For the first time in 15 years, I am eyeing the feasibility of doing an old-school prog rock album and hopefully actually finish this one. I'm not going the prog metal route of the 90s-on, I aim to do one that is very keyboard/synth heavy and stereotypical of the 70s and 80s (and Motoi Sakuraba's arrange albums from the 90s) purely with samples and FL Studio.

I have everything I need except guitars and that's what I seek help here for. What kind of sample set or loops do you recommend for strumming and chords? Acoustic and lightly distorted electric guitars are what I seek and don't plan on using guitar leads or metal chugs or such.

Thank you!

 

Are you opposed to using Kontakt?

 

I forgot to check this thread.

No, Kontakt is what I largely expected to use.

 

If you don't feature it too heavily in the mix, the Session Guitarist series can be quite good. The acoustics work quite well and you can do some good stuff with the electrics too if you re-amp them.

 

Here's a track I did a few years back for a girl and we decided to make it sound as close to classic Alan Parsons Project as we could for giggles. I think all the guitar is NI except for the lead guitar; we were going to re-track them and just decided heck, they sounded fine, it wasn't really worth the effort

 

Love it, I didn't think anyone would be interested in producing that kind of music anymore. You got the Parsons-sound down to a tee, especially with the keyboards.

 

Thanks!

 

Makes two of us then.

I was thinking for Kontakt libs, some of the Orange Tree guitars might be good. Those are always good, it's just a matter of picking the right one. I don't make progressive rock or use Diva, but I noticed this Diva presets pack recently and remembered it due to this thread. It is from Vicious Antelope so it might be pretty good. https://www.producerloops.com/Download-Vicious-Antelope-Prog-Rock-Bundle.html
or "elsewhere".

 

Try and find a guitarist to collaborate with, plenty of extremely talented real prog musicians around that would do it if you're any good.

 

Any good and famous guitar library will do the job, because most of the prog sound relies on the signal/tracking chain + the imprevisibility of the notes, just what would expect for 50's to 70's jazz. You can't ask for a "Bebop Sax Lib". You will grab a decent horns library and make bebop. Automations on the project tempo, just like orchestral music, can give that swell feeling of some classic albums as well. The good thing is that 70's prog rock signal flows are higly documented and you can find everywhere on the web or even on AI.

 

You said "stereotypical of the 70s and 80s" which I find odd : perhaps no other genre has so drastically changed as prog rock during those two decades. Any OG prog band that survived through the 80s sounded radically different than they did in the 70s -Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, ELP (with Powell instead of Palmer), Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd... New Wave is all around prog rock during that decade.

The reason I'm being a pedantic asshole about this : samples from the 70s might not work well in a 80s style, and vice versa. This applies not only to guitars either : 80s prog rock is all about polyphonic synths, while that was not possible in the 70s (I mean yeah, poly synths existed since the mid 70s but they weren't as common as in the 80s, and most prog classics came out before 75).

Anyway, to give you an answer : I've never been satisfied with guitar samples (except maybe funk-disco loops when I had to make a track really quick), mainly because I'm a guitarist and no sampled instrument feels even close to the real thing to me. I mean it can work if you're not writing lead guitar parts, but the more you try to give it real human expression, the less authentic it sounds IMO.

So I agree with @ChrisB : if you can afford it, find a real guitarist who will record the parts.

If you can't, I'd pick any of the Kontakt libraries mentioned above.

 

I'm not hiring a guitarist. That would cost more money than an album like this would ever make and be a lot more complicated and difficult than necessary. Guitar samples that don't sound "as good" as the real thing only account for like a 30-50% drop in quality while being 8-20x easier to deal with (and afford) overall.