The sound and the actual performance are intimately linked to our perception of the sonics in my opinion. A great keyboard player will lift the experience to a higher level than someone just plinking around, even if it’s a super expensive library or VST.

But If we’re talking purely about sonics/tone, though, I’ve gotten very nice results sampling guitar strings with ambience already baked in, slightly “degraded,” so to speak. I’ve done this both with my own guitar and by sampling single strings from records. In isolation it can sound a bit rough, but once placed correctly in the mix it can feel incredibly realistic and organic.

I also tend to prioritize fewer notes in bursts followed by a couple of more prolonged notes rather than continuously playing notes which often is a giveaway with MIDI guitars unless the keyboardist is very experienced.

In my case I wasn’t really aiming for a pristine, crystal-clear guitar sound anyway, I was more after something with an organic, almost analog lo-fi character.

 

I started as a drummer, about 30 years ago, and maybe in 2003 or 2004, i started to feel the need to write music myself (being a guy who can only plays drums turns that you´ll always need someone else to write "songs), so i discovered GuitarPro, learn to read & write, both tabs and traditional notation, so i could give the tab or midi to the guitar player of my band, and for a while i was happy about it. I think in 2010 i discovered Kontakt and found that there were guitar libraries too, so that meant that i didnt needed someone else anymore, or so i thought. Started to experiment with em, and some time later, i was able to create full songs, with bass, drums and guitars, all from sample libraries, but the results were never that satisfactory, at best they could be considered decent demos, never a serious attempt at doing something i could release as music, and sure some people got "fooled" when they listened to my stuff and asked if i also played guitar, but those people were never musicians, they were mostly casual listeners or they couldnt distinguish a guitar from a bass. The thing is that the amount of effort you need to put into writing the midi, the keyswitches and the humanization is too big for the degree of authenticity you´ll get, and to that you got to add the amplification part, because some amp sims sound kind of plastic even with real guitar, so imagine it with a sampled one. I think the most practical and "convincing" stuff i used was the Shreddage libraries by Impact Soundworks, basically because im into metal and thats what i write. So, there was this point, about 4 years ago, when i was really disappointed of what i was doing, just demos to show the guitarist of the bands that i played on and the sound sucked badly, that i decided it was enough. Bought myself a guitar, i had never even touched one til then, and teached myself how to play (since i had been using GuitarPro for almost 20 years i had some knowledge about the mechanics of the instrument, and being a drummer helped with the rythm part). When i look back i think i was a complete fool for believin that sample libraries could be the solution, i lost a lot of time doing it, and if i had took the decision of buying a guitar and learning to play instead, now i could be a more skilled guitarist. Obviously, after a story like that i cant tell you that there´s no way a sampled based guitar could compete with the real thing, and that i prefer complete silence over a fake guitar.

 

Assuming no major shortcomings, virtual guitars are 90% down your own MIDI programming skills and 10% everything else.

You have to manually adjust every single aspect of every single note of every single chord/melody with stringed instruments.

If you're too lazy for that, then yeah, your sampled instrument's strumming is going to sound like an early toy robot.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

 

Last edited: Mar 9, 2026 at 3:25 PM

The composition and the interpretation is important. No listener cares about your unintentional inaccuracies.

 

When I was in New York last year, I visited LaMonte Young's Dream House installation, which is on the middle floor of his house. Amazing
https://www.melafoundation.org/dream02.htm

Here's a photo I took of his mailbox :