Pettinhouse Funky Guitar 2.0 out - we have a winner

[David Polich]

Just picked up Pettinhouse Funky Guitar 2.0. A huge improvement over his original
Funky Guitar. For those of you looking for a guitar VI for funk, soul, and disco, this is it.

I gotta hand it to Andrea Pettinhouse, this dude works tirelessly to improve his products,
which are almost all guitars that you play from a keyboard. Funky Guitar 2.0 has a built-in
strummer with over a hundred patterns that sync to tempo, and you can edit any of them as
you wish and save as your own. Chord types are changed by pressing keys in the lower octave
of your keyboard, and you can change to single notes or noises with keyswitch presses as
well. The keyswitches are mapped very intuitively and I was up and funking in no time.

You can turn the strummer off, of course, and play your own pattern in real time. The best part of Funky Guitar 2.0 for me is that finally, there are muted noises so doing the Curtis Mayfield "waka-waka" thing is easy. You'd think this would be a feature included in Scarbee's
Funk Guitarist or Rob Papen's RG, but it isn't. Both of those VI's have gone into retirement on
my hard drive now.

Funky Guitar 2.0 includes built-in amp and effects emulations, and they're pretty good. I prefer to run it through Amplitube Fender or Scuffham, that's a really great combination.
I promise you'll get asked "who played guitar on this track".

More info here:
http://www.pettinhouse.com

[jloeb]

Not to take anything away from Andrea's funk guit which indeed sounds great and looks easy to use, but in fairness, Scarbee's NI joint definitely does have mute noises and is wakka-ble.

[David Polich]

Not to take anything away from Andrea's funk guit which indeed sounds great and looks easy to use, but in fairness, Scarbee's NI joint definitely does have mute noises and is wakka-ble.

Then I must have missed that somehow, and I have Scarbee's Funk Guitar.
Although, even if the noises are in there, Scarbee's Funk Guitar's setup
and implementation is so counter-intuitive to me that I gave up on using
it.

[mhschmieder]

Wasn't impressed by the demos, in terms of something I could use on final production, so I'm just debating whether it would be a time-saver during mock-ups or be too annoying. While I respect Andrea -- and he got many things right with this library -- he made one fatal error, which is to have the patterns repeat the same way.

If you watch some tutorial videos with Nile Rodgers, you'll see that each strum changes up the chord voicing ever so subtly. Not to mention inexact replication of the rhythm. It sounds too machine-gunny to me in the audio demos.

[David Polich]

The first thing I did when I called up Funky Guitar 2.0 was to turn off the strummer. It's just way easier for me to play in what I hear in my head, as opposed to hunting through over a hundred patterns to come up with what I'm hearing. This is the same reason I never use MIDI
grooves in drum VI's. They're always "close" but as I started out on drums, I prefer to play
what I hear in my head.

There are controls in the FG 2.0 GUI that allow you to customize velocity>articulations, at
what point palm mutes engage, chord decay, etc.