The story
Recorded in the freezing cold winter of Finland (under a cozy blanket with a cup of hot chocolate) This guitar is an acoustically sampled electric Ibanez guitar.
The guitar itself has a wooden cover and has been a personal friend for many years in my productions in the cold winters. It has survived both winters and summers flawlessly.
The library features plucked acoustically recorded electric guitar with close mic, room mic and an ambient pad from the guitar. Close and room mics both include 3 velocity layers.
Reviews for Arctic Guitar
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Lovely but could be much better!
This is a nice little guitar instrument that can work really well in some cases, but unfortunately it comes with some sampling and programming problems. First, the is some slight noise in the samples, but that's not that bad. In some cases, the sample pitch changes depending on the velocity, or is just plain out of tune, which doesn't let you use it as you may initially wanted.
The overall sound is good though. It reminds me of old and kind of entry home keyboards, which is not necessarily a bad thing. In addition, it took me a while to realise there is a Reverb setting in the middle of the UI, because it blends too much with the background. I would also love to see the different mics on the UI instead of having to load different patches.
Not useful for me personally
As i guitarist a often find these guitar sample instruments pretty unrealistic even if they still sound cool. Theres just something about the articulation if playing guitar that i think is extremely hard to capture with sampling. They usually sound like dulcimers or harpsichords to me and this one is so exception. This one i think espicially does because of its more thin and bright tone compared to other sampled guitars. I think the pad path is a bit more useful for my purposes because i think the attack is where you can really tell if its real or not, although i still find the tone pretty thin and bright. Im generally into more warm sounds. This is fun to play around with and sometimes i like to write a guitar melody with midi and then record it with my guitar but i personally wouldn't get much use out of this. I hope others do though.
Electric guitar with some issues
This is a good first attempt at sampling, but it has some issues. Most obviously, one of the sample zones has the incorrect root key assigned, so notes play a step lower in that zone at the highest velocity. The lowest of the three velocity ranges spans from 1-41, and I find it exceedingly difficult to consistently get those samples to trigger. It would have been much better if the lowest range spanned something like 1-79. I'm not a fan of the actual guitar sound. It sounds rather like a banjo in some ranges, and severe buzzing in the lowest range makes it sound like a sitar. To my ear, at least, it sounds like there were some issues with the way the instrument was played during the sampling process. There are also inconsistent gaps in the editing of the beginnings of the samples, so lines played with this instrument will not play back in time, regardless of how strictly you quantize them. Like any new endeavor, I'm sure the samplist who created this library learned many new things in the process, and it's great that we all have the PB community to support us in our sampling journeys.
