Guitar Rig 7 Pro: Product manager answers your questions

Discover Guitar Rig 7 Pro and find answers to the questions from our community. 

Meet Guitar Rig 7 Pro

We’re thrilled to announce that Guitar Rig 7 Pro has landed! Now with new additions of amps and pedals powered by machine learning technology (Intelligent Circuit Modeling, also known as ICM), lo-fi components, and the new Loop Machine Pro, Guitar Rig 7 Pro has everything you need to jam and experiment. See more details here.

Your questions, answered

Joining us for the launch of Guitar Rig 7 Pro is Tobias Fricke, the Lead Product Manager and mastermind behind Guitar Rig 7 Pro. We know you’re curious about the latest happenings in the Guitar Rig world, and Tobias is here to address burning questions and feedback that have been posted in our community over the past year. The questions have been reformulated from the original post, which you can access by clicking on the link provided at the end of each question.

Let’s jump right in.

Will there be any acoustic amps added to the line up in the future? The ability to have some type of IR loader would be cool. Team Green

While we didn’t include a dedicated acoustic amp with version 7, we did include an IR loader. This makes Guitar Rig much more versatile and even gives you nice options for acoustic guitars since you can always just use the IR without an amp.

When a component is collapsed you have no idea what's going on. There should be a way to save space but still have insight in what's going on? Wouter De Muynck

Thanks Wouter! We built in the new side bar with Guitar Rig 7 Pro which should solve for this problem and make navigation much much easier.

What is the usage NI is targeting for Guitar Rig? If NI focuses on the use in the studio, Guitar Rig 6 is configured correctly. For use on stage, Guitar Rig 6 has thrown all the good features of the previous versions overboard. Can we expect Guitar Rig to get things that are needed for live use? Gandi

Hey Gandi! Some of the Live features in Guitar Rig 5 were deeply connected to the Rig Kontrol hardware integration. As that hardware was discontinued many years ago, we decided to remove this part when launching Guitar Rig 6. Your question about intended usage is thoughtful, and for us, we decided to focus most on in-studio and jamming/rehearsing use cases.

That said, with some workarounds, some users still use Guitar Rig live on stage with great success. And we see value in supporting that because the creative possibilities and inspiration you get from Guitar Rig are outstanding in the market.

To summarize, yes, we hear you and have many ideas about this ourselves. If there comes a point where we feel ready to expand use cases again, live features are of interest to us, too. However, we don't want to make any promises on future features or timelines.

The new Amp 'Fire Seeker' shares a lot of the aesthetic with the existing 'Fire Breather' model, but it sounds and reacts quite differently. Is it a worked over reboot of Fire Breather? SjD

Yes, well noticed, Fire Seeker is a sonic companion to the Fire Breather, adding a new flavor. They share some components, but we put in a creative spin to get to a different sound which we found quite exciting.

The looper is missing under Guitar Rig 6. It was promised as a component of Guitar Rig 6 but has not yet been implemented? Gandi

We apologize that an error on our website when Guitar Rig 6 was launched gave the impression the looper would return for certain – there was a wrongly set checkmark in the version comparison chart. (We fixed it as soon as we realized, but we understand the confusion.) We really did hope to get a new version of the looper in as a potential v6 update, but the timing did not work out with our development cycles. On the bright side, the delay was caused by us being extra-ambitious – rather than just bringing the old looper back in, version 7 now has a drastically improved new looper that should solve for far more use cases than what we had before.

I love the visual of Guitar Rig 6, I really do, but it would be better to get a better sound quality in ten years rather than a visual quality. In my opinion, Guitar Rig 6 is just a stylish GUI. There's no live performance mode, nor guitar IR loader. There are also no new ICM amps getting added to Guitar Rig 6 until January 2023. I remember it was said new amp models will be coming in updates? iKalamaZoo

Thanks for sharing your frustration, iKalamaZoo. We’ll touch on a few items here, along with some general comments.

For Guitar Rig 6, we were excited to deliver free updates like Doppel-Filter, Supercharger, Supercharger GT, Replika GR, Replika Shimmer and Driver. In terms of ICM components, we also released Red Fuzz and Fire Seeker. We can understand you wishing for more, and we wished we could have offered more, too.

To share some background on why this happened, this type of feature became more challenging for us during the pandemic. To begin with, lockdown introduced logistical limitations on how we could do our typical modeling and measuring of physical amps. We simply couldn’t do all the prep work we need to do for new amps. Beyond that, it’s worth mentioning that ICM is deeply technical and specialized, which means it takes time and care to get just right. (We’re excited to be back on track now with Guitar Rig 7 Pro, where we have 4 new ICM amps and 5 new ICM effects.)

Another barrier to delivering more updates for Guitar Rig 6 was the work our Engineering teams needed to do for the Apple Silicon release. This work is so important from a compatibility perspective, but often very time-consuming – and these updates took longer than any of us anticipated. We recognize it is frustrating when that type of necessary work holds us back from delivering features that offer more delight and excitement. Thanks again to everyone for your patience on that.

When it comes to some of the other changes in Guitar Rig, we believe it's always within a customer's right to disagree with our decisions. While we hope we can please all our customers, we also know this is not always possible. Music software development is sometimes a little bit like making music itself. Some people love your tunes, some people don’t, and some people prefer the older tunes, even though you're working hard on your new material. 

Our hope is Guitar Rig 7 Pro is a chance to re-set  for you, and that you might be inspired with some of our new improvements, like the new looper, the cabinet impulse response loader, new ICM amps and pedals, as well as new effects and the new sidebar with the signal flow and the context help. And not to forget the more than 200 new presets. Our sound design team has done an incredible job there! Thanks again for being open and honest with your feedback.

Integration with Maschine software and making Maschine+ finally support Guitar Rig would make NI enter the Looper market and bands with backing tracks. I really would love this, having Maschine+ on a stand besides me. Wilmar Boer

Some of these ideas certainly fall in the category of “I wish the days had more hours”. :)

In Guitar Rig, heads, cabs and distortion pedals are all dual mono capable. This is very convenient for dual mono double-tracked DI guitars on a stereo track, but the problem are compressors. Many of them are not dual mono capable. It would be very nice to have also all compressors dual mono. They all affect dynamics. bFooz

Thanks for this valuable feedback. You are right the only workaround is the Splitter and that’s not ideal. Added to the wish list.

Just wanted to to say Thank You to the NI Guitar Rig Team and express appreciation for the work everyone has put in. Really glad for the updates such as the improved standalone/plug-in open times for those who have an integrated graphics card like myself. And very much appreciate the Tapedeck auto-names file fix. The auto-naming of newly recorded files is a time-saver indeed and keeps things in the moment. Mikey T

Thanks Mikey, that’s nice feedback. While we certainly listen to our customers, we wish the day had some extra hours to make everything happen. Looking at our backlog there are so many things we are hopeful we can get to. Between our community and our internal teams, we certainly don't lack ideas.

A big thank you to Tobias for sharing your thoughts, and our incredible community for posting all the thought-provoking questions. We hope that this interview provides more insight into Guitar Rig's direction and a sneak peek behind the scenes of our work. We'll keep this post open until September 11th, 2023!