In the height of the 2020 lockdown I sampled a family members 1966 Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar. Prior to this, I had no experience with any vintage guitars so having the opportunity to play and record this for the day was a very special for me. The tone of the guitar was so balanced and pertecily resonant, it was an absolute dream to play. It really made me understand why these instruments are so sought after today. I wanted to capture what is almost a 55 year old instrument in a format that can stand the test of time for others to use and create with. A cool backstory I found out about the instrument was that it once belonged to the rock band The Levellers before it was purchased in Soho, London by its current owner. The instrument is comprised of two patches. The first being the plucked 12th fret harmonic samples with 3 velocity layers and 3 round robins. For the second, I couldn’t resist some experimental processing using software such as Paul Extreme Sound Stretch and Michael Norris’ Spectral Blur. This combined with numerous reverbs created an interesting pad that retains many of the timbral characteristics contained in the original sample. I sampled the instrument using a stereo matched pair of Rode M5 condenser mics that ran into the Xenyx pre-amps of my Behringer 1002b mixer. All samples were noise reduced using RX7 Advanced. All samples were recorded at 48kHz 24bit.