Help In Choosing Strummed Guitar Instruments.

[caseous]

Hey there. I'm trying to decide on a high-quality set of software for strummed guitars. My parts require a lot of rhythm guitar and I could use something flexible and realistic. I've been looking at Electr6city, Prominy and Orange Tree's Evolution, but haven' worked with any. Any recommendations on this (or anything else I should look at) along with an acoustic steel string instrument, as well?

Thanks,

C.

[bbaggins]

I'm impressed with the Indiginus Torch (http://indiginus.com/index.html) product, and how good it sounds without having to be disguised by layers of amp sim distortion. Strumming sounds natural and is easy to program. And at 50 bucks a bargain to boot!

I also use OTS Evolution, but I'm not too enthusiastic about its strumming features and use it primarily for leads.

[caseous]

Indiginus looks interesting. Anyone else like it? Also, Orange Tree is considerably less expensive than Electr6city and the like. Do you really get that much more for the money that's useful and sounds good?

Thanks for any opinions on this!

[eDrummist]

I'm a huge fan of Orange Tree Samples and have even given the dev business advice over the years (I'm a marketing professional and have given a good deal of developers, mostly whose products I own, advice, including 3 guitar sample library devs whose products I own). But, imo, Evolution Electric Guitar - Strawberry is the most realistic sampled guitar library by far. Listen carefully to the demos from each of the products you mentioned. Granted, guitar sample libraries have come a long way over the years and none of the ones you mentioned are bad, but listen to the changes in the demos and pay close attention to the demos without a bunch of distortion (drenching guitar sample library demos in distortion is a common trick to cover a multitude of shortcomings).

Beyond realistic sound, I think the next issue is programming. The days of unsophisticated big guitar samples without scripting are long gone -- or should be, at least. Years ago, I strongly contemplated buying Prominy (you can still find the threads -- there's a couple of us KVRers that have been hardcore into guitar samples and posting about our experiences for around 10 years; one of my fellow poster is Jeff -- I forgot the rest of his screen name, LearJeff maybe? But his real name is Jeff and he's a lawyer and really knowledgeable on guitar sample libraries too). However, in the end, I never purchased it because, while it does sound quite good, I've heard from several users that it the scripting is unintuitive. Now, I've bought a lot of other guitar sample libraries, like most of the Pettinhouse ones, which are very good, but don't have the sophisticated scripting of Evolution, so they require significantly more hand editing of midi. Another very scripted (for KONTAKT) choice is Electri6ity, which, in my opinion, would be the top contender for me if Evolution didn't exist. Electri6ity and Evolution are the top two choices if you want deep sampling, impressive realism and sophisticated scripting, imo. However, between those two, I find that Evolution Electric sounds more realistic to the discriminating ear (listen to the blues demo on Orange Tree's website -- at least I think it still is there -- it's pretty amazing that demo was made using samples, I know expert guitarists and know of three different award winning composers who've been astounded at the realism and rave about it).

I'm surprised more people haven't chimed in on your thread yet. You can always pop over to the Orange Tree Samples forum and post a question there and I'm sure you'll get a much larger response from people who actually own and use the product, same with Indignus, which has a forum on KVR and the dev who scripted Electri6ity is a regular KVRer named Benjamin.

[EDIT: Found and fixed several grammatical errors.]

[bbaggins]

Indiginus looks interesting. Anyone else like it? Also, Orange Tree is considerably less expensive than Electr6city and the like. Do you really get that much more for the money that's useful and sounds good?

The difference is that Electr6ity uses the Kontakt player and Orange Tree requires full Kontakt. When you buy a product based on the free player, there is a stiff royalty to NI built in to the price. Libraries based on the full Kontakt are generally less expensive.

[Jason Washburn]

Check out Ilya Efimov's strum products. You'll need the full version of Kontakt 4:

http://www.ilyaefimov.com/products/acou ... strum.html

http://www.ilyaefimov.com/products/nylo ... strum.html



ooopppppsss I think you're looking more for an electric guitar

in that case, i'm like eDrummist , http://www.orangetreesamples.com/ and Evolution guitar is the way to go

[bbaggins]

Beware of demo songs, as they can be somewhat deceptive. They might sound wonderful playing a stock, generic metal lead but then turn out to be limited to just that application and little else. If you want a semi-clean country, a slightly dirty rock or a surf twang lead, they often fall short. I chose OTS EEG because I heard a wide variety of styles in their samples.

There are some real bargains out there, though, if you're willing to accept limited versatility.

