Big Fish Audio | SoundsAndGear.com JK Swopes | Acoustic Legends HD Product Review
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Acoustic Legends HD | SoundsAndGear.com

Reviewer: JK Swopes Back to Acoustic Legends HD product details

So what is Acoustic Legends HD?

It's basically a closet full of the most well-known, and best sounding acoustic guitars around. Taylor, Martin, Gibson, McPherson, etc. Everything is sampled in great detail, 24 bit to be exact. Of course you get various styles of playing, articulations and even chords. Steel, nylon, twelve string...you know the drill. It comes as a Kontakt player instrument which can also be used in the full version of Kontakt

Quick Specs

- Content: 19gb of 24 bit, 96Khz samples
- Format: kontakt and kontakt player instrument
- Price: $299.95


How does it sound?

Authentic...they captured the samples very well in my opinion. Of course, guitar is one of those sounds, those elusive sounds that are hard to recreate in the digital/virtual realm. We've come a long ways from the tons of akai format guitar libraries, which we definitely used. The sound and articulations you can recreate with a sampler like Kontakt is pretty dope. The interface is simple, you get access to eq, reverb, delay, and a few extras like fret and release noise. The inclusion of the fret/release gives it a more realistic sound when playing, and the fact that you can adjust the volume of these particular samples lets you customize it to how you want it to sound. My favorite sounds are probably the nylon, though I love the steel guitars as well. The folder full of chords is pretty useful, you can easily switch through different chords using the key switching.
I've been using guitars samples for a long time, back since akai s1000 format, so this library is definitely a pleasant sound to my ears. Folks that play real guitars for a living will of course find something inherently evil in the library but that's a given! To my ears, it sound good, and judging by the popularity and longevity of the library, I would say many others feel the same.
No tricks here, just a great sampled, great sounding, fun to play collection of some of the most well-known acoustic guitars around. Oh yeah, they also did some extra patches like banjo, mandolin, etc Also some weird fx type patches made from the core samples in the library, they can get pretty freaky. So what's the bottom line? I like this library a lot, it's one of those things you "just have" you know?  It's like a good piano library, it never gets old! I love the articulations and I like the velocity/playing response. I would have liked to see more performance features like strumming etc, but it's still a very useful library as is.

I give this a 4 out of 5, I really like the sound, and the tone of it. Hopefully we'll see an updated version of this library which incorporates some of their performance technologies from their other instruments, things could get really interesting then. That said, if you need a go to library of acoustic guitars, this is definitely worth the look. I've tried a few other guitar libraries, but I haven't come across any as deep, and extensive in the styles/types represented as this one.
Ultimately it comes down to the sound, and this sounds great!

Check it out at big fish audio, listen to their demos, as they have way better guitar playing chops than I do!

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