to midi feature which is really good, works excellent converting a few chords and then changing the instrument to a grand piano. But I really would like to have a track that sticks with the guitar sound, big every guitar instrument I choose just sounds really fake. Any ones people would recommend? Maybe they just need some effects added to them afterwards to make them sound more authentic?

Thanks

[TLW]

The only truly realistic guitar sounds come from a guitar.

It is quite possible to record guitar into a Mac (or PC). As I understand it the Rocksmith cable is a cheap USB interface intended for use with video games. Which means it’s probably not a very good audio interface, especially if not connected to the right game, which may be applying all kinds of processing to the sound.

Dull and muffled guitar can be caused by all kinds of things, but first of all try putting a software amplifier emulator on the guitar’s audio track in Live and see if that makes a difference. Or use eq to adjust its tone and utility to adjust the gain and see if that helps.

[jestermgee]

Guitar VSTs I use for Acoustic guitar stuff (and i'm not real good at playing or programming) are MusicLabs RealGuitar (there are a few different models but always sound good to me) and a few samples guitar patches in Omnisphere really sound good. Here's one I created last year that uses RealGuitar, the acoustic model, with my basic skills.

https://soundcloud.com/jestermgee/major-8-ez

[gbert]

If you have a real electric guitar available then using a software amp/cab plugin will sound best. You’ll also need the an instrument (“Hi-Z”) jack to connect the guitar to on your audio interface. If your interface doesn’t have one then you can get a DI box to connect with. For the software plugin, I recommend Scuffham S-Gear as one that covers most of the bases and sounds fantastic.