MOTUnation.com

Sorry, "other" acoustic guitar VI's - there's a "new sheriff" in town.
Amplesound.net's AGM.

I purchased it yesterday. The company is in Beijing, and I had concerns
because you have to purchase it and then wait up to 24 hours for the download
link. My concerns were for naught because I had the download link within
two hours, and this morning when I sent in my challenge code to obtain my
permanent keycode, I had that within 10 minutes of sending the email. So
I can vouch for the company.

The VI is $169 US and worth every penny. When I first heard the demos I really thought, "that's a recording of a guitarist, it's too good to be a programmmed demo". I was wrong - this is hands down the best acoustic guitar
VI I've ever used. Like the Sample Modeling products, it has so many controls that it takes some time to learn exactly how to "play it". Yes, it
includes a strummer that re-voices keyboard chords into appropriate guitar voicings, although it isn't as simple to use as MusicLab's RealGuitar 2.
That is offset by the sound quality - it's light years beyond RealGuitar2.
Really does sound like someone playing an acoustic right in front of you.

Several layers of round robins, adjustable noises, releases, fret squeeks,
etc., several articulations, picked and fingered versions of the guitar,
stereo, mono, and doubled switches, and intelligent scripting behavior -
for example, if you just play half-step ascending or descending notes, you
stay on the same string (until you reach the note where you have to move to
the next string that can play the note, which the VI happily does) and the
guitar stays in legato mono mode. Then if you play a two note chord, it switches to poly mode. There is an included fretboard in the GUI and you can
see your "fingerings" and the strings vibrate as you play. The VI won't play
what can't physically be played on the guitar, either - for example, a G and
a G# played on the E string will not sound simultaneously, because that is
impossible on a real guitar.

There is a range of "pedal" effects included, and a separate page for the
chord strummer with interactive matrix. And the download also includes the
MIDI files for the website's demos, so you can see how they were done.

More info here:

http://www.amplesound.net

Wow is right !! This VI is very impressive… now on my "gotta-have" list

Schweats

Wow. The samples sound great, but how much work went into producing them? My question with VI's is always, "Is it more cost effective to spend 40 hours laying something down as a VI, or just hiring a great guitar player for a 2 hour session?" If I can quickly get from score to useable VI track then it's worth it.

As an example, I got some really good string sounds from GPO, but it took a ton of fussing. In that case, I couldn't afford a full string section so it was worth the effort. Sometimes it's a tough call.

So, please get back to us with your thoughts when you've had time to fuss a bit, 'cause the samples on their web site aver VERY impressive. Thanks for the link.

Phil

Phil O wrote:Wow. The samples sound great, but how much work went into producing them? My question with VI's is always, "Is it more cost effective to spend 40 hours laying something down as a VI, or just hiring a great guitar player for a 2 hour session?" If I can quickly get from score to useable VI track then it's worth it.

As an example, I got some really good string sounds from GPO, but it took a ton of fussing. In that case, I couldn't afford a full string section so it was worth the effort. Sometimes it's a tough call.

So, please get back to us with your thoughts when you've had time to fuss a bit, 'cause the samples on their web site aver VERY impressive. Thanks for the link.

Phil

I use guitar VI's to compose and arrange, they're invaluable for that.
So any guitar VI that sounds good is worth it to me. Amplesound's guitar
isn't THAT "fussy" to deal with - if you know how to play guitar parts from
a keyboard, you can get good results right away. The strummer takes some
work, I'm still investigating it, as it's not as "automatic" as MusicLab's
Real Guitar2.

The guitar noises and effects are scripted so they happen automatically too,
and with a good degree of authenticity. And the level of the noises is
adjustable. Just about every aspect of the guitar's sound is adjustable, actually. That said, what comes up when you first launch it as a good,
well-balanced sound.

Sometimes I can't get a guitarist to come over and replace a track, and so
a few of my projects feature the sampled guitars. I would not hesitate for
a moment to use Amplesound's AGM for a "final" track. It's that good. For the record, it doesn't take me 40 hours with a VI to get a good result. With
Amplesound I had usable guitar parts within 10 minutes.

David Polich wrote:...With
Amplesound I had usable guitar parts within 10 minutes.

Now I'm impressed! Thanks for the info, David. Your input is valued here.

Phil

This thing is indeed killer. Picked it up without moment's notice.

It's sound and playability is evident immediately. Very deep and intuitive.

Thanks again for another great head's up, David.

David:

This is a brilliant find. Thank you.

Guitarists might be understandably not as thrilled as DAW keyboardists will, but that's okay. If I were a master of the guitar I'd feel the same way. Heck, as a pianist with a grand piano to work with, it's not always practical to get a piano tuned and mic'd up at 3 AM when an inspirational idea hits.

Guitar VIs have suffered only secondly to sax VIs of late, but gladly both have come along admirably.

Thanks again for this discovery.... while I wait patiently for RealGuitar3.... if you take my meaning.

Hmmmm...realistic indeed. Tuner, anyone?

http://www.rfjmusic.com/publicmusic/AGoutoftune.mp3

cbergm7210 wrote:Hmmmm...realistic indeed. Tuner, anyone?

http://www.rfjmusic.com/publicmusic/AGoutoftune.mp3

Yeah, but you're a genius. That's not fair!

