How to emulate whammy bar (tremolo bar) techniques in a DAW?

I pride myself on being able to sequence guitar like synth solos, and doing "fake whammys" is something I like doing. Whammy Bars basically just lower the pitch of your guitar. You can go up in pitch as well but going down in pitch is generally what its used for since you can go so much further down than up - About 12 semi-tones down is about right. In my experience, I prefer using the Pitch Bend Wheel - You CAN use legato (thats what I use for "hand bends) but Pitch bending allows for so much more control over what you're doing. Plus, if you're careful, you can use LFO on the pitch while you're using the Pitch Bend to create descending vibrato, which is quite cool if done properly. If its not fast enough vibrato tho, you just end up fucking up your nice downward pitch bend so you gotta be careful. But yeah, the thing is, a LOT of people use harmonics when doing whammy dive bombs (going down about 7 semitones or more) cause it sounds cool... I have a synth with a formant shifting dial (In the Malstrom Graintable Synthesis Synthesizer in Reason) which emulates those harmonics. Sometimes I'll change the oscillator volume balances to help create a more interesting sound (with distortion, you can get weird effects from any sort of timbre changes).

Honestly? My biggest piece of advice to you is practice practice practice. I don't know of any VSTs that produce that magic sound you're looking for but I know you can do it if you just work at it.

I'd also suggest you try transcribing some guitar parts that use a lot of whammy stuff - slow it down, get those little details so you can figure out how to sequence it realistically.

I did this some time ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoGiyzPYbvs - Its an 8-bit version of Eruption - I think its fairly accurate altho I did mess up the tapping section a tad with the amount of triplets compared to the original, but there are LOADS of whammy tricks in here I was able to recreate using the methods I mentioned earlier in the post. Hit me up if you want some more detailed info on it, maybe I could show you what i'm talking about since words only take you so far