Like every guitar player on the planet, I'm a tone hog. I like my signal path the same way I like my whiskey: straight, no chaser. Just a guitar, a wire, and a seriously beat-up tube amp turned up loud.

So why am I writing about software? Because I'm also a realist. Achieving that magic tone is never easy, and sometimes you need to dial up something pronto, whether onstage or in the studio. Enter Guitar Rig 2.

The Big Picture

Native Instruments (NI) struck gold with the first installment of the Guitar Rig software a few years back. The flexibility, ease of use, and sheer power won over legions of fans and charmed not a few reviewers. With Guitar Rig 2 (see Figure 1) the company has upped the ante by redesigning the Rig Kontrol foot controller.

What's the big news? How about a two-channel USB 2.0 audio interface that supports extreme sample rates and bit depths? Plug your guitar in one end, connect the other to the PA, fire up your laptop, and you have a serious arsenal of tones and tweaks at your fingertips. It's like lugging eight guitar and bass amps, 21 different cabinets, nine mics, rack after rack of effects, tape decks, looping tools, modulators, and even a couple of rotating organ speakers up and down the club stairs every night.

At least that's what the ads say. My job is to dig out the truth. So read on.

Figure 1. The Guitar Rig 2 software works as a stand-alone app or a plugin. It includes physical models of amps and effects, as well as recording tools. (Click to enlarge.)

The Waiting Game

I was stoked to receive the box from NI at the tail end of 2005. I tore it open, speed-read the instructions while the installer did its thing, and reached for my trusty Strat. Uh-oh: an installation screen informed me I had to complete an online registration process before I could check for any updates. No worries: I went to the website ... and found I needed to create an account with yet another password to remember. I finally downloaded the latest driver for the Rig Kontrol 2 (I always check the Web for updates before I fire up any new software) and settled in for a long afternoon of guitar fun.

Or so I thought. Playback through the Rig Kontrol 2 had so many crackles and pops that it hurt to listen to. I tried changing buffer settings, sample rates, you name it. According the Guitar Rig users' forum, I wasn't the only one experiencing these problems.

Finally, on January 20, NI posted new drivers and a software update so I could get down to work at last. Needless to say, I wasn't in a pleasant mood.

During the three weeks it took to get up and running, I had a lot of time to peruse the user forums. Granted, people are more likely to post complaints than praise, but from the looks of it, my experience is fairly typical. Furthermore, the initial tech support I got was not helpful; it took several rounds of email to learn that working drivers were on the way.

That's not cool, and anything good I say about the product—and there is a lot to like—is colored by the frustrations of simply getting it to work.

[Ed. Note: Native Instruments' Tobias Thon responds, "Guitar Rig 2 was released on November 30th in the US, and on December 20th in the rest of the world. The audio artifacts in question, unfortunate as they were, were not at all omnipresent but limited to a fraction of the Mac users. The first driver update that addressed this issue was released on December 21st, three weeks after the US launch and only one day after the worldwide launch. Considering how long it takes to develop and test a new driver version, this was a pretty fast reaction time. Unfortunately, it didn't totally eradicate the problem completely so a second driver update was released on January 19th that addressed the problem for good." Thon called the incident "quite unfortunate, and not up to the usual standard of our product releases in terms of reliability." He was also concerned about the tech support Mark received; Mark stands by his version.]

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