Tonehammer has released Epic Guitars, a new sample library for Native Instruments' Kontakt and Apple's EXS samplers that Tonehammer describes as "the heaviest, fattest sounding guitar riff loop library you've ever heard".

Tonehammer worked with one of the best heavy session guitar players in the Scandinavia, Danne Forsblom. Danne used his custom 6, 7 and 8 string guitars through a variety of different amps and distortion pedals to serve up "positively brutal and mind-blowingly precise" metal and hard rock rhythms. The style of the library is a mixture of nu metal, death metal and thrash, with a touch of hard rock/funk on top.

The library contains nearly 2000 riffs/phrases/licks, which are divided into 7 core tempos from 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130 and 140 BPM. All the loops/riffs were meticulously edited, so they stay tightly in sync and adapt to host tempo, so you can use the loops in any tempo you desire. Every riff was overdubbed between 4 to 16 times with ultra-tight precision, resulting in a massive wall-of-guitar sound.

Tonehammer allow you additional custom mixing power with their 4-channel dual-layer mixing technique, easily controlled by your keyboard's mod-wheel. Every patch also includes special key-switching to allow for up to +/- 3 semitones of on-the-fly root pitch adjustment. There are host-tempo synching, time-stretching, vowel filter wah-wah, independent layer-routing and DFD-ready versions of every instrument patch, for maximum flexibility. This library is designed especially for Kontakt 3 and later, but includes a section of Kontakt 2-compatible patches and a basic set of EXS24 patches as well.

Tonehammer also wanted to ensure longevity and variety in the content, so it contains a large selection of more traditional rhythm riffs, as well as more aggressive, experimental and industrial grooves. All wav files are also directly accessible.

This entire library is overdriven and distorted "to hell and back". There are virtually no clean tones to be found in it at all. However, every loop was recorded bone-dry, without any reverb or other spatial effects added anywhere.

It's available for download with an MSRP of $99.