VI acoustic guitars libraries

[claudemeyer]

As I play myself lap dulcimer and autoharp, I need only ONE acoustic guitarist to make some comp with me. Among MusicLab , Ilya Efimov, Amplesounds acoustic VI, there are some differences in realism.
My question is more on the richness of the library of strumming patterns, so that I don't play all my tunes with too few patterns, and I do not have patience and the ideas to develop new ones. Musiclab presents more than 1000 patterns, but other packages ? Thanks for your advice.

[Shooshie]

It's probably better if you just come up with the patience and add a few of your own. You'll be that much happier with it.

Shooshie

[Armageddon]

I generally prefer doing all my "strumming" myself (like you, I use MusicLab's RealGuitar 3), but if you're just looking for decent acoustic guitar strumming chord sounds, the best I've ever used is the Gibson patch in PLAY's Ministry Of Rock collection. The only reason I don't use it more often than I do is because I rarely, if ever, just play chords in an acoustic or electric guitar MIDI part. I like the ability to switch between chords and single/solo notes. Unfortunately, the Gibson patch in MOR is, for whatever reason, chords-only, though you do get single note bridge mutes and up-down strokes, and you get the full range of major, minor and 7th chords. I want to say it's a J-160 through two different acoustic amps and it sounds very full and beautiful with a nice top end that sits well with other instruments, such as a doubled electric rhythm guitar. It also takes a lot of the hard work out of doing chords. Again, the main reason I don't use it more than the rare occasion that I do is simply because it lacks the full versatility of MusicLab's acoustics (nor does it have the spiffy "doubled" steel-string guitar).

[zuul-studios]

I recommend two: 1) Music Lab's Acoustic Guitar (which has already been mentioned) and 3) Chris Hein's "Guitar" collection. Both give musically convincing strumming sounds when the time and effort are put into sequencing them. But like with anything involved with sequencing, time and effort is required to create good sound.

(Sometimes it's easier to record a live musician! LOL!)

Good luck with your choice.

[David Polich]

I've tried every guitar VI in existence. Hands down, Amplesound's AGM and AGT are the best acoustic guitar VI's on the planet. Much better than RealGuitar. Yes you can strum - you assign chords to MIDI notes, and you "strum" with the fingers of your right hand. It takes a little bit of getting used to but not much. You can assign up to 12 chords to MIDI notes - and I can't think of any song that needs more than 12 chords.

Amplesound offers a free "lite" version of their AGM acoustic. No missing notes, but some articulations are missing. You can certainly create complete parts with it. And their tech support is superb.

http://www.amplesound.net

For electrics I'm still with Vir2's Electricity. You form chords with your left hand and the strumming keys are on the upper octaves. Again, it works
more like Amnplesound's guitars for strumming, except that you can't assign
chords to MIDI notes, you have to form them ahead of time with your left hand.

http://www.vir2.com/instruments/electri6ity

[FMiguelez]

I've tried every guitar VI in existence. Hands down, Amplesound's AGM and AGT are the best acoustic guitar VI's on the planet. Much better than RealGuitar. Yes you can strum - you assign chords to MIDI notes, and you "strum" with the fingers of your right hand. It takes a little bit of getting used to but not much. You can assign up to 12 chords to MIDI notes - and I can't think of any song that needs more than 12 chords.

David, I heard you also like Pettinhouse guitars.
How do they compare to AGM and AGT?

[Tobor]

FWIW and FYI Pettinhouse just came out with Acoustic Guitar 2.0 with additional strumming patterns- the video looked (and sounded) impressive.

I'd be curious if anybody had installed the upgrade yet ($49 if you have the original version, I believe).

[David Polich]

I've tried every guitar VI in existence. Hands down, Amplesound's AGM and AGT are the best acoustic guitar VI's on the planet. Much better than RealGuitar. Yes you can strum - you assign chords to MIDI notes, and you "strum" with the fingers of your right hand. It takes a little bit of getting used to but not much. You can assign up to 12 chords to MIDI notes - and I can't think of any song that needs more than 12 chords.

David, I heard you also like Pettinhouse guitars.
How do they compare to AGM and AGT?

I just got the Pettinhouse 2.0 acoustics and the version 3.0 Direct Guitar (the electrics). I have to give the edge to Amplesound in the acoustics department. Pettinhouse Acoustic 2.0 does include a library of strumming
patterns which are really good, which can all be modified as easily as changing the "height" of a section of the pattern in the pattern GUI window, and can be exported as MIDI. The Pettinhouse acoustics are very very
bright and clicky, which actually is nice for certain things, and still
overall much better sounding than, say, Orange Tree's stuff.

The Pettinhouse Electrics (Direct Guitar 3.0) have their place...the jazz
guitar is exceptional, better than Electri6ity's 335, and the rest of the Pettinhouse electrics fare very well too. For me it's gotten to the point
where I just think of Pettinhouse and Vir2's Electri6ity as different "guitars" in my collection. Neither of them cover every conceivable base.
Kinda like microphones - the more you have, the more situations you can
address.

