Re:How to make the electric/acoustic guitars sound real for those who do not know how to p
2012/01/09 15:59:37
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I am a piano player, I have used fake guitar since many years, thinking that guitar players might tell the difference, but ordinary people won't. I do not play them live, I program every guitar part with some patience. I spent around 100 dollars on average every year for a guitar sampled product in the last 8 years.
After using sampled instruments for years, I discovered audio loops. There's a lot of specialized rex/acid libraries of guitar loops (acoustic, funky, pop, rock, jazz, metal etc) and you have many tools in Sonar (beatscape, rmx + midi, loop constr. window, audiosnap,dim pro + midi, matrix view) to audition them in contest, pitch-shift them / stretch them globally or per-slice, take bits of them and combine with others, play bits through keyboard and have much fun in driving them towards what you have in your mind. Outside Sonar, Celemony Melodyne is an amazing piece of software to put added value to guitar loops, the new version can take a real played chord and transform it into another (althought I have not used it).
So loops, to me, are the way to go for realistic sounding. And new products in the near future will give the ability of "playing" starting from loops (think of NI Scarbee funk guitarist, for rythm only, or ueberschall liquid guitar for solo parts), the goal is to customize them. But the source material is specialised and you need many libraries to cover the full range, so I spent hundreds in the end.
Not always I find the good loop for my job, so I open Musiclab real guitar. Basically it is a sampled product, so less true, but it has means of thinkin about the voicings freeing you from a lot of guitar knowledge. I programmed realistic parts with that.
Finally, the guitar ampli (Guitar Rig Le, Amp Sim and tube leveler in sonar, IK Amplitube in some other package) can shape the sound if you go for electric guitars (and hide the sampling fakeness).
So it seems that there are two ways of approaching faked guitars, which converge:
1. start form loops and mangle them with a software that can do it (natively or in the daw) to give them new flexibility
2. start from sampled sounds and having a software to take care of the playing with an interface at an higher level.
Cheers
"Below the realm of the musical note lies the realm of microsound. Sound coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds" (Curtis Roads)
http://www.carosone.eu/