Making Music With Native Instruments Strummed Acoustic - Session Guitarist

I'd been wishing for some solution to allow me to incorporate realistic strummed acoustic guitar sound into my production music tracks. It looks like Native Instruments' new Strummed Acoustic - Session Guitarist product for Kontakt 5 is just the thing.

After hearing some of NI's demos, I quickly decided I needed this product. I bought it at NI's website with no problems. They accept PayPal, which I definitely like. One warning: downloading may take awhile depending on your bandwidth. I did mine over two days. Fortunately, NI provided a download manager that did a terrific job of letting me pause the download and come back to it later. This allowed me to download parts of the product when no one else was online where I live - most thoughtful.

Once the download was complete, installation was a snap. I began working with the product by loading up Kontakt in standalone mode, then loading Strummed Acoustic and using the included virtual keyboard in Kontakt to learn how to trigger different chords and strumming patterns. Note that it is definitely worth your while to download and read the product manual up front. It gives you a good description of how to set up your own custom patterns into songs and how to manipulate features to get a fuller sound and chordal variations up the neck from the lower patterns.

Having familiarized myself with the basic functions, I loaded up my DAW, Acoutica's Mixcraft 7 Pro Studio. and started to work on a motivational rock anthem. Another nice thing about Strummed Acoustic is that it gives you a set of pattern groups organized into songs to get you up and running quickly. I chose the "Passengers" song and customized it, adding a "Brit Pop" pattern that figures promptly at the beginning of the track where the guitar is playing alone and then other instruments are being added gradually.

The song itself is three repetitions of a basic set of chord changes, with instruments and embellishments added gradually. As I mentioned, I used the Brit Pop pattern that has a soft, ballad-like feel at the begnning. At the end of the first section, I switched to a muted crescendo to climb into the second section, where I switched to one of the basic "Passengers" strum patterns. I stayed with that through the rest of the track, except for an open crescendo to climb into the final, big section. I was able to make all these changes by sending MIDI notes to the appropriate keys that are preprogrammed into Strummed Acoustic to trigger the pattern changes form my DAW.

For the final big section, I kept the same pattern, but changed Strummed Acoustic's low voicing mode to "Doubling." This gives the impression of two guitars chording in unison and thickens the sound considerably. I was able to automate this process, as well, using commands sent from Mixcraft. Of course, by this point in the track, the drums are rocking out and there's some distorted guitar to give the overall mix more gravitas. Because of this, the strummed guitar doesn't really punch through the mix that much. But that's OK for me in this case. It has enough to fill out the track and add to the rhythmic drive pushing the whole thing on to the conclusion.

The rest of the tracks, I programmed using IK's SampleTank 3. I didn't use any special effects on the Strummed Acoustic track. I did run the whole mix through a touch of reverb (again IK, their CSR Hall) to try and tie it together, and used iZotope Ozone 6 for a little sweetening.

Overall, I'm very impressed with the results I got from NI's Strummed Acoustic - Session Guitarist, and am looking forward to using it on similar projects to fill out this portion of my portfolio in the near future. Please have a listen to the results below.