IK/SR VI HOT BUY - GROUP BUY on eSoundz!!! SampleTank Instruments for $99 + more!

[areemts1130]

One particular thing which nobody has yet touched in terms of Free sounds is Guitars ! Both Acoustic and electric......

I am a keyboardist.....so I am always after realistic Guitar samples...So has anybody tried SR's Guitar samplTank Expansions ? both Acoustic and electric ? Are they worth spending the 2 'Bonus' product coupons ?

Torgo, what do you have to say about Guitar Expansions ?

Thanks !

Well, I'm not Torgo, but I'll take a crack at your question and then he can chime in next time he's here. (We need a bump back to the first page anyway.)

I have both of the Xpansions from last year's group buy. I'm a guitar player, so I don't use them a whole lot, but I bought them to use in places where I want some kind of a melodic line that I can't play myself (I'm definitely more of a rhythm player than a lead guitar player - no Eddie van Halen solos here!). You get a lot of variety in the kinds of sounds offered, and if you're skilled at programming your parts in the SampleTank interface (something I'm still working on) you can get some nice sounds through layering different guitars together on the same channel. The electric guitar libraries respond really well to the built-in effects, as well as running them through amp sims like Amplitube and Guitar Rig.

These have the same limitations that most guitar libraries do - how realistic your parts end up being depends a lot on how you program and play the parts. If you're looking to recreate a Steve Vai solo electric guitar piece then you'll probably have better luck with a Kontakt library that uses extensive scripting, like the Orange Tree sample sets. But if you're looking for something to use to layer parts to sit in a mix and doesn't take up a lot of memory they do the job nicely.

In my opinion, they're both solid libraries - not flashy (although in the hands a more skilled programmer than me they could be!), but good, solid bread-and-butter libraries. I'm not sure what else you have in terms of guitar samples, but I think given the price they're a good deal. Hope this helped!

[subtlearts]

I'm interested in that too - although, there's quite a selection already in Sonik Synth 2 - so I'm guessing the dedicated collections are expanded versions of what's there, as is the case for other things. If so... the ones in SS2 are really quite good and playable, I was impressed - but at the same time I think they may be quite enough to fill my needs so I'm less interested in the dedicated collections than I was before I got SS2. So it goes...

[Krabat]

A question about zone editing:

Is it possible to edit several zones at once? Or copy the settings from one zone to another?
A case where it would be useful: You have a drumloop and want to change the pitch of the bassdrum. It would appear several times in the loop, so you have to change every slice. Would be cool to do this at once (especially if you tweak more than just the pitch).

Regards, Gunnar
--
esoundz: Krabat

[DarkStar]

^^^
Not as far as I know. It's one zone at a time

[torgo]

Great going esoundz ! Whenever I go to esoundz web site, I know I am going to be tempted because many irresistible offers are always going on there !

This offer is super fantastic ! Just got my Miro last week ! Loving it just by playing presets !

One particular thing which nobody has yet touched in terms of Free sounds is Guitars ! Both Acoustic and electric......

I am a keyboardist.....so I am always after realistic Guitar samples...So has anybody tried SR's Guitar samplTank Expansions ? both Acoustic and electric ? Are they worth spending the 2 'Bonus' product coupons ?

Torgo, what do you have to say about Guitar Expansions ?

Thanks !

I'm a true keyboardist too, so I usually sit back and let people with more guitar experience be the ones to give the reviews of the guitar and bass collections, piping in on the piano collection and Vintage Keys (mainly electric piano) instead.

But yes, I *love* the two guitar collections. They're both pretty strong sets.



The big secret of the Electric Guitar set is that you absolutely must explore the "child" sounds. (When you scroll through the library, you'll see the list of "parent" sounds. Each sound has a little black triangle in front of its name. Click on the black triangle to expand the list and show the child sounds.)

The SampleTank interface includes a lot of built-in effects - including things like preamp, tone control, and cabinet settings. And the Electric Guitar collection has a lot of child sound variations that make use of these effects.

