I have not tried it by myself but I'm aware of their functions and sound. Also, I have tried ample LP and IS Hydra.


What I can tell, is that indeed session guitarrist guitars sound good. The problem comes when you need more depth in the guitars of your track. Ample sound has a great riffer that makes programing guitar parts easy and in a realistic way, and IS guitars have a vast range of articulations that Session guitarrist guitars just don't have.


However, if guitar isn't your main concern, session guitarrist shouldn't be bad at all.

 

To me, Session Guitar has a couple issues- the main one is that it has what used to be called the machine gun problem in drum machines; that is that it sounds very robotic and your ear can detect the lack of variation as it repeats. The other is that the on board amps are not very good sounding, although that can be easily fixed by reamping. The clean sounds actually are rather nice.


I've not tried the Ample Riffer, but I highly suspect it's better for that sort of thing...

 

refx slayer 2

 

BTW interesting and telling that no one has brought up Ujam... not really surprising probably

(Edited for awkward phrasing)

 

Last edited: Jul 5, 2024

It's worth mentioning Metal GTX. It's a guitar for sforzando, and It look quite good, and not that demanding.

You might have many more playing options than what you recommended.

Look at this:

Not perfect, but good for being free and lightweight.

 

They're about loops, aren't they?

I've not tried them, nor listen to demos. However I've read Ujam's guitars are quite limited.

 

Ujam is sort of like Session Guitar, you can choose from a series of predetermined looped (midi) riffs but it's not implemented very well and it doesn't sound good either my humble opinion. Given the choice between those two I would definitely go with Session Guitar. If they used an actual audio loops it would probably be better.

 

You are so right!

 

That's why I have 4 guitars and a P-Bass I like sampled sounds/loopers too, but it all depends on what you are trying to do.

 

Last edited: Jul 5, 2024

This is a tortured analogy but bear with me
Let's say that you want a hamburger. Easiest way to do that is to just get a hamburger. But if you are vegetarian then you have options... one is just to forget the hamburger but the other, if you're bound and determined to have a burger is to figure out some kind of option that satisfies your taste for a hamburger without actually being one. The degree to which that is going to fool you or anybody else into it thinking it's a real hamburger depends on the amount of time and energy and frustration you feel like putting into it.

That's sort of my whole real vs. sampled instruments argument in a nutshell

 

just drench your vegan hamburger in reverb until it tastes like the real thing.

 

So reverb is sound ketchup, is what you're saying

 

Yeah, but how much chilli do you want, a little or a lot?

 

Is it soy based chili?

 

For me, Omnisphere acoustic guitars are ok, i can make it sound very convincing with quantization and the strum/fx layers. IR's also help a lot. I also disable all the effects on the preset because i don't wan't everybody to recognize the tone, so i build a new chain like it's been recorded through piezo.

 

NO! NO!
This is better!
See you as a producer, you're like a chef see, and normally if somebody asks for a burger you would cook a burger but sometimes you have to cook for vegans and well, you can figure it out from there...

 

Wow, it's seems you liked that analogy quite a lot

 

It's on my mind, I'm not gonna lie.

 

Perhaps if we built a large vegan badger...

 

I have an acoustic Guitar and also a bass, but although I have taught myself to play the notes, I've just never been able to grasp a way of making them come alive. you know? Notes without the expression is how I describe it.


EDIT:- I don't know whether or not you remember, but when Spectrasonics brought out Keyscape, you and I discussed how we were hoping it would have been guitars instead of Keys. For my part it was because I've never managed to make a Guitar VST come alive, and I was really hoping that would have been the answer for me.