Native Instruments Rammfire Review

Native Instruments Rammfire
Guitar Amplifier & Cabinet Emulator Plug-in

Is a €49 add-on for a plug-in that already costs €179 worth your money?

Rammfire is a bolt-on for an existing software plug-in famous the world over, called Guitar Rig 4. If you’re not familiar with Guitar Rig, it’s a software emulation Mecca containing everything you need to make a good guitar sound — amplifiers, cabinets, effects, dynamics, etc. Guitar Rig’s components put rival companies’ effects and distortion plug-ins to shame and they weren’t even designed to be universal; they were designed for guitars.

We were surprised to see that, despite Guitar Rig having dozens of built-in amplifier and cabinet emulations, Rammfire wasn’t part of a free upgrade; it costs €49. Granted, it’s got a guy on the front who is legendary in the industrial metal scene, but what exactly does this product offer to justify the price? Is it a worthy addition; or is it the music-production equivalent of exploitative video-game DLC?

What Does It Do?

Rammfire is an emulation of the exact hardware combo used by a guy called Richard Z. Kruspe who is the lead guitarist of a band called Rammstein. Rammstein are a massive industrial metal band, German. Their most-watched YouTube video has 18,000,000+ views, and their tracks are laced with devil-lunged guitars.

The communication strategy of Native Instruments for Rammfire revolves around Kruspe being fed up with flaky software emulations of guitar rigs. He thinks they aren’t a patch on the real thing [he's right -- they aren't]. And so, NI state that Rammfire was developed under Kruspe’s watchful eye — an easy-to-use alternative to the expensive, bulky real thing.

Rammfire is also being pitched as the key to Kruspe’s sound in the palm of your hands.

On the NI website it says that Kruspe uses Rammfire to record demos at home and also to warm up for gigs, which is believable. The fact that NI aren’t trying to sell you some false promise of it being the same as the real thing is reassuring, and also suggests Rammfire must be pretty impressive off the bat for its developers to be so open about its limits.

Graphics

Native Instruments got the Rammfire graphics perfect. The faceplate looks like it was scratched by a velociraptor. It may be black and gothic in the spirit of Rammstein, but the calculated roughness will appeal to fans of any hard genre of music — drum ‘n’ bass, tech house, ragga; you know the drill.

Crash Test

Playing a guitar chord through Rammfire for the first time is like:

Accidentally putting your hand into a wood chipper and watching a tsunami of shredded skin, bone and blood explode out of the other end.
In science class; concocting a mixture of every available chemical inside a beaker, shakily holding a pipette of nitroglycerine over it at arms length; wincing in terror behind your protection goggles (due to a sneaking suspicion that when a drop falls into the beaker something bad may happen) and the entire world shattering through a nuclear explosion.
Saying, “What’s the worst that could happen?” crossing a road, getting caught in the wheel arch of a runaway juggernaut and careering off a cliff into a sea of raging, poisonous fire.

Rammfire is the real deal. It’s hard to think of a software plug-in more immediately gratifying. And despite the prescribed roughness, its overall sound is really warm and quasi-analogue. Playing one guitar chord through Rammfire creates an incredibly rich, monstrous distortion with some interesting tones forming around the lower end never heard before on software emulations. It’s not very hard to explain … if you’re looking for the hardest, biggest guitar distortion available on a computer, the instant you use Rammfire you’ll know you’ve found it.

There are actually three other modes on Rammfire away from RZK mode which we’ve just covered; MODERN, VINTAGE or CLEAN, which allow you to lightly simmer audio in the fatty saturation of Rammfire without making flambé of your audio.

As far as the matched cabinet goes (visible on the bottom half of the image cresting this article), its virtual microphone proximity and DRY/AIR sliders help you to change the flavour of a sound; they represent a bonus roll of the dice in the mixing game when your first bets aren’t sticking.

An additional EQ in the top-right of the plug-in lets you try to take control of the overall sound, plus a PRESENCE knob allows you to shake the mix if things aren’t quite falling into place and somehow, someway, edge over the finish line.

Criticisms

Guitar Rig’s components are getting so good, that producers want to be able to access them without loading the entire Guitar Rig host. To process one individual sound using Rammfire as an effect on a synthesiser, for example, one has to waste a lot of processing grunt booting the entire program. It would be real slick to be able to load Guitar Rig’s best components (especially ones you pay extra for like Rammfire) directly onto your plug-in chain.

Ramm Boobs

The Beef

If you have a guitarist in your studio, and you want to produce something to bust holes in bunkers, you want Rammfire. Playing a chord through this device is the musical equivalent of hitting a beaker of nitroglycerine with a sledge hammer.

It’s kind of hard to get your head around the fact that you’re paying extra money for a component whose kind already exists in numbers within the plug-in you’ve just bought. But once you use Rammfire the reason becomes clear: Native Instruments is building Guitar Rig into a major, creative software-hub. And who are we to stand in its way when the results are this strong?

QUALITY: (9/10)