KVR Audio

jsp1979 · Post by **jsp1979** » Tue Aug 16, 2011 3:26 pm

V'ger wrote:
synaesthesia wrote:The best free guitars you can get, in my opinion, come with Independence Free. Very playable indeed.
+1

I finally downloaded this last night after hearing good reviews of their free
guitars for a while.

And...?!

I agree...they're awesome. Before you spend any money, you owe it to yourself to at least try the Independence Free guitars. They appear to have five or six velocity layers...with slide notes at the uppermost layer....reasonable sounding fret noises. Really good stuff for free.

werd · Post by **werd** » Tue Aug 16, 2011 3:45 pm

The Poetic Guitar series
Audio and Video link: http://www.timesconcept.com/EN/heaudio.asp

lingyai · Post by **lingyai** » Tue Aug 16, 2011 6:42 pm

fx1mark wrote:I haven't experienced any bugs at all with realguitar using cubase 5.

My issues could well be specific to Acid Pro. MuiscLab had to send me a special patch to get it to work within Acid, so it's a known issue (or at least was as of January). Is till somewhat flakey -- sometimes the Hold feature will suddenly result in strumming at what sounds like approximately 800 bpm until you bypass the VST and reactivate it. Also, for some reason the patch for Acid disables the standalone version. These are annoying, but it still sounds so good that on balance I'm still glad I bought it.

cunparis · Post by **cunparis** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 10:19 am

This thread was originally started a year ago. I'm curious what people think about the current choices. I'd like to get a guitar library and I have no idea which one I should start with. My main concern is that it be easy to use. I'm not a guitarist (or a keyboard player). I just want to make some simple guitar tracks for my flute playing. Some fingerpicking and strumming.

I'm currently looking at:

ilya efimov acoustic guitar complete - I read through the manual and it looks very good. I'm not sure why they have strumming as a separate instrument and I'm not sure if it's easy to switch between strumming and fingerpicking.

orange tree - User manual is a bit thin. Makes it sound easy to use but I haven't seen a video or any demo so it's hard to tell.

pettinhouse - Videos make it look easy to use

They're all about the same price so I'm really stuck as to which one I should choose.

Any clear winner here? Are they all similar?

lingyai · Post by **lingyai** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 10:29 am

RealGuitar, with the optional Toolbox, comes with a lot of picking and strumming patterns which sound quite realistic, some truly wonderful. Only so-so for ease of use though. The patterns are easy to audition and respond well to changes in whatever chord you play through them -- ther's also a single-finger chord triggering mode. As for using them in a multitrack composition...if you are only using one pattern, it's easy. If you want to switch between patterns, it's fiddly. Can be done programatically, though requires tidying up; as for doing for a live performance, I haven't managed very well, perhaps others have... In conclusion, a powefrul instrument, but with a learning curve. As well as a few quirks (at least within my host, Acid Pro).

Shy · Post by **Shy** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 11:22 am

I've read this and some other threads before deciding to buy Evolution Acoustic Guitar. It's really exceptional. The recording quality is great, there are no unpredictable quirks, and the amazing scripting allows very easy usage with realistic results. And that's the key, I can easily make it sound real, and since the recording is proper (that's actually rare) I can easily fit it anywhere.

lingyai · Post by **lingyai** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 11:57 am

Shy wrote:I've read this and some other threads before deciding to buy Evolution Acoustic Guitar. It's really exceptional. The recording quality is great, there are no unpredictable quirks, and the amazing scripting allows very easy usage with realistic results. And that's the key, I can easily make it sound real, and since the recording is proper (that's actually rare) I can easily fit it anywhere.

Sounds interesting.... I assume you mean this?

http://www.orangetreesamples.com/evolut ... el-strings

May I ask about playability, as there's no demonstration video ... like the OP, I'm not much of a keyboard player. Hence the attraction of preset picking / strumming patterns such as those found in RealGuitar. Or which were in the now defunct Virtual Guitarist, which was more playable. I.e., play a chord, and it plays convincingly -- but as I mentioned, changing patterns (in RealGuitar) is the hard, clunky part.

