/guitar-rig-5

Guitar Rig 5 for Ableton Live

Guitar Rig 5 for Ableton Live

This is a collection of Ableton Live Audio Effect Racks wrapping Native Instruments Guitar Rig 5. Each Guitar Rig effect is contained in a single rack, with its default preset and eight macros already set up.

Installation

  • Download or clone the repository into your Live library, which is probably here: /Users/<you>/Library/Application Support/Ableton/Library/Presets/Audio Effects/Audio Effect Rack/
  • Let out a sigh of relief as I tell you the rest of this page is irrelevant, just open up Live and drag in some Guitar Rig effects.

Why?

All the Guitar Rig stuff is awesome, but ways away from being as easily accessible and browsable as Live's built-in or other non-containery audio plugins.

Having all Guitar Rig effects directly available in Live's browser will give you a whole new appreciation for all that's in there. Promise!

Macro Knobs

  • If top row controls on the effect are part of a larger group (e.g. Filterbank with its eight bands), the whole group will be left un-macro'd but available within the Guitar Rig instrument's parameters.
  • All of the instrument's exposed parameters that are not mapped to rack knobs are placed up front in the parameters, all clutter has been moved to the back.
  • No hard and fast rules to color and order, but for the most part controls will be laid out to most closely resemble the original effect GUI.
  • Macro knobs for secondary effect GUI knobs will be colored noticably darker/more mute.
  • Macro knobs for switches are colored slightly different from their siblings to note the ON/OFF mapping.

Default Preset

Each effect is set up using its default preset with the following exceptions:

  • Syncing is preferred, i.e. an effect allowing to tempo-sync delay times, or LFO rates, are included in synced mode, even if the default preset ran free.
  • Stereo is preferred, i.e. an effect supporting both mono and stereo use will be included in stereo, even if the default preset used mono.

What's missing?

  • Most of the non-guitar effects are already present, still missing are the following:
    • Amplifiers/
    • Distortion/
      • Fuzz
      • Gain Booster
      • MeZone
      • Skreamer
      • Sledge Hammer
      • TransAmp
      • Treble Booster
    • Pitch/Harmonic Synthesizer (how do you macro that shit up?)
  • Each rack only ever contains one single effect, so nothing from the Guitar Rig tools and modifier sections is used:
    • Modifier/
    • Tools/

Excessive rackage considered harmful

Please note: Each of these racks contains an instance of Guitar Rig 5. You can throw these in willy nilly, that's what I racked them up for. Just be aware that using Guitar Rig like this may waste CPU and memory if you line them up in sequence (effectively emulating what could be done in a single instance of Guitar Rig).

TL;DR Sometimes pulling up an empty Guitar Rig is just the thing to do.