A note on all guitar sample products
The goal of each SampleSoundBank.com guitar instrument is to replicate the live-playing of a real guitar with recorded samples. One way this goal is pursued is not to remove an important part of the sound which can be heard in real guitar playing:
Every time a string is plucked or picked there is a short moment where the finger, nail or pick is struck or rubbed against the string, and then a moment later, the string is released and begins vibrating. The “strike” or “rub” sound of the finger, nail or pick is retained in each of SampleSoundBank.com’s guitar samples. The length of this sound may vary from 5 milliseconds to almost 20 milliseconds depending on the guitar instrument (e.g. fingered or picked). The length of this pre-string-release sound is consistent for each sample in that guitar instrument. For example the picked guitar “pick rubbing” sound component is up to 10 milliseconds on average.
When a guitarist is playing they anticipate the above described strike moment and hit the note just before the beat so that the vibrating note starts sounding on the beat. All this means that once you have written or generated your MIDI guitar strumming track in your digital audio workstation or other software, you should shift forward slightly the entire guitar MIDI track about 10 milliseconds or more to get the guitar notes playing sweetly on the beat. The benefit of this is you’ll retain some of the percussive sound of the guitarist striking every note!
How can I check that I have moved the guitar MIDI track forward enough?
There are two ways:
- By ear: you can isolate (Solo) the drum and guitar track of your composition while all your guitar notes are selected. Play the tracks together and listen. You can move the guitar notes a few milliseconds forward (or back) until you get the timing and sound you want.
- By an audio app: drag a WAV file from the Samples folder of your SampleSoundBank.com instrument into an audio editor like Adobe Audition. Zoom in to the sample and measure the length of the delay before the string is released and begins vibrating.
Another thing to think about is that some styles of music have instruments playing ahead of the beat (jazz, funk, etc.) so this is a good thing to keep in mind anyway. Ultimately the timing of every instrument in your composition is up to you. It’s just important to know about how guitars are played so that you can make them sound good in your music.
Why round robins and no velocity layers?
The goal of SampleSoundBank.com is to offer a range of ready-to-go strumming guitars to use in your music production. These instruments need to sound realistic and the best way is to use more random “round-robin” samples. When you play a guitar in real-life, every time you strum a chord each string is struck uniquely different. This makes a literally endless variation of sound possible when you play a real guitar when you think about all the variation in timing and sound you could hear for the same chord played over and over.
Think about this: a six string chord multiplied by a choice of 7 different random samples per note means a huge variation in potential sound… this makes your MIDI guitar strumming sound more realistic than if we only used 1, 2, or 3 samples per note.
Another reason SampleSoundBank.com avoids over sampling instruments is that most mainstream music no longer relies on a greater range of dynamics (this is just an opinion!). With more and more compression being used and larger differences between loud and quiet passages in music means we’d rather concentrate on giving you the most realistic sounds for your dollar down. Also check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
No refunds
As you know a tonne of effort and intellectual property is present in every SampleSoundBank.com product. When you purchase an instrument you are only purchasing a license to use the samples in your music production, but the samples remain the property of SampleSoundBank.com – the Copyright owner. As these samples are digital, “virtual” and non-transferable, no refunds are available once you have purchased the product. If you are not happy with the reality of this situation, please do not buy. For more information on how you enter a license agreement with SampleSoundBank when you purchase a product, please read the license agreement page. Thanks.
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