Reminiscing back to the days before Silvertone guitars were made with the impulsive Wal-Mart shopper in mind, Audiowarrior releases Studio Silvertone Electric Guitar Plugin. For the plugin, Audiowarrior used a 1963 Hornet bodied Silvertone guitar with lipstick pickups (Model 1457) and the "Amp in Case," a guitar amp with four Silvertone tubes built into the included hardshell case.

The Silvertone Hornet body is very similar in style to the Fender Jaguar. Thus, if you're using the plugin, you can perform wah leads, surf-guitar, spy-guitar, and dive bombs with your MIDI controller. We've never heard anyone use the term "spy-guitar" before, but we have a man on it, trying to find out as much information about spy-guitar as possible without getting caught.

Of course if you're not exclusively looking for spy-guitar, Audiowarrior's patent pending iStrum MIDI strumming patterns are fully usable. Twenty dedicated patterns can be combined for about 1,700 chord combinations. If you prefer manual transmission, Audio Warrior throws in a nylon pick which you can use to actually strum a non-weighted keyboard key. It sounds like somewhat of an awkward setup for manual strum entry, but then again, I don't know how to drive stick either.

Fast features in iStrum:

• 85 G-Mapped chords for use with iStrum MIDI patterns
• Defaults to 79 BPM strumming. Increase/decrease BPM as needed
• iStrum MIDI patterns are four bars each
• +/- the BPM without changing pitch
• Available as a Mac/PC Plugin/Standalone
• iStrum MIDI patterns work with all "G-Mapped" chords including the AW Acoustic Dreadnought Strummer and the AW Acoustic 12 String
• Chromatic patches