One day, weeks ago, I picked up my father’s guitar and started noodling around on it. Frankly, with all the crazy instruments lying around our house, I don’t know why I picked the most bland one.
But I can say one thing: I was astonished at the sheer power and clarity that the instrument could produce.
Even a singular string, plucked with the most delicate of touches, emanated a haunting, and yet crystal clear depiction of my emotion at the moment. Oddly enough, however, it still had that bright and classic sound that we always associate with guitars- at least modern ones. It took me a week to decide that something needed to be done to capture this sound before it got lost in time.
Of course, the guitar is really nothing special. It is a modern guitar. There are probably thousands, hundreds of thousands
of guitars just like it in the world, but, for the sake of how excited I was in the moment, I’m going to let go of my hindsight and assume it was golden. But even with that bar of gold,
I had never really sampled a full instrument before. It still worked out. Somehow. The UI was really fun to make too.

Anyways, that was more of diary entry than a description of the instrument…

The guitar has 3 round robins and 3 velocity layers, so it has 9 samples per note.

I did the 2nd velocity layer first, so I was still figuring things out, and therefore I didn’t exactly do the full range of the instrument (for that layer).
However, the 1st and 3rd velocity layers are completely sampled to the range of the guitar.
The 1st velocity layer is more meant for a Sufjan Stevens type feeling, whereas the 3rd velocity layer is harder plucks for grittier chords.
It should be noted, though, (gosh, there are so many exceptions) that the 3rd velocity layer is tens of decibels louder than the 1st, so you may have to crank up
the volume to even hear the 1st velocity layer.

There are a multitude of effects on the plugin (mostly because I was messing around), the most useful of which I would say are the ADSR controls. I have to say, my favorite thing in the world
is turning down the attack, sustain, and release to 0, and then setting the decay to a very small value. The impossibly short- but sweet- notes that come out seem to not exist in
the dimensions we know. Us humans, we’re used to large timescales- weeks, years, decades; even a minute is short when you’re with people you love. But to understand the
world of milliseconds? The fact that something can blip in and out of existence so fast that we don’t even notice, except in our memories? That is the stuff of music.

10/15/24 Update:

– Tuning adjusted to 440Hz using autopitch (thank you geebro for pointing that out!)

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Levi Christian