Adjusting "offset" and "time stretching" for Virtual Guitar instruments (But also in general)

[El Duderino]

Hey there.


I'm trying to find or create a "fast riffing" or solo guitar where I can program and play extremely fast and tight notes and I'm exploring different options and ideas. I've tried several virtual guitars and tried to tweak them but as I'm fairly new to all this audio/sample editing stuff it can be overwhelming to know what to tweak and when.


What I'm trying to do is to make the guitar almost like a percussive instrument to create fast rhythmic burst of palm muted "chuggs", but sometimes what happens is that either the sound becomes too muddy and the transient "hits"/"chuggs" gets lost and blurred together. Perhaps this could be because of the tone of the DI or the Distortion of the Amp Sim and I need to adjust EQ to control, cut out or enhance some frequencies? And if so are there specific frequencies that I should pay specific attention to?


OR perhaps the samples have too much initial "space" before the actual transiten "chugg" and therefore are not played because they're canceled out by the triggering of the next sample? Especially if the instrument is played "monophonically",if that is the correct term? What I mean is that the instrument can only play one note at a time.

Perhaps I should play around with "offset" to cut into the samples so the transient chugg is played as soon as the sample is triggered, but also "time stretching" samples to make them tighter and snappier so they play through and finish before the next sample is triggered and to make them adjustable to fit into the "BPM" of the song? Sometimes I want a really fast and snappy chugg and sometime I want a more drawn out chugg that rings out. As I said before it might help to think of this as more of how you would program a monophonic drum kit where you want every hit and sound to play inside its designated midi note slot consequtively without overlap.


Would it make sense to play around with "global offset" and "time stretch" to do this without changing pitch, and could this create any obvious issues I should be aware of?


I guess I might run into problems if the samples in a library are not of the same length and the transient "attacks" are not aligned in all of the samples but perhaps this is usually the case and standard when creating libraries today? Is there any software where you might be able to load a lot of samples to compare, edit and adjust these kind of things if that would not be the case? Aligning transients ,trimming multiple samples at once? That sort of thing.


What would be the simplest and/or best way to go about this? I know there are time stretch features to do this in Kontakt, and probably offset as well but are there alternatives that might be better suited for this specific purpose? Would Kontakt be the best option to attempt to create my own virtual guitar if I'm slightly familiar with it but not a lot of other sampling software tools made for virtual instrument making? Is Kontakt the best and/or simplest way to make a virtual instrument? To map out samples with velocity layers and round robins and apply setting to adjust for offset, timestretch, implement other effects into the GUI and allow for keyswitching to different articulations?


What virtual guitar libraries do you know of that might have these functions already? I think the Impact Soundworks Shreddage series might have some of these functions? And do you know of any great "physically modelled" (is that the correct term?) guitars that doesn't use samples? Perhaps the MusicLab guitars are done that way of maybe they're some kind of hybrid? They seem to have a lot of tweekability.

[DSmolken]

Offset would be pre-attack pick noise, which is probably important for realism. You can try turning it up - a lot of virtual guitars will have 20-50 milliseconds of pre-attack noise - though I suspect it's a lot quieter than the note, a ton of gain could make it sound almost as loud as the note and add undesirable noise. Also look at the release time and shorten that, so the gaps between notes aren't too "full"? Also if there are release samples, turn those down/off and see if things sound clearer.

Kontakt does have time compression, and I can think of bowed string libraries that use it to create unrealistically tight (but musically desirable) shorts. So you could look at that, for sure.

There's a couple of guitars which are physically modeled, or have a lot of modeling added on top of the samples. I'd take a look at the Three Body Tech one, that one's both got sophisticated modeling and seems designed for metal.

[BertKoor]

Too fast chugging with too much overdrive turns into mud when playing a real guitar as well...
(especially on low notes)

[DSmolken]

Well, yes, but composers also want string sections to be able to play fast runs with clarity...