If "Jazz Geetar" doesn't float your boat, jump down to variations like "Smokey Room" or "Squares of Fuzz" - they'll sound quite different from the original.

You can also use them as good starting points for tweaking and making your own tones. It's pretty simple to do with electric guitar - you don't have to know all that synth stuff like oscillators and envelopes. Just choose your effects and turn the knobs: give it more distortion, kill the tremolo, swap out the preamp, add wah-wah, etc.

Lots of good sounds in this set - Ricky, Strat, Gretsch, Telecaster, Les Paul, etc - totaling 1.1 gig of parent samples.




It took longer for the Acoustic collection to grow on me, mainly because I'm not a guitarist. There were a few sounds that I really loved straight away, like the acoustic 12 string, the Martin steel 6-string, and a few others. But since I don't have much guitar experience or skill, I didn't "get it" at first with the subtle stylings of the other sounds.

The trick here is that even though it's a 1.17 gig set with 51 parent sounds, it's NOT a collection of fifty acoustic guitars. It's more like about eight or ten instruments, with the main ones featuring many different variations and articulations - picked, fingered, muted, played with capo, etc.

And if you think about it, that's really the way you'd want a good acoustic guitar collection to be.

The Larrivee even has "performance" versions with extra sounds like scraping the strings, slapping the body, etc. If you play D1 and up you get the regular guitar. Below D1 (outside the guitar's natural range) you get the effects.

I still tend to stick to my few favorites, never using 90% of what's there. But I do appreciate having the different nuances available.

As for realism, yes, you can certainly pull it off with these sounds if you play them right. If you play nothing but piano-style three-note block chords in root position, it won't sound good. But if you "strum" the chords and play them with more than three notes where possible, you can get some impressive results with these sounds.

[scatman84]

Thanks a lot aaree and torgo....Your insights will help me decide ! Btw whats the count now ?

[Krabat]

^^^
Not as far as I know. It's one zone at a time

Thanks, DarkStar!

[torgo]

We haven't had an update from Squids yet today. The last count (sometime over the weekend) was 257.

I'm expecting that we'll hit the three bonus library level, but unless we get an extra boost somehow or an extension of the sale from IK, we'll probably stop out there.

Still a great deal though - these instruments normally sell for $150+, and the bonus libraries typically go for $40+. At three bonus libraries, that's $270+ of product for $99.

[Krabat]

Edit:
As the voucher I was reffering to in this post is outdated, I decided to delete this post for not missleading someone, who does not read the replies.

Regards, Gunnar
--
esoundz:krabat

[Examigan]

... unless we get an extra boost somehow or an extension of the sale from IK, we'll probably stop out there.

Hey if they get the sale to go into June, I will buy in for Samplemoog, adds one more on that count

[StickyWicket]

BTW, since the process is fully automated, I decided to also run it on the Miroslav Philharmonic Tips and Tricks thread that that was mentioned earlier. So I now have a single web page and 29 page PDF for that thread as well, just in case anyone is interested in that topic also.

Hey that's great dmorrill!!!! Thanks for taking the time to do this....
If possible, I'd love to have a copy of both PDF's?

[torgo]

Latest update = now at 262.


Also... the "printable version" of this thread only has five pages rather than 32. That makes it a lot easier to copy and paste the text into the word processor of your choice.

(I just tried it with OpenOffice on an Ubuntu Linux system - works just fine.)

[subtlearts]

(deleted post due to inaccurate/misleading information...)

[Squids]

That's out-dated info, the $10 coupon. Also shouldn't work with the current promo.

[torgo]

Another suggestion for sounds that work very well layered together...

If you have Sonik Synth, you can make a *GREAT* pop brass section by throwing 016 Wet Brass, 019 Trumpet Solo, and 020 Trumpet 2 together on the same MIDI channel.

The combination takes up three Parts, but the three sounds use a combined total of just 9 meg of RAM. It's light on the system resources, and it's killer for playing chords as horn stabs.

Try it !!

-torgo (esoundz = bhall1968)