Hey guys, in this video we’re going to test out 3 completely free acoustic guitar virtual
instrument plugins that we can use to create an acoustic guitar sound within our computer.
The quality of these free plugins varies, and we’ll hear what they are all capable
of.
We’ll compare all of these plugins using a MIDI track I created on the Akai MPK249,
and I used the keyboard to offset the timing of the chords to make it sound like a guitar
strum.
The first plugin we’ll look at is Spicy Guitar by Keolab.
This basically sounds like a cheap guitar synth, even though we’ve done lots of work
to make the MIDI track sound very natural by varying the velocity and the timing of
all the notes, so this is probably about as good as we’ll get out of this plugin.
Surprisingly, this plugin does have a lot of presets and includes controls for reverb,
steel vs nylon string guitar, picking position, and much more, but the very fake guitar sound
we get out of it makes it pretty much useless.
Next up is DSK Guitars Acoustic, by DSK Music.
This plugin is slightly better than the previous one, but it still sounds like a fake acoustic
guitar.
The controls are a lot simpler to use, giving us attack, decay, sustain and release, like
a lot of the other DSK plugins, and we get a level control.
The best free acoustic guitar vst instrument plugin that we’ve found is the Ample Guitar
M Lite II, by Ample Sound.
This is the only free acoustic guitar plugin we’ve come across that can actually decently
replicate a real guitar.
For controls, we get stuff like, panning, width with a doubling control, which I rlike
for a stereo acoustic guitar, and a bunch of various other controls.
We can even do things like switch between open and palm muted chords by hitting the
C0 and D0 keys on the keyboard, which actually corresponds to the C1 and D1 notes in our
DAW because the keyboard is messed up.
Even in the plugin the notes and labels are of the wrong octave, but they do play correctly.
When using this plugin, I like to keep it in keyboard mode, which doesn’t consider
the guitar strings a note is on, since it doesn’t have the full range up the strings
anyways for playing up the neck.
This plugin also has a strummer tool, which I don’t use, since I try to get everything
nailed down in MIDI instead.
It can also load tabs from a Guitar Pro format that other software uses.
Last we get a few FX pedals to alter our sound, including compression, overdrive, EQ, chorus,
phaser, delay, reverb, and wah.
If I were to actually use this plugin in a piece of music, I think I would limit it to
something simple like a single chord strum, since programming a full acoustic strumming
section in MIDI with the note offsets would be very difficult and time consuming, but
overall the plugin does have a very decent sound to.
Thanks for checking out this video on free acoustic guitar vst instrument plugins.
If this video helped you out, don’t forget to give it a like, subscribe to the channel,
and press the bell icon to get notifications whenever a new video is released.
You can also check the video description for links to social media accounts to stay up
to date on all our new content, and products featured in this video.