I got this Cordoba Guilele (a Ukelele sized guitar with 6 strings, tuned to A D G C E A) about 10 years ago to accompany me while travelling abroad. Circumstances led to the trip (and any long distance travelling) being cancelled so this little guitar never got much use out of it.
While trying out a lot of nicely constructed sampled instruments from both the LABS range and from Pianobook, I got excited to try making a sampled instrument myself. I don’t think there’s a lot of Guilele (or Guitalele) samples around the web yet so I thought it would be the ideal candidate for this experiment.

This way the Guilele can travel around the globe in a virtual form, which is an idea that makes me smile.

The guilele is sampled using a Rode NT1 condensor microphone through the preamps of a big Allen & Heath GL2200 console. Every note (between A1 and A4) is sampled chromatically. I extended the range downwards to a C1. The notes are picked with a regular guitar pick. There’s two velocity layers (one normal and one ‘as hard as possible’) and two round ribbons. I kep the open strings undamped as much as possible while sampling the instrument so there’s some natural ambience from the sympatheticly resonating strings.

The Ableton Sampler version of the instrument has a light compressor and reverb built-into the instrument rack, as well as adjustements for attack and decay (for making lush pad-like sounds).

It’s not the best sounding virtual instrument out there, but I learned a lot about sample management and about setting up Logic’s Sampler. I hope you’ll enjoy this sampled guilele as much as I’ve been enjoying the lovely instruments created by the Pianobook community.

I made a short introductary video about Sympathetic Guilele that you can watch here:

If you run into any issues, please reach out (it will probably be educational for me).

Thanks for reading!