A good example is Lyrical Distortion's Ripper Amped library (http://www.lyricaldistortion.com/store/ ... ucts_id=34), a genuine bargain at $19 and currently on sale for just $10. It sounds realistic, but it's a one-trick pony. What you hear is what you get. Still a bargain, though.

Another good, but limited, library is Indiginous' Nashville Electric Guitar (http://indiginus.com/5dollar.html), which you can get for a mere 5 bucks.

Both of the above require full Kontakt. If you don't have Kontakt already, it's well worth the investment given all the useful but cheap libraries that are available for it.

[cfcboc]

I've been trying to research this forum to see if there exists samples like the guitar strumming, but using fingerpicking variations.

Unfortunately, as an amateur keyboard only player, I am really bad at trying to play guitar samples to sound realistic and only get limited time to be able to practice getting better at it. I'm currently using the guitar strumming samples and really like the ability to sequence them using chords.

What I would like to do is to get the same principle as strumming, but use fingerpicking variations of a chord, e.g simple arpeggios, 3-5 string variations of playing a chord, etc.

Can anybody comment on whether chord fingerpicking instead of strums is available and what products? I believe someone mentioned a product (Real Guitar?) that might do it, but can't find a site to check on it.

Thanks in advance.

[Imyself]

Indiginus +1 and very good quality & price

[cfcboc]

Imyself.. thanks for the response...

I actually own and use the acoustic guitar collection from Indiginus and that's the strum engine I use.

But what I'm looking for is a chord fingerpicking version (individual picked notes) of the strum engine. I would like to play a Cmaj7 chord, for example, and get the chord fingerpicked in various ways for variety.

If I'm missing something that's already in the Indiginus product, slap me upside the head and point me to it! I'll concede stupidity on my part!!

[Imyself]

Imyself.. thanks for the response...

I actually own and use the acoustic guitar collection from Indiginus and that's the strum engine I use.

But what I'm looking for is a chord fingerpicking version (individual picked notes) of the strum engine. I would like to play a Cmaj7 chord, for example, and get the chord fingerpicked in various ways for variety.

If I'm missing something that's already in the Indiginus product, slap me upside the head and point me to it! I'll concede stupidity on my part!!

Hi cfcboc,

truth is : i am a keyboarder too...
so i 'm afraid to not be able to help you...

sorry

[Musical Gym]

Poetic Series of guitars http://www.soundsonline.com/Poetic-Acoustic-Guitars features sophisticated strumming and finger-picking.

[Xenobt]

I'll recommend Wavesfactory's StrumGTR electric. It's a really expressive instrument, that I got great results from in 10 minutes.

From sketchy, barely there Edge chords, to big Townshend rave ups, the up-down stroke key-mapping was really easy to get my head around, and at $13.62 usd, is even better than a no-brainer!

But if you want a no-brainer, you got it! AAS's Strum Electric GS-1 has a MUCH steeper learning curve, but is more versatile, with strums, arpeggios and lots of performance articulations like slides and hammer-ons. AudioMidi.com still has No-Brainer copies for $20!

It's a modeled instrument, if cpu or drive space is an issue, so it comes in at an anorexic 70mb of drive space, compared to WF's StrumGTR which is a heftier 4GB. And there IS a demo to see if it's your taste.

There's also an acoustic version of the AAS, but the regular msrp applies at $99.

Check stuff out here:

StrumGTR (the third demo has the best variety):

http://samples.wavesfactory.com/?p=1205

Strum GS-1:

http://www.audiomidi.com/dp/B0028PNHRS

And the demo pages for Strum Electric GS-1 and Strum Acoustic Session:

http://www.applied-acoustics.com/strume ... /overview/

http://www.applied-acoustics.com/struma ... /overview/

I had NO idea there was so much stuff out there for this! I got research to do!

KVR/eSoundz: Xenobt

[toitoi]

Impressive TC Strum http://www.ilyaefimov.com/products/tc-e ... strum.html

[cfcboc]

Thanks everyone. I looked into the Strum GS-1, but the AudioMidi site is out of stock. The Poetic Acoustic Guitars might be an option, but a high priced and couldn't find a demo of the strum patterns.

I've sent a note on the Ilya Efimov site to confirm that their Strum product will do the fingerpicked strum, e.g. if I play a Cmaj7 chord, I would get the guitar sample to play C E G B as individual fingerpicked notes and ideally with variations if the chord repeats, e.g. C B G E.

I'll see what the reply says. For 99 Euros, it seems fairly priced and I like the ability to play various chords on my MIDI keyboard and have the Strum program interpret the chord to how a guitar player would play it.