Pianobook Epic Guitar [KONTAKT]

To make your guitar epic, just add AIR Studios.

The story
Its good to be back. For the last few months I’ve been plugging a way as a composer. As I’ve always said the more you progress as a composer, the more the likelihood of getting fired. This came to pass this Autumn leaving me with 4 days in AIR Studios that couldn’t be re-sold and I was liable for! So instead of cutting my losses and letting the studio go dark I leant in. What an amazing 4 days it was!

This was day two in the morning. I had loved the tones we had produced for “The Stack” and wondered, would AIR Studios make for a good backline booth?

Spoiler alert… yes it does.

I’ve been working with Theo Le Derf for over a year now, a splendid composer but also one of the best guitarists I’ve ever worked with. So I offered him the chance of turning the hall at AIR Studios into a backline booth. We bought an old guitar and a vintage amp. We then hired two Marshall stacks and placed them in the galleries. Turns out Electric guitars in AIR sound absolutely sublime.

This instrument is very much designed with the media composer in mind. The types of articulations we find useful, but also with sonic control and potential that is befitting of the Dolby Atmos age we live in.

With mic controls for the amp in the “room” and in the “gallery” you can simply use the close signal where there is very little hall signature. Dial in the room mics for both the room and gallery and start enjoying the beauty of the hall. Then to bind this all together the “ambient” mics give a real sense of how this all works together.

Assign these different signals to surrounds and you will really feel like you’re there.

I sample-buddied with longtime collaborator Stephen Tallamy, who not only made this fantastic GUI, the Decent Sampler version but also some new innovations for Pianobook.

But he can explain this better.

“As this is a guitar library I wondered if there was a way to “dial it to 11” and that’s where the ambience control comes in. Dialling it up to 3 o’clock increase the ambient mic signal, dial it further (into the orange zone on the control) will start to add a convolution reverb to all signals. This feature works in both the Kontakt and Decent Sampler version! In the Kontakt version you hit the settings button to tweak the attack and release of all signals independently which can be really helpful for balancing the amount of “tail” you get from the room and ambient mics. As soon a Decent Sampler has support for additional UI tabs we’ll add these controls there too!”

So, thanks to the amazing engineers at AIR for figuring this one out. Thanks to Theo for his wonderful playing (he does remote sessions BTW and can be found here), thanks to Lucas Pemberton for editing and noise reducing and to Stephen for making this a work of art.

Happy Christmas to you all with all of our love,

The Epic Guitar Team.

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