I just bought and installed Native Instruments Session Guitarist - Strummed Acoustic ($99).  While I still maintain that MusicLab's RealGuitar is by far the most flexible product out there (strums, finger picks, solos, can play any chord you can invent, can strum any pattern can make up, includes steel, nylon, 12-string, picked and finger picked, etc.), this NI product sounds phenomenal.
 
Since having a variety of natural acoustic guitars is important to me, this is a welcome addition.  It has a preset group of strumming patterns so it is not the most flexible product in the world, but you can probably find a pattern that will work for most things.  The sound is extremely authentic because the patterns were actually played by an accomplished session player.  For $99, it's pretty impressive.
 
Using two instances (one with low voicing and one with high voicing and panned to opposite sides), sounds great.  There is also a doubling preset that is pretty cool.
 
Honestly, this sounds better than the demos on the NI site which did not really do much for me.
 
This will work with either the free or full Kontakt player.  I have the full player and have only tested it that way.
 
Essentially, you pick up to 8 different strumming patterns for your song and put keyswitches in your MIDI track to change patterns.  MIDI notes also define the chord you are playing (e.g., C maj, Eb min 7th), and other MIDI keys select sounds like ending chords, mutes, thumps, etc.  If you are not a keyboard dude like me, you can pick predefined chords so you don't have to figure out how to play them on a keyboard.  You should have this program mastered in 15 mins if you are used to similar products and maybe an hour if you're a newbie.  If you have a song with odd bar lengths or half-bars, you will need to check the manual.  That is not super simple, but it's not too bad and it is described in detail in the pdf.  You just have to do some simple arithmetic.  (No worse than calculating bank and patch select values on a synth.)
 
As with all NI products, however, I got mad because after the installation and authorization, Service Center forced me to update Kontakt.  Staying updated is cool, but I am always surprised their sample libraries won't work with a previous version of the player.  NI has weird ideas about compatibility, but if that's their worst fault, I'll let it slide.
 
I hope this is helpful to you.  The Mighty Konrad believes in sharing with the inner circle here.
 
 

Thanks for the detailed impressions.
 
Have you had a look what Orange Tree have done with the strum engine in the new Stratosphere library. You see the strums in sequence on a vitual fretboard. You can drag them to just include certain strings or affect the strum speed. You can also specify up or down stroke for each strum and select an articulation.  Greg will roll this out to his other libraries in due course. I think he has nailed it as its both versitile and intuitive. The chord detection has gone a long way towards catching up with MusicLab too.
 

I like the sound.  saw some youtube review/demos that were better than the NI demo sounds they have up.
 
$99 is a nice price but I don't think I need this right now AND I know it will be included in Komplete 11 Ultimate.  I might just wait and play with it the.
 
I am really trying to take my foot off the GAS.

In typical Native Instruments fashion, no one at NI has responded in any way to my question/ticket opened three weeks ago.

What about the strummed acoustic that comes with Sonar. Is it different from the NI version ?

I bought Strummed Acoustic on the first day it came out and I was a bit underwhelmed at first, but I found four or five patterns that are useful for me and I like them.  However one of them has this annoying squeal or something that I have to EQ out.

I haven't tried the low voicing/high voicing thing that Konrad described.  Sounds intriguing.

RealGuitar is handy because you can midi out its patterns to another track and change them to your liking and to another instrument.
Ilya Efimov has a strum instrument that I like, but I think it hops around the fretboard too much so the tone isn't consistent. I find it sounds best in "keyboard" mode, so I lose the guitar articulations.

Haven't gotten around to the Orange Tree strum engine yet.

I forgot about the AAS strum instrument that comes with Sonar. Looks like it can do picking stuff too. Going to check it out some more.
Bjorn

I have actually found NI Session Guitarist - Strummed Acoustic to be mostly unusable in a mix. When I tinkered with it on its own, it sounded good enough, but putting it in a thicker mix of instruments has been mostly unsatisfactory for me. I really wish I had spent this $99 towards Real Guitar 4 (I have RG3) . . . but of course it wasn't out yet when I was buying.
 
I also agree that the Orange Tree strumming engine shows great promise . . . and hopefully it will get developed further, since it's a more intuitive way of manipulating strum patterns, but not quite there yet in my opinion.

Thanks for the reply guys. I was excited about the NI session guitarist, but now I think I'll do some more research before I make a purchase.

Now this thread is truly resurrected it’s worth mentioning Indiginus. http://www.indiginus.com/StrumMaker4.html
 
This is a simpler, less versatile strum engine, but very effective none the less. Its also a lot cheaper than the competition assuming you have a full Kontakt licence.
 
 

hey, guys, i am super new to recording on my computer...
 
i was able to export a midi track out of arobas guitar pro 6
 
then i was able to import that midi info into sonar le track
 
i bought native instruments session guitar strummed acoustic 2
 
can you break it down for a newbie
 
"HOW TO"
 
get the midi track to play native instruments session guitar strummed acoustic 2 inside sonar le?
 
thank you :)