Indiginus StrumMaker IV Acoustic Guitar
Napoleon Hauck
Indiginus is not an unknown developer to me. I have been using their Delta Blues Ac Slide Guitar and Solid State Symphony for a long time now, so I am not sure why it took me a while to get around to this.
StrumMaker IV is really two Kontakt instruments in one. For one use it is a strummed guitar that you can either play in yourself or use its very powerful pattern sequencer. But it also is a really lovely acoustic guitar for playing non-strummed melodies and parts, using keyswitching to change articulations.
If you look at Pic 1, you can see three Kontakt 5 keyboard with colored octaves: red, green, and blue. The red octave (C1-B1) plays chords in the strummed pattern you have selected, based on the chord you have assigned to each root note. The green octave (C2-B2) behaves similarly but with single strummed chord downstrokes with the blue octave (C3-B3) for chord upstrokes. The single strummed cords are great for ending or interrupting patterns, or playing in your own patterns.
You can control a whole bunch of this stuff with keyswitches. The black octave of notes (C4-C5) allows transposing by half steps as if you were a real guitar player moving a capo up the frets on the fingerboard. The yellow octave (C5-B5) lets you change between 12 patterns on the fly. And did I mention that you can edit the patterns? You can. More on this later.
The highest colored notes affect muted up and downstrokes, turn Latch on and off, and affect step resolution, e.g., note. note, etc. This can result in a very powerful workflow, once you master it, as I am just beginning to do.
The biggest single change for me to get used to is that with the acoustic guitar library I have been using I was able to play the chords and inversions pianistically and hear the exact notes I am holding down. In all candor, I prefer that but there is so much that this brings to the table that my other library does not that I am willing to adjust. Among the other significant features are:
Among its many features are: 6 velocity controlled layers; optional automatic vibrato; 12 string emulation; Round Robin; Amp and Cabinet effects; controls for Hammer-Ons; Slides that can be controlled by the velocities of your choice or by keyswitching; the same editable body choices as the StrumMaker IV.
Pros: Beautifully recorded, does pretty much everything you could want a library like this to do to help you create some realistic guitar parts. Not too steep a learning curve and everything in the GUIs are very clear. Light on CPU.
Note: While you are there, check out their other fine instruments. I am a big fan especially of the Delta Blues Ac Slide Guitar, Solid State Symphony, and I am starting to become good friends with the Torch Electric Guitar and Renaxxance nylon string guitar.
Jay is a Los Angeles-based composer, songwriter, arranger and orchestrator, conductor, keyboardist, as well as vocalist.As a composer, he is best known for scoring the New World Television series Zorro. Among the films and TV movies he has arranged, orchestrated and/or conducted are Paramount Pictures' Blame It On Rio Read More
Hey. Thanks to everyone for the answers. Some really interesting ideas and opinions in there. It was just something I was musing about, how far I could push things in terms of getting different sound out of an already recorded acoustic guitar part. Cheers!
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