The story
The laziness (or business) is real, and so despite being a guitarist myself, I asked a peer to produce a few guitar chords for me, for easy composing/mockup purposes.
4 round-robins
2 velocity layers
Major and Minor chords
Shimmer Pad
Volume, Pan knobs
That’s all there is to it. Simple, great sounding Major and Minor chords on an acoustic guitar. Oh, and a Shimmer pad just because.
With some sneaky scripting I was able to create a ‘second’ guitar simply by starting the round robin cycle on 2 and not 1.
I built this pack over a year ago, and it was a fun experience in furthering my Kontakt scripting and GUI development.
At one point this sample pack was on my website for sale, but with so many great guitar plugins now available for free, the universe told me what to do with this one.
Samples Mixed in Cubase Pro 10.5
Interface
Reviews for AcoustiChords
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Corporate inductions at the touch of a button
Make 1000 bucks a minute finishing all your corporate induction scoring commissions in seconds with this baby!
Jokes aside, AcoustiChords does exactly what it advertises exceptionally well. As Mark mentions there are a wealth of free guitar libraries around now, and if you need something versatile with complete control over rhythm, voicings etc. I'd highly recommend the Ample Guitar M II Lite. However, if you just need some quick, easy, and gorgeous-sounding strummed chords, this is the instrument for you.
The layout is very simple and forgoes the complexities of keyswitches, and thanks to this I found myself stumbling upon some interesting, Opeth-esque chord progressions by just adlibbing around within a single octave.The shimmer pad is also cool and I got some really interesting and rich sounds by just turning the guitars off and playing around with the Brightness toggle.
Downsides - It's only major and minor chords downstrummed in one voicing, so you probably won't be comping any jazz arrangements. The ability to add individual notes with the same acoustic quality to extend chords would be an amazing addition, but probably isn't within the scope of what this instrument is intended for. There are a couple of samples with subtle, annoying clicks, probably from a stray pick, but easily avoidable with the RRs.
Will definitely be my go-to when I just need a simple guitar strum, and I'm looking forward to playing around some more with the pad.
Lovely strummed chords with a pad
This library has some well recorded major and minor strummed chords and a rich, full-sounding pad. turning up the "second" guitar gives you a lovely doubled sound that's really useful. If you need a few slowly strummed chords in the background, this might be just the thing. If you need an amazingly rich sounding pad, this library should be near the top of your list. The weakness of this library to my ears is that the chords are offered only in one position on the neck, so you don't end up with any sort of voice leading from chord to chord. I'm not a guitarist, but I play guitar on TV shows -LOL- and that was the big limitation that I heard. I suppose adding a couple more inversions of each chord would quickly add to the complexity of the library, and it would quickly cause the size to balloon. It's more like what you'd expect from a commercial product costing hundreds of dollars. All of that aside, this library is really well recorded and playable, and it accomplishes what it sets out to do, and accomplishes it very well. Another worthy download from Pyjama Planet!
Intuitive Library but not for me personally
One thing i think is really great about this library is the way its laid out. I think its extremely smart to lay all the major chords in one octave and all the minor ones in another. If you have basic knowledge of chord progressions you can immediately know where to go and not have to take time figuring out where the chords are laid out. And even if you dont know about chord progressions its still going to be very useful. As a guitarist, i personally wouldn't use this as of course its limited in control, but it could be great for people who dont play guitar or for anyone just wanting to quickly see how a progression might sound.
I think it would be more useful for the shimmer pad to be its own patch with full playability though. Its laid out the same way as the guitar with pre programmed major and minor chords which can be pretty limiting.
All in all even though i personally won't be using this, i still think its a
great library and a really useful tool and as i said before, the way its laid out is the most intuitive of any pre programmed chord library ive come across.Simple single strum chords
This is a fairly simplistic idea but it is executed very well. This patch gives you access to all major and minor chords, grouped in two separate octaves. The recording quality is excellent, with the minor exception of some light clicks that you really won't really notice that easily.
As it is right now, all the chords are strummed in a very specific way, which is a somewhat slow downstroke. This may seem very limiting for many, but it's well programmed and very easy to use compared to other strummed guitar instruments that can be fairly confusing. You also don't have any more complex chords like 7, 9, diminished, etc. You can definitely use it for slower pieces on a downbeat, it'll get the job done!
As an extra idea, this instrument offers a very smart and easy way of exploring harmonic sequences, especially for those who struggle playing chords on a piano - you just have to hit one key now!
The shimmer effect is a little overwhelming to me, but I found the two different guitar knobs, being very usefull, since you can use them to mimic double tracking (if you pan them hard-left and hard-right each), for a bigger stereo image. Cool!
As a suggestion, perhaps a more sophisticated (and obviously more complex) way to tackle this would be to have the dynamics on the modwheel and have some chords in different speeds based on the velocity (how fast you downstroke).
Full and rich.
Does exactly what it says on the tin - majors and minors in root position. Well recorded, if you don't have any other access to guitars or guitar libraries then these could come in useful for layering with other sound to give that acoustic vibe. Personally I prefer the shimmer pad which has a mysterious Cajun cinematic quality to it.
