Virtual Guitarist (affectionately known as ‘VG’) was introduced by UJAM ten years ago with a focused goal: help producers and songwriters access believable, musical guitar performances without disrupting creative flow. As home studios became more capable but budgets grew ever-tighter, Virtual Guitarist offered an alternative to traditional recording setups that made music-making a vastly more accessible venture for everyone.

vg anniversary history

The earliest days of VG stretch even farther back, though. Back in September 2001, Peter Gorges met Paul Kellett at Steinberg HQ to observe a demo of a software prototype Kellett had been working on at Swedish musician/inventor Sven Bornemark’s behest. Inspired by sample CDs preloaded with time-flexible drum samples, Kellett was trying to build a guitar equivalent. Peter’s company Wizoo was tasked with  the plug-ins user interface and backend development, and so officially began the long and winding road that’s brought us here today.

Having been involved in Virtual Guitarists history from day 1 to today, Peter reflects: “It still strikes me with how much enthusiasm and backlash at the same time Virtual Guitarist was received when we launched it with Steinberg in 2002, and how that has changed to gratitude and appreciation as people understood it’s not threatening guitarists, it’s elevating people who don’t have access to one. And with its musical and technical evolution, it’s even become a writing tool and time saver for those very guitarists today. I take pride in that”.

Virtual Guitarist was conceived with performance and players in mind. Initially based around phrase-centric composition, the timing, dynamics, articulation, and humanity that inherently accompany real-world playing were treated as core elements of the plugin’s conception. Its original strumming patterns and rhythmic structures were created to sit naturally in a mix, encouraging songwriting and song development in the studio.

Over the past ten years, as music production has gotten faster and further removed from the traditional recording environment, Virtual Guitarist evolved in parallel. VG quickly established itself as an excellent tool to support the creative process, as users would often remark that the plugin had helped accelerate their song sketching and arrangement processes. That same sort of user feedback has played a key role in influencing the development of the plugin, leading to innovations like the new Instrument Mode, which breaks entirely from the pattern-based form and lets users play custom lines note by note.

Now a decade into the journey, Virtual Guitarist still aims to provide users with the same intuitive, creatively fulfilling experience it always has. Even after ten years, with even more iterations in the works, the VG sound library still has so much more growing left to do.

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