I see that Evolution Acoustic Guitar is for Kontakt (which I'll be getting), and you mention advanced scripting... can you elaborate a bit please... Let's say you want to play a song with three picking patterns. Would you have to devise these yourself, or do they exist as presets? If the latter, how would you go about it? And is it feasible for a live performance?

cunparis · Post by **cunparis** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 12:16 pm

Shy wrote:I've read this and some other threads before deciding to buy Evolution Acoustic Guitar. It's really exceptional. The recording quality is great, there are no unpredictable quirks, and the amazing scripting allows very easy usage with realistic results. And that's the key, I can easily make it sound real, and since the recording is proper (that's actually rare) I can easily fit it anywhere.

I know nothing about scripting so is it usable without it?

I won't be using it live, just at home to make accompaniments. But if I knew what it could do live that would give me a good idea of what I could do without messing around with scripts and a sequencer.

too bad they don't have demo videos. I watched some for the electric guitar and it seems quite capabe, I assume the acoustic library is similar.

Shy · Post by **Shy** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 12:52 pm

By scripting I really mean the built-in automatic mapping. The "Mind Control" engine section in the user guide explains it

. You can customize things, but definitely you don't have to, as it's "smart" out of the box. I can't give useful comments about live playing since I mostly just write all the notes etc. in the host sequencer, but yes, I would say it is very feasible for live playing. There are built in patterns and you can customize everything yourself, even chords and string tuning. I think the manual explains pretty much everything. There was some really great live playing demo posted somewhere, but I can't find it.. (they should include that and other user posted demos on their site)

lingyai · Post by **lingyai** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 12:58 pm

Thanks Shy. I've sent them an email with some questions. When I hear back I will summarise here.

lingyai · Post by **lingyai** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 1:27 pm

In advance of that, Shy -- I've looked through the manual -- they mention 12 strumming patterns, and while they mention picking parameters, they don't mention picking patterns. Does that mean basically you need the keyboard skills to play what you'd like picked?

Shy · Post by **Shy** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 1:45 pm

Ah, I didn't know you meant internal sequencing. Yes, you'd have to play each note or use a MIDI step sequencer plugin.

cunparis · Post by **cunparis** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 1:48 pm

Shy wrote:Ah, I didn't know you meant internal sequencing. Yes, you'd have to play each note or use a MIDI step sequencer plugin.

Do any guitar libraries have a feature to do the picking based on a chord?? that would be very cool. I'm just learning to play arpeggios.

Can you recommend a MIDI step sequencer plugin? I never heard of that.

Learning a lot here!

lingyai · Post by **lingyai** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 2:26 pm

cunparis wrote:
Do any guitar libraries have a feature to do the picking based on a chord?? that would be very cool. I'm just learning to play arpeggios.

RealGuitar will do this. If you don't care about live performance, it might work for you. I suggest downloading the trial version, along with the Toolbox add-on which has picking patterns.

cunparis wrote: Can you recommend a MIDI step sequencer plugin? I never heard of that.

There are hundreds of them. An easy introduction (and very fun to play with)is Blip2000, which you can see and download here:

http://music.service-1.de/html/blip2000 ... r_vst.html

This video will give the basic idea. Essentially it generates patterns of notes.

Blip is the thing on the right. Notes are arranged vertically, and time, horizontally. Orange means a note is played on that beat, white means it's silent. But -- it doesn't make noise by itself -- it only lets you select the timing and pitch of notes; these notes are then transmitted to any virtual midi instrument (not included with Blip) so the pattern can be replayed by a virtual guitar, piano, drumkit or whatever. In the video you are hearing the pattern played through a virtual instrument which the video maker has chosen (the thing on the left).

Things like this are a lot of fun, but I've tried sending Blip notes to a virtual guitar instrument, and it doesn't really sound like a real guitar arpeggio -- too rigid. You would have to tweak the result, which, judging from what you've written, might not be your bag.

StickyWicket · Post by **StickyWicket** » Tue Oct 04, 2011 5:27 pm

Joel232 wrote:quote]

Thanks for this post. I have had a look at this and it is very good for £25. All i really need (as you can hear from the example track i posted) is simple chord patterns. Would you anyone else recommend this over the Orange Tree Samples package?

I have the same question.....is the Evolution acoustic guitar worth the $179 or would the $40 Indiginus be a better route?

what is the best ACOUSTIC guitar vst instrument ?