The story
Hey hey! My name is Hidde, and this here is my first go at sampling an instrument.
A few years ago my younger brother received a LaPaz guitar for his birthday after telling us he wanted to learn guitar. In the end, however, he rarely ever played the thing. Seeing this, I decided to adopt it myself, and though I still can’t play a lick, that doesn’t mean I can’t put it to use. I’d been interested in the idea of sampling an instrument since first joining Pianobook little over a month ago, and I thought that the guitar would make a perfect first attempt.
I think that, in some serendipitous way, my lack of skill at both the guitar, and at sampling may have been a boon in this case. As this was my first time sampling something, I thought I’d give myself less of a challenge by one sampling one string (the lower E-String), sampling only one octave of said string, and using those recordings to make a pad like sound. I ended up making three presets, utilizing four to seven round robins per note -the fluctuation came from me messing up notes, redoing them, and later thinking they sounded fun anyway. I did make sure to only include four in the more “vanilla” preset. Each recording did have noise reduction on it, but with me sitting so close to the mic, and being very inexperienced in recording in general, there’s still a fair bit of background foley from me shuffling around, or my headphone cord tapping against the guitar. I actually quite liked how that foley sounded in context of the final pads, so I decided to keep it in -gives the pads a bit more texture in my opinion.
As I have neither Kontakt nor Logic, I was only able to make a DecentSampler version. I included a lowpass filter and reverb knob, as those were the only ones I was confident I could make.
In the end, I’m really pleased with the result! I hope it can be of some use to you guys too!
Cheers!
Hidde
Reviews for LaPaz E-String
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Creative and nice textured library!
Wow, such a creative sound packs! I like rolling waves patch. It has a dynamic and swelling, interesting sound.
Cool and creative...
The sounds from this instrument are very interesting. It's nice to hear a guitar sampled in an untraditional manner. There is a good bit of static hiss in some of the samples and the low ranges on certain patches it very slow to respond, but other than that it's marvelously put together. Look forward to hearing what you come up with next~
Really useful cinematic sound
I really like this sound and definitely plan to use it. it could be best described as reversed guitar textures. With multiple different patches the sounds are really enveloping and cinematic. They have as synth like quality but also have that unmistakable metallic sound of an acoustic guitar. I think this instrument can be useful in many circumstances. I plan to use it for added interest and texture in scores and i also think it will sound great along side real recordings of acoustic guitar.
Some interesting sound design
There's some interesting and inspirational sound design work which has been done here. Hidde clearly has vision and taste. There are some extraneous noises in the samples which may turn some folks off, but there's a spark of invention here, and I suspect we will see good things from Hidde in the future.
Reversed cinematic guitar strikes!
This kind of big library will give you 3 different patches to choose from, the Basic, the Great Stacks and the Rolling Waves, with each one becoming more layered and aggressive.
Starting off with the Basic patch, you get a very wet reversed pad ending up in an awesome strike. The samples, while not noisy, they are stretched across the keybed, so it'll be hard if you want to do hits with multiple notes.
The Great Stacks is very similar, just with a more textured and more aggresive. Both of these patches share a range of just 2 octaves, and they have a very long release by default.
Finally the Rolling waves patch has a shorter release than the others, but I noticed that if you try to play a note while holding others, the note will likely cancel some other notes. I assume though that the original intention is to play only one note at a time.
Each patch though has a very nice character that will greatly enhance your tracks!
