Since our most popular sample libraries to date are the Karoryfer x bigcat cello and Meatbass, we've sampled yet another instrument with f-shaped soundholes. This time it's a shiny black archtop guitar, and it has more samples than anything we've done before, plus a nice graphical user interface. Such GUIs are normally found only in commercial Plogue Sforzando libraries, but Plogue Art et Technologie were kind enough to allow us to use one in this free library.

We sampled the notes every minor third, like we usually do, but this time we recorded two channels - one is the direct output from the pickup, and the other is a microphone. So, you can blend the acoustic and electric sounds together, and there are also more controls for vibrato, number of voices etc. All notes are sampled with four velocity layers and four round robins. The low E string is also sampled tuned down to C#, and there are also muted plucks and note release noises with five round robins, and percussive samples with four round robins.

Although archtop guitars are usually associated with jazz, the sounds here can actually get quite bright and aggressive if needed, especially with the microphone signal blended in. They're probably not the best samples for death metal (even with that detuned C# sampled), but quite suitable for pop, EDM, hip-hop, funk, indie etc. Or jazz, of course.

The library adds up to 846 24-bit 44.1. kHz WAV samples. The compressed download size is 352 MB (439 MB extracted) and in addition to the samples also includes an SFZ mapping, registration XML and GUI components.

The below demo is all Shinyguitar. The melody is all pickup signal with the tone turned down and some vibrato applied, the chords are mostly microphone signal, and the percussion starts off as pickup signal but quickly changes to all microphone.

The below track uses Shinyguitar for the clean guitar parts, and also uses several of our other libraries: Emilyguitar, Growlybass, Pastabass, Blackheart, Cowsynth and the cello.

Sforzando version 1.822 or newer required - bank registration and some controls may not work with earlier versions. Free download, open source and royalty-free for all commercial and non-commercial use. Photographs by Arkadiusz Ko?uch.