Wanted to share my fake guitar sound made with a basic synth patch, an open source IR VST, and free IR samples. (If anyone wants a tutorial for it I could make one.)
Where did this sample come from? This is another one from my friends work. That stream out back has been great for videos. How did I get it to look like that? It's the usual fancy lighting (a mix o...
I really like this guitar-ish sound. It scratches that itch for me as a keyboard player who yearns to know how to play guitar.
The TL;DR is: A basic Synth Pluck with a hint of velocity modulation drives an IR VST that adds that guitar-body tone. Then I distort the high end a bit to make the pluck feel more physical. Lastly, I do multi-band compression to tame the lows as most IR samples I tried for the body blew the lows into the stratosphere.
Here is the processing in order:
Synth Patch: Saw Pluck (Saw wave w/ a filter set low & a decay envelope modulating the filter positively & velocity modulating total amplitude as well as velocity modulating the envelope's effect on the filter. Amp envelope is a decently long decay and a low set sustain)
When you pluck a string I'm pretty sure it distorts if you pluck hard. That's why I add Density from https://www.airwindows.com/
I ended up using the settings: Density: 1.179 Highpass: 0.703, Out Level: 1.0, and Dry/Wet: 0.2734
This adds the harshness needed to make the pluck feel physical. The sound works without this, and sounds more like a clean electric-jazz guitar tone.
Then I put that through another IR Sample: Walkman from https://fokkie.home.xs4all.nl/IR.htm#speakers
I use dry/wet at 58% here. I don't remember why I did this, it may just be for taste. I think it sounds fine without this, but I like it a bit better with it.
Multi-band Compression
The lows are unmanageable right now. If you tried playing the sound before this step, I'm sorry for your ears. To tame the lows I used just two bands of LSP Multiband Compressor. The cross-over is set at 300Hz. Only band 1 will compress. The ratio is set at 1.53, and that's all I changed from the default settings.