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Guitar hand position

d.healey

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There are lots of guitar libraries that have a hand/fret position control that allow you to play at different positions along the neck. There are also some that are fixed at the first fret.

When you're using a guitar VI do you make use of the fret position control, or is it one of those things that you don't use much?

I'm making a guitar library at the moment and trying to decide which way to go with this. Currently I'm leaning towards having moveable hand position.

Thanks.
 
I care about realism in sequenced guitar parts, so I manually control the fretting position a lot, especially on chords. For monophonic lead parts, having force-string keyswitches at the bottom of the keyboard is also a huge help.

In addition to allowing for much better realism, being able to control where notes are played also makes the library more versatile because the same notes can sound very different depending on which strings they're played on.

Some libraries have automatic fretting algorithms to reduce the need for manual control of hand position. Some are better than others. Shreddage 3 is currently the best on the market for this, though I'm picky enough to still use the manual control options pretty often.
 
Yea, I map the fretting position to a CC and change it all the time.
Ditto. As a guitar player. I often write on the instrument then convert the performance, including exact fret position, to VI. Anything I can't convincingly convert gets DI recorded. VI helps me for licks I cannot do physically. (Never gonna be Joe/Steve/Eddie)
 
I kinda hate the fact that the market expects it, and with something like a cello I can record three-four times as many articulations in the same amount of time as a guitar, because doing the same note on multiple strings isn't expected.

But it is expected unless you're doing something like a heavily effected ambient guitar library, and it does have its uses. If you're gonna use a tremolo bridge to make a chord all Chris-Isaaky, it's important which string which note is on. You can actually use the control for the opposite of realism, too, and get a really short plunky sound high up on the low strings. That's kinda inconvenient to play in real life, but a useful sound in a VI, especially if you're looking at weird indie guitars with short sustain and low-output pickups, like Secret Agent Guitar.

Having said all that, I'm kinda tempted to make an alternate-tuning guitar library with maybe 30 open-string notes available (this will take a lot of restringing and retuning), but fingered notes sampled in only one position for each note. But I got so many other ideas to do first, that one would have to wait till 2021 at least.
 
Just going to also throw in my 2c. I definitely think the guitar would need to be sampled at a lot of different fret positions. The difference in timbre of the different strings, particularly wound and non-wound strings, is very noticeable, and you can easily hear the difference between someone playing up and down the strings at the 14th fret and a sample library using samples from the high E string of the guitar only.
 
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