My initial thoughts of
Acoustic Revolutions 3.First, I should point out that I have WAY more virtual guitars than I really need, but each one usually has something unique to offer. A quick rundown on most of my guitar samplers are: MusicLabs Real Guitars (all of them), Orange Tree Samples -Evolution Series (12 of them), Scarbee Funk Guitarist and Strummed Acoustic 2, Indiginus guitars (including the new Renegade Acoustic). That last one is where I should have stopped.
I like the amount and variety of strums that come with Acoustic Revolutions 3. Strums come in 4/4, 3/4, and 6/8.
But I'm not happy with the sampled chords. Using the built in FX, such as Chorus or Reverb, tends to leave unnatural sounding artifacts. The compressor seems okay though. (I haven't tried using external plugin fx with it yet)
But even with all the FX turned off, there is something that doesn't sound right when playing various chords.
It sounds like they weren't sampled very well or very consistently. When switching chords you can hear an audible shift in the EQ from chord to chord.
I didn't download the optional WAV files, although I'm not sure what they are for, or if they replace the existing sampled chords with a higher quality sample. But at over 8GB for the initial samples, I didn't want to fill up anymore space on my hard drive.
So, to sum up, I like the amount and variety of strum patterns, but I'm not at all happy with the overall sound.
If you're looking for a great sounding acoustic guitar, that you can strum AND solo single notes (along with many articulations like trills, hammer-ons, up and down slides, etc.) I would suggest Indiginus new
Renegade Acoustic, for about $40 cheaper. The sampling quality is much better, but not as many strum patterns.
I will continue to use AR3 for it's strum patterns, and try running it through a guitar fx plugin like TH3 or Guitar Rig and see if that helps.
Thanks for reading!