Back to acoustics - like I said, Amplesound for me is still the winner. In fact Amplesound released another update of its AGM (Martin), AGT (Taylor)
and AGF (Strat) a couple of days ago, and I'm happy to report they all load
faster now and don't hang notes with rapid playing like they sometimes did
in the past. The bottom line is that the Amplesound acoustics are like BFD
drums - people tell me "wow, that guy played great" when hearing the Amplesound track, they don't say "that's a really good guitar sample".
BFD was like hearing a drummer on the other side of the studio glass. Amplesound strikes me the same way - it sounds like I recorded a real player
with awesome mics through expensive mic preamps. It sounds real.

The only caveat I'd bring up is that you have to crank DP's buffers down to
128 to get latency down to an acceptable level with the Amplesound guitars.
VI's like Kontakt 5, I can still get playability at a buffer of 512, and at
256 it's completely acceptable. Amplesound, you gotta go to 128. I'm not sure why.

I'll say that Pettinhouse's libraries are definitely worth having. Amplesound is a must-have as far as I'm concerned. I "had" RealGuitar but
stopped using it once I got the Amplesound stuff. RealGuitar to me is not in the same league at all - in fact to me now it sounds kinda pathetic.

[FMiguelez]

Thank you so much for that detailed dscription, David. That was quite helpful.

Now I'm gonna have to buy the Ampesound guitars too...

[Armageddon]

I've tried every guitar VI in existence. Hands down, Amplesound's AGM and AGT are the best acoustic guitar VI's on the planet. Much better than RealGuitar. Yes you can strum - you assign chords to MIDI notes, and you "strum" with the fingers of your right hand. It takes a little bit of getting used to but not much. You can assign up to 12 chords to MIDI notes - and I can't think of any song that needs more than 12 chords.

Amplesound offers a free "lite" version of their AGM acoustic. No missing notes, but some articulations are missing. You can certainly create complete parts with it. And their tech support is superb.

http://www.amplesound.net

For electrics I'm still with Vir2's Electricity. You form chords with your left hand and the strumming keys are on the upper octaves. Again, it works
more like Amnplesound's guitars for strumming, except that you can't assign
chords to MIDI notes, you have to form them ahead of time with your left hand.

http://www.vir2.com/instruments/electri6ity

We've had this discussion before, and while I was definitely open to the possibilities of using Amplesound's VIs, I didn't really like their electric guitar stuff (AGG). Their bridge mutes were kind of wonky and didn't sound right to me. Which is a shame, because their doubling engine (and the fact that, if you pair it with an instance of RealLPC, you get a doubled sound with two different VIs) actually works great. However, I see from your above post that you're basing a lot of your preference on the chord/strumming capabilities, which is something I don't use; I play all my chords and perform all my strums manually.

I've been struggling to get Electri6city to work properly ... so far, no dice. For some reason, a lot of the articulations seem to behave weirdly, even with the update. That's one I would really like to get working right, because it sounds incredible.

[cbergm7210]

I have purchased all of the acoustic guitar VI's that I have ever come across. Amplesound is the best.

[Arceo]

I have purchased all of the acoustic guitar VI's that I have ever come across. Amplesound is the best.

+1
I'm a very happy Amplesound AGM and AGT costumer. I don't own the electric models so I can't comment on that.

[mhschmieder]

Chris Hein Guitars is the biggest waste of money of anything I've ever bought, and though I like the timbre and expression of the dumbed-down subset of horns in Kontakt's stock library, it was enough to scare me away from other products from that vendor. EXTREMLY expensive compared to other alternatives, and I have yet to get any realistic sounding phrasing from it. The timbre itself is also quite unpleasant to my ears, due to a combination of miking, instrument choice, and playing technique.

I am currently transitioning my acoustic guitar sources but have not yet bought Amplesounds; I own most of the rest. I prefer to do my own "strumming" but occasionally take advantage of RealGuitar's revoicing to get more realistic sounding chord voicings than what I usually end up doing from scratch in my head, via notation, or through keyboard playing.

I've been fairly happy with the Orange Tree libraries, but had some instability with at least one of them recently. I haven't re-tried them since upgrading to DP8 from DP7 so don't know if the crash issues are solved. The timbre is quite nice, but the interface on those products tends to change with each release, which can be frustrating as it can then take awhile to master them again and get the best out of them, but Greg is an excellent developer and I trust that he vetted the changes carefully first.

[VitcoMusic]

Sounds like I need to give Amplesound a try. I've been using the Vir2 Acoustic Legends for the past few years with nice results.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[cbergm7210]

I prefer to do my own "strumming" but occasionally take advantage of RealGuitar's revoicing to get more realistic sounding chord voicings than what I usually end up doing from scratch in my head, via notation, or through keyboard playing.

Amplesound has three voicing's to choose from on each strummed chord. Just one detail among many why it is superior to others. It's very deep yet very easy to use. I've used it for final acoustic tracks on 5 or 6 songs since February. These guys really thought the instrument out well.