Native Instruments Session Guitarist Strummed Acoustic KONTAKT

Strummed Acoustic’s Pattern page with the keyswitch options mapped onto the Kontakt virtual keyboard.

Struggle with your strumming? Perhaps NI’s Strummed Acoustic can lend a helping hand.

Whatever your playing skills or quality of instrument, capturing a pristine acoustic guitar recording can be a challenge in a home or project studio environment in the absence of a suitable acoustic space and some equally suitable microphones. If you find nailing the sound problematic, as with other instrument types, you can turn to virtual acoustic guitars. Top of this particular tree are products such as RealGuitar and Acou6tics, both of which have been reviewed in SOS. These offer some seriously good ‘playable’ virtual instruments, which allow you to construct performances that would slot right into almost any polished chart production. However, while something like Acou6tics is both powerful and sophisticated, it does come with a sizable price tag and a suitable learning curve.

If we slip back in time about 10 years or more, a precursor to Acou6tics was Steinberg’s Virtual Guitarist. While it would now sound a little dated, the underlying concept was a good one: the instrument provided a range of preset performance patterns (strummed and picked) triggered through keyswitches but allowing those performances to be played at any tempo and using any chord. It was very easy to use and, within the limits of the sampling technology of the day, sounded respectable.

If you take the modern sonic brilliance of something like Acou6tics and combine it with the simplicity of use provided by Virtual Guitarist, then you get very close to what Native Instruments’ Session Guitarist Strummed Acoustic is all about. And as it comes with a rather nifty Kontakt front-end and a price accessible to the home and project studio owner, it sounds like a very attractive proposition indeed. Let’s find out.