G.UITAR vs OttavaBassa

G.UITAR – Your Retro Digital Guitar Companion G.UITAR brings the charm of 80s digital guitars straight to your smartphone, reimagined for modern creativity. Whether you're exploring new chord shapes or adding a vintage twist to your sound, G.UITAR offers an expressive, customizable experience for players and producers alike. Choose from six unique guitar sounds and switch effortlessly between pluck and tap modes to match your playing style. Mute individual strings for more percussive textures or open tunings—perfect for crafting original voicings. With built-in transpose and auto-tuning systems, switching keys or tunings takes just a tap. G.UITAR also includes a smart chord recognition engine to help you visualize and learn new shapes in real time—ideal for students, creators, or curious hands. Adjust the fretboard layout with dynamic scaling options to fit any screen or hand size, and select between 3, 4, or 5 frets for new chordal possibilities. Coming soon: MIDI out, theme customization, and AUv3 support—because your digital guitar should evolve with your music.

OttavaBassa has been designed for guitarists looking for a simple all-in-one plugin solution for making their guitar sound like a bass. This means you could use your standard guitar to play bass lines on recordings and during live performances. OttavaBassa is an “Octaver” effect that takes your incoming note and transposes it down by one octave putting your instrument into the range of a bass guitar. In addition to the octave-down effect itself, OttavaBassa also includes a simple EQ voiced for controlling the important low and high bass guitar frequencies, as well as built-in effects for drive, compression, stereo chorus and a simple speaker cab filter. “Ottava bassa” is a music theory direction that literally translates as “low octave” or “octave below”. It is commonly abbreviated as “8vb”, hence the icon. OttavaBassa is an AUv3 effects plugin that can run standalone, or in any AUv3 compatible host such as Logic Pro, GarageBand or AUM. OttavaBassa currently runs on iPadOS / iOS (iPad & iPhone) and macOS (Intel & Silicon) and is available as a Universal Purchase from the Apple App Store. If you’re planning on using OttavaBassa on Mac / desktop, please ensure that your favourite DAW / host supports AUv3 (not just AU). PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY! OttavaBassa has been designed specifically for use with guitar. This means that pitches below the low E string (82.4Hz) will not be handled well. Sorry bass players! OttavaBassa will perform at its best when it is given single notes played reasonably cleanly and accurately. It is not a monophonic pitch generator in the true sense, but multiple input notes (aka chords) might result in “warbles” in the processed signal. OttavaBassa uses a pitch detection method that will introduce audio latency, i.e. a delay between input and output. Please note this is not to be confused with audio interface latency, so you cannot “fix” this by changing buffer sizes or sample rates in your host app. Currently OttavaBassa has a latency of around 25ms. So whether OttavaBassa will work for you, depends largely on your playing style and whether you can live with the inherent latency. My personal perspective: I would never make a plugin I wouldn’t use myself. In fact I made OttavaBassa because I needed an Octaver for my own iPad-based live guitar setup, and I couldn’t quite find what I was looking for. I find that OttavaBassa sounds good to me, and feels responsive enough in the context of a live performance, adding bass lines to guitar loops for example. I wouldn’t do a gig without it! I thought hard about making OttavaBassa publicly available because I’ve seen many Octaver plugins get terrible reviews from folks who don’t really understand that the latency and tracking limitations can’t really be magicked away with clever coding! While I am aware of more sophisticated pitch shifting DSP advances that significantly reduce latency especially, I believe this comes at a CPU cost. So while OttavaBassa does use a less sophisticated pitch detection method than “state of the art”, this does mean it’s pretty light on CPU (i.e. around 6% running on an M1 iPad in AUM). And of course, just because it was designed for guitar, doesn’t mean OttavaBassa won’t work on other audio sources - it can sound pretty scary on vocals for example! Just be mindful of the limitations mentioned above regarding pitch range and tracking, e.g., maybe don’t put an entire mix through it and expect amazing results! Thanks for reading to the end :-) -Rob