LOL with uttermost respect.

Frodo wrote:

cbergm7210 wrote:Hmmmm...realistic indeed. Tuner, anyone?

http://www.rfjmusic.com/publicmusic/AGoutoftune.mp3

Yeah, but you're a genius. That's not fair!

LOL with uttermost respect.

Ha! More like I am overly anal, my Hobbit friend?

How many times have guitars been re-tuned to re-track a section of a song because of intonation? Myself, enough..but, you do what you have to do, eh?

BTW I changed the capo around real time in the sequence to get different results for the chords that were most out of tune. Again, hat's off to the developer for a great product.

cbergm7210 wrote:Hmmmm...realistic indeed. Tuner, anyone?

http://www.rfjmusic.com/publicmusic/AGoutoftune.mp3

It does sound very realistic, but the attacks bother me. It sounds like you're striking all the strings at the same time. No pick sounds as you strum across the chords.

That's something that they did well in that guitar VI that comes bundled in Mach5.3. Has anyone else tried that out? You can specify how you're strumming it, and it really goes a long way toward making even a mediocre keyboard performance sound like a bang-up job on a real guitar. I forget what that's called, but I was very impressed with it.

And this one from Amplesound is also very nice. It would be interesting to compare the two.

Shooshie

Shooshie wrote:

cbergm7210 wrote:Hmmmm...realistic indeed. Tuner, anyone?

http://www.rfjmusic.com/publicmusic/AGoutoftune.mp3

It does sound very realistic, but the attacks bother me. It sounds like you're striking all the strings at the same time. No pick sounds as you strum across the chords.

That's something that they did well in that guitar VI that comes bundled in Mach5.3. Has anyone else tried that out? You can specify how you're strumming it, and it really goes a long way toward making even a mediocre keyboard performance sound like a bang-up job on a real guitar. I forget what that's called, but I was very impressed with it.

And this one from Amplesound is also very nice. It would be interesting to compare the two.

Shooshie

Shoosh, I was just clicking across chords with the mouse to show the intonation. The instrument actually has a very deep strumming engine that's incredible.

Hmm. Very strange. I posted to this topic but my post disappeared. It wasn't political, I swear

Anyway, as I said before - I'm not a pianist and my workflow involves scoring in Finale and exporting to a MIDI file, then using that file in DP to tweak and do some VI magic. Does that sound reasonable with this VI?

Phil

Phil O wrote:Hmm. Very strange. I posted to this topic but my post disappeared. It wasn't political, I swear

Anyway, as I said before - I'm not a pianist and my workflow involves scoring in Finale and exporting to a MIDI file, then using that file in DP to tweak and do some VI magic. Does that sound reasonable with this VI?

Phil

Do you mean, can the MIDI part you played be re-assigned to Amplesound's
guitar? If that is the case - no, you have to play the MIDI part using
the Amplesound guitar VI as your destination. The reason is fairly simple,
but probably not obvious to keyboardists - the Amplesound guitar won't "let
you" play parts that are impossible on a guitar.

Let's say you play a chord that is (using middle C as C3)B1, F#2, B2, and F#3,which is a typical piano inversion of Bmaj. Playing this chord into
Amplesound's guitar, only the top two notes will sound, because that voicing
isn't possible on a real guitar. I've actually tried reassigning a piano
MIDI track to Amplesound's guitar, and it just sounded stuttered and stumbling, with many notes missing.

I've been doing "keyboard guitar" parts for almost two decades now, which
came about because I got sick of waiting for guitarists to come over and work with me on songs. Playing keyboard guitar parts is work and requires
some outside-the-box thinking and a lot of listening to and watching guitarists play. Probably the biggest oversight on the part of keyboardists
is that guitarists can finger the same notes, or the same chords, in several different ways, whereas keyboardists can only play a single note
(C4 for example) in "one position" - C4 on the keyboard. Conversely, runs
that are easy for us piano players to do can be literally impossible on
guitar, because of the how the fretboard is laid out.

That said, I've spent some more time with AGM and I am just blown away at
the quality of this instrument. Spank notes hard, you get that snapped string sound that so many guitar VI's miss. You can adjust the amount of
sympathetic string resonance (it's on a dial) and it is totally authentic,
you hear strings resonating sympathetically, and it's different depending
on which "strings" you're activating. Switch to pick mode, play some notes
quickly in staccato fashion with a harder velocity and you can hear the
sound of strings falling back onto the frets to produce that "vibrating wires" effect. This VI must have taken at least two years to script, maybe
more, and certainly took ages to sample. The developers literally thought of
everything and they must certainly be guitar freaks themselves - and they're
Chinese!

Okay, I think I just had a customer service heart attack.

I emailed Amplesound about the tuning issues along with my MP3 sample (I also told them what a fantastic job they've done with the instrument) and 3.5 hours later I received this email:

Hi:

Thank you very much!
We invited a prefessional piano tuner guy to help us yesterday, he has tuned AGM - Finger samples.

AGM - Finger - Tune patch (2kb), our customers could login here to download it:
http://www.amplesound.net/en/download.asp

Best regards
Ample Sound

I downloaded the patch, and bingo, the finger picking patch is now perfectly in tune.

Great instrument, fantastic customer service. What more is there to say?