Review: Virtual Guitarist “Iron” plugin

It’s time for another review!

I recently tried out the “Iron” virtual instrument from Virtual Guitarist, and I have to say, I’m pretty impressed!

The makers have sampled a tight sounding rock guitar playing lots of various notes, chords, styles and phrases, and created a nice, simple interface to make it very easy to use, either live or in the studio. It also has some very nice amp / speaker simulation settings, and some built-in effects, but you can also play it dry through your own effects if you prefer.

Two and a bit octaves are allocated to actually playing the samples, and it can either be chromatic, or you can choose a key which gives you some sus 4 alternative chords on accidentals, for example if you select the key of C, playing C# now gives you C sus4.

Another three octaves are used for selecting alternative phrases, 2 octaves of “common” phrases, from single note hits to multiple fast power chord hits. The other octave selects “style” phrases, whole bar & multi-bar phrases of varying complexity.

The style can also be chosen from a list including Grooved, Funk Rock, Big Accents, Modern Shred and many others. Put all this together, and you have all you need to create a great guitar track, without touching a tuner!

Overall, this plugin gets 5 stars from me – it’s easy to use, and sounds great! So great that I used it on “Lotto Blues”, the most recent release from Ka$h Nexu$!

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And don’t forget, Virtual Guitarist also have 3 other guitar VIs:

  • Silk – “concert guitar accompaniment virtuoso”
  • Amber – “boutique American vintage dreadnought and a legendary German vintage large diaphragm microphone”
  • Sparkle – “vintage guitar with a legendary bell-like single-coil sound”

Check them all out now!