Session Guitarist - Strummed Acoustic

STRUMMED ACOUSTIC is your always-on-call, professional session guitarist – perfectly strummed and recorded patterns, vivid sound, and real-time performance control.

drumasonic is Daniel Scholz and Samuel Dalferth. After gathering years of expertise with their drumasonic drum libraries, they bring this expertise to Native Instruments with SESSION GUITARIST –STRUMMED ACOUSTIC – a KONTAKT instrument delivering acoustic guitar rhythm tracks with unparalleled realism.

DANIEL SCHOLZ

Having studied computer science, music theory, ear training and piano, Daniel Scholz works as a teacher at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich, Germany. As a producer, mix engineer, songwriter, and pianist, he has worked with many artists, covering rock, pop, jazz, and acoustic genres. Daniel is the founder, developer, and programmer of the drumasonic virtual drums software and the winner of the 2014 Pensado Break Thru Mixer Award.

SAMUEL DALFERTH

Samuel Dalferth studied violin, music production, and composition for film and television in Germany. His work as a composer and sound engineer is in high demand worldwide, ranging from award-winning jazz musicians to Hollywood composers. He shares his extraordinary approach to sound engineering in university lectures and as a regular contributor to Germany's most important music technology magazines. Samuel joined the drumasonic team as a co-developer in 2010.

WHY SESSION GUITARIST – STRUMMED ACOUSTIC?

“None of the available guitar software products felt like a real musician playing a guitar. So the vision evolved to create an instrument that would allow non-guitarists to have a workflow as similar as possible to the typical relationship between a producer and a rhythm guitarist in the studio.

If a studio guitarist is given a tempo, a groove, and a bunch of chord symbols, he’ll turn these elements into an outstanding musical performance. That's exactly what our new instrument does – based on meticulously captured performances of a real guitarist combined with software-emulated ‘musical intelligence’.”

A NEW KIND OF INSTRUMENT

“To achieve the final guitar sound, we spent about one week comparing guitars, strings, and plectrums to get the sound right at the source. We then spent another week comparing around 50 microphones, various high-end preamps, converters, the guitar’s placement in the room, and the microphone positions. Microphone positioning is the most important element of the recording process.

Once those positions were found, it was crucial not to alter them throughout the recording sessions, which took place over a period of several months. Sam and guitarist Floryan Kœrber spent another month inventing a laser-based mic positioning system and a sophisticated, custom-made guitar stand to make sure that everything stayed in place.

During post-production, there was no need to process the sound of the recordings. The result is a 100% pure acoustic guitar sound.”

ORGANIZING THE DATA

“To transfer the enormous amount of data into our engine, we had to develop additional proprietary software. This software analyzed the exact positions and volumes of all played strokes of all chords, pitches, voicings, tempos, doubling takes, and patterns. These millions of data sets had to be structured for the virtual instrument to create an authentic sounding, real-time performance.”

WHY KONTAKT?

“Developing such a challenging project as STRUMMED ACOUSTIC on the KONTAKT platform was a natural choice. KONTAKT is platform-independent, provides very powerful sampling tools, performs extremely fast and, with its comprehensive scripting language, enables sample library developers to realize even the most unconventional technical approaches. It's the only platform where you can create a real piece of software that behaves, interacts, and adapts in a user-friendly way.

A big Thank You goes to guitarist Floryan Kœrber, who also builds and repairs acoustic and electric guitars. His musical expertise and knowledge about these instruments was crucial for the development of the engine.”

FAVORITE FEATURE

“One of our favorite features is the Rhythm Finder – a unique tool which hasn't been realized in any other software instrument we know of. If you're looking for a certain rhythmic pattern or have the accents of a groove in mind, simply type them into the Rhythm Search Strip and the internal database instantly presents you with a selection of authentically performed guitar patterns, sorted by similarity to the search query.”

A STEP FORWARD

“We believe that the instrument is not only a unique tool for music producers of many genres, but also serves as inspiration for songwriters. Playing patterns on a MIDI keyboard is really inspiring and quickly leads to great sounding tracks – the intelligent playback engine almost makes it feel like you're jamming with a real musician. Except it would take a great amount of time, expertise, and top equipment to achieve a recording that's as tight and accurate as STRUMMED ACOUSTIC.”