Looking at the demos, I see the instrument type changing often as well as the up/down stroke. I haven't dug into the plugin, but I wonder if the plugin handles "figuring out" different things you would play on MIDI would result in up/down stroke and instrument changes to achieve an effect - or if this has to be manually edited/added after you recorded the basic track.

If the VST is handling all that switching - then that's good. If not, then there may be a lot of editing necessary to achieve the results as on some of the demos.

The amp simulator from Peavey (ReValver) is quite a piece of work in a good way. The only ding I would give it is the gig mode saves only 8 presets - so you can switch between 8 different sounds using a MIDI controller (footpedal). Ignoring available footpedals and method of switching from one preset to another - 8 presets seems slim if you have a gig with lots of tones to cover - although you could squeeze a night into 8 different tones - with the depth of this plugin - you leave a lot of variety "on the table".

But having an amp/cabinet/effect/guitar modeler that not only lets you choose presets and tweak parameters - but also lets you change the schematics inside of the modeled amp -- that's pretty nice. It turns into the problem of too many choices if you really elect to get into that plugin.

For your second question - about using with the ReValver plugin - it looks like the plugin can "profile" your guitar (even the simulated guitar out of Montage) which allows it to morph the guitar sound on input to emulate different guitars on output. This may be one way to "refactor" the guitar sound out of Montage. They call it "Audio Cloning Technology". I guess the downside here is that the profiles to change to a different guitar are at cost in a store of guitars (and other string instruments). Not sure if this plugin itself will get you there - but there's lots of noodling available in terms of settings.

Hi Jason, thanks for the reply. The Prominy V-Metal is a (massive) collection of DRY guitar samples and what appears to be every possible note and articulation that a guitar player can express on the instrument. And then it's used as a source to feed through an amp plugin.
As for playing style, from what I can see it has the smarts to humanise the performance applying the articulations and nuances dynamically. (combined with your own user controlled events you can map to various keys, such as chord types, pinch harmonics, palm muting etc)
I've listened to other sources, such as a competitor "Shreddage 2" (which is half the price) being fed through the same amps and the result is not even close.
So with the risk of sounding like an advertisement for Prominy, it's a friggen amazing source.

Using a Montage guitar as a source, combined with the right amps, maybe I could achieve a reasonably convincing metal guitar, but I would be missing out on all the humanising stuff that Prominy has to offer to make it sound like a real guitarist is playing it and not a keyboardist.

So I've answered my own question, and can use the Montage for 99% of my instrument needs, and the Prominy and whatever amp plugins for the other 1%, being the guitar.

Cheers
Daniel