Any Interest in Developing or Using a Kontakt Guitar Library Specializing in Alternate Tunings?

[Musical Gym]

I think it would be fun to use a vst or Kontakt guitar library where each string could be tuned to any note (or muted) for alternate tunings.
I think there may be a few that can do some of the standard open tunings, but there is a vast "collection" of tunings that artists like Alex De Grassi, Michael Hedges, Pat Metheny, etc., etc. use that cannot really be done on existing products that I know about.
I wonder if there is any interest in using something like this or developing one.

[DSmolken]

I've thought about that from a more indie side - Sonic Youth's guitarists would sometimes even have multiple strings tuned to the same note. Flexible tunings would also be useful for things like slide guitar and lap steel.

Sampling isn't hard, the bigger issue is how to make this playable in a way that a typical virtual instrument composer, who isn't a guitarist, won't find too confounding. Especially when it comes to things like playing the same note on multiple strings at once, or combining open strings with notes high up the neck on other strings. Those things are important to some styles.

There's also the fact that brute-force sampling every fret plus several harmonics on every string for any tuning you'd want to assemble would just be a ton of effort, so this would be better done using some kind of modeling, or maybe just sampling strings tuned every minor third and transposing by a half-step for other possible tunings, which would only be about twice as much work as sampling a guitar for one tuning. So, that's not really a huge problem.

[vurt]

sonic youth

[agharta]

Glenn Branca.

[Musical Gym]

Thanks DS, let me know if you pursue it. I can test from guitarist perspective.

[Musical Gym]

I found a bunch of alternate tunings presets in Evolution Acoustic Guitar Steel String library by Orange Tree Samples. After testing Greg's products for years, I completely (almost) overlooked this capability.

[DSmolken]

It would be next year at the earliest, but let's figure out what would be important here. I'm guessing you don't just want to play voicings and intervals impossible (or at least severely inconvenient) in standard tuning, because you can already do that with Secret Agent Guitar, Shreddage and any others that have a setting which allows playing multiple notes on the same string at once.

If you want more than that, please explain what musical effects you're trying to achieve, so I'll have a better idea what to sample. I can think of a few things that can't be done properly with that setup, and of ways around them that don't quite require as much brute-force sampling, but I wonder if we're thinking about the same or totally different stuff.

[Musical Gym]

Actually, it looks like Evolution Acoustic Guitar Steel String pretty much does what I need as far as I can tell so far. All six tuning pegs can detune each string up/down two octaves, which will cover it I think.
Thanks for offering.

[DSmolken]

Two octaves, wow. Well, if this is good enough for your purposes then it's a pretty clear sign that transposing strings sampled at regular pitch works.

Which is good, because it would let me spend the time sampling more extended techniques and preparations, for the weird indie electric thing. Paperclips hanging off the strings and stuff.

[Musical Gym]

Look forward to seeing what you come up with.

[Musical Gym]

Turns out the beta I was using has the pegs, whereas the latest engine has a drop-down list of tunings.
I didn't really get tangible results making adjustments.

[Winstontaneous]

Ooh, interesting...I was just checking out Michael Hedges this morning (one of my all-time faves, the single most magical live performer I've ever witnessed).

Not specifically done in alternate tunings, but I did participate in a 100-guitar performance with Rhys Chatham - talk about a wall of sound!
https://soundcloud.com/rhys-chatham-2/a ... 0-electric