Sharing Presets in Guitar Rig 4

November 4, 2009 in Tutorials by David John

One of the most exciting aspects of Guitar Rig 4 (Review Link) is the ability to share presets with other guitarists. Better still the presets can be shared regardless if they were created on the Windows version or on a Mac.

I decided I would try to recreate the guitar sound for one my favourite (live) Pearl Jam songs. I am no expert in replicating guitar sounds but I knew in my head what I wanted to create and decided to give it a go.

Getting Started

The good news you don’t have to start from scratch. Take one of the presets that comes with Guitar Rig as a starter and click the “Save As” option on the bottom left of the screen. Give your preset an appropriate name, I called with one ‘Yellow Led’.

GR4

As you can see the components of the current guitar preset appear in the rack. You can easily delete effects or click the “Components” button on the top right of the screen to add one of the amazing effects shipped with the software.

I was trying to replicate a live version of Yellow Ledbetter and am using a Charvel with the neck humbucker selected. I spent an hour tweaking the chorus, delay and amp settings to get it as close to the sound as my ear could hear.

The song is played with a range of distortion levels. If you think there is too much grit in the preset you can adjust the level of gain in the Tube Compressor (this was the one area I tweaked the most).

Please don’t send me emails of complaint if it doesn’t sound like your version of the song but think of it as another slightly blues rock preset.

Exporting

Once happy with the preset I clicked save to make the final changes. I can obviously go back and tweak these settings at a later date. The preset file is now saved in the Guitar Rig folder within my documents folder.

Importing

Importing presets into Guitar Rig is a simple four click process. Click File and then ‘Import’ click on the .KSD file and then ‘ok’. I was going to add a screenshot of the File menu but as the process is so simple it looked a little patronising. Now a ‘Yellow Led’ preset should now be available in your Guitar Rig 4 Preset list.

Again this file is supplied for the purpose of the tutorial, apologies if it doesn’t transform your guitar sound to that of Mike McCready. Please note the file is contained in a zip archive.