bighud

Guitar Rig sounds good. If you can't make it sound good then the problem lies in how you have it adjusted and/or your playing in general. I do prefer a great amp over guitar rig anyday though!

Yeah I love that stuff. It's all fun and games for me until the modal mixture and the non-harmonic tones(that actually create different harmonies) get thrown in crazy places. Once in Theory III we had to write a 10 page paper on a one page long excerpt of a Wagner piece. Never been so stretched for ideas before, but it all worked out.

I second Ethan. Music theory is not some strange distant science but rather a pattern of musical trends and ways in which different pitches and different chords interact.

My amp does not hum when running on clean power. My old keyboard player would plug in on the same circuit I was running on and then all of a sudden I had a vacuum cleaner sound in my amp. Clean power, proper settings, and good engineering eliminates the hum. Single coil pickups have a tendency to amplify the 60 cycle noise coming from florescent lights or general electric hum, that's why they are noisy. Their poles are not balanced(like a humbucker) therefore prone to some noise.