Guitar Rig?

A lot of time has been put into these, and famous tones such as those of Satriani, Van Halen, Rammstein, ZZ Top, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC are all on hand. Joining the pre-existing 15 amps are the Van 51, which is clearly aPeavey 5150 emulation, and Hot Solo +, which appears to be a Soldano imitation, judging by the logo - the knob style and labels hint at Soldano's Hot Rod 50 model.

Surprisingly, there's little difference in tone when switching between the rhythm and lead channel of the Van 51 once both pre-gain knobs are set to give similar drive. This is quite unlike both the real hardware and Peavey's official 5150 emulation in their ReValver software.

Shoot-out!

Speaking of which, we took the opportunity to compare the 5150 emulations of Guitar Rig 5 Pro and Peavey's ReValver. By running the same drop-tuned, DI'ed guitar parts through both pieces of software, there was no doubt that the Peavey version could achieve tighter note definition and greater clarity out of the box - GR5 was slightly muddy in comparison.

Room for one more

Guitar Rig Pro 4 introduced Control Room, an eight-channel array of virtual cabs/mics that you could mix to create custom tones.

The mic selection was fixed, but expanding upon the concept is Control Room Pro, where you can choose cab, mic and mic position per channel, fade in a room mic and flip the phase, which can be a powerful tone-altering trick.

You can balance these eight (often vastly differing) sounds as you see fit via the module's mixer pane, with pan, level, solo and mute controls.

However, this was quickly cured by inserting Guitar Rig's Skreamer overdrive unit before the amp. This is an emulation of the Ibanez Tube Screamer, which is often used in the real world to tighten the bottom end up in the same way.

GR5 has one up on most amp sims due to its Control Room Pro cab/mic system, which can be most useful in teasing just the right response from those palm-muted chugs.

In terms of its amp tones in general, Guitar Rig 5 Pro sounds very good, but it does fall slightly short when it comes to absolute authenticity, responsiveness and real-deal feel you'd get from a great valve amp/cab, which some other products pull off better.