The story
Alkis Efthimiadis is a former mathematician and guitar luthier.
I am originally from Portugal and in 2011, I flew to Athens to visit his workshop and try several of his amazing instruments.
I bought this guitar and still play with it to this day. It is my main instrument as a classical guitarrist. In 2021 I decided to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of this trip of mine.
This is also my first ever sampled Kontakt Instrument.
I recorded it using a IRig Acoustic Stage Microphone.
I sampled 3 velocity layers (p,mf,f) with 3 round robins each.
Reviews for Alkis Classical Guitar
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
As a Guitarist i cant get behind this one
While the instrument sounds pretty unique and there are some nice effects option to get some pretty cool textures, as a guitarist i just cant get behind this one. As one yourself im sure you know that all the nuances, hammer ons, slides and so on are pretty much gone when you sample leaving it sounding pretty robotic. Its still fun to play around with though and sometimes i actually like to write a guitar melody with a midi guitar to get the idea down and then record it with my real guitar.
It might be a little hard to deal with
I personally found that the velocities are kind of inconsistent, resulting in a very unbalanced result when it comes to volume, but that might be easier to control when programming it in your DAW. I like the round robins but some of the samples in there are way more noisier than others and some tails are weirdly cropped, and that may be very hard to deal with. The GUI offers Reverb, Delay and Chorus knobs, but the design could be a little better. The sound of the guitar is fine, but the playability might hold it back. It's not a bad instrument though! It just is far from a plug-and-play one.
Great first attempt at sampling
This is a great first effort at sampling with multiple velocity layers three which overlap and three round robins. The tone is pretty evenly matched from zone to zone and between the different velocity ranges. The samples are well edited, so that makes the instrument more playable. I think the biggest thing holding this library back is the quality of the recording equipment used to capture the samples. The richness of the instrument seems to be lost, and the sound seems somewhat pinched and nasal. I think with a microphone designed more for recording, the results would be better.
