CONTINUUM GUITARS
Finding flexible, inspiring guitar sounds can be tough for desktop musicians. Enter Cinesamples with its recipe for seamless strumming
It’s easy to be envious of musicians who drift from one instrument to another, with seemingly little effort. For most of us DAWbound musicians, we find ourselves seated in front of two types of keyboards; one for computer control, and the other for playing notes and music, although some might gravitate to pads for samples and drums. Meanwhile, those lucky few who are adept with frets, might have a permanently connected guitar, ready to record those rare grooves as the production zeitgeist envelops them.
New Continuum
Cinesamples, as their name might imply, have an established reputation with an everincreasing catalogue of cinematic libraries, from full orchestral suites, through to more esoteric packages that complement different styles and genres. Continuum Guitars straddles the cinematic and contemporary production genre perfectly, with a very different take to the more usual groove-fests that might be found in other guitar packages.
This becomes immediately apparent as you begin to audition the preset content. With over 200 patches bidding for attention, this package does offer a degree of groove content, but its forte really lies with its capacity to create interesting textures and tones, with potential to generate movement in real time.
The initial interface looks familiar, with compartmentalised sections; the first in this lineup is a virtual Stomp Box, where four flavours of distortion colour may be applied. This ranges from the traditional overdrive and distortion colours, through to the wonderfully vibrant Lo-Fi element, which might be better described as a bit-rate and sample crusher. This quickly becomes something of a favourite, as the tonal element of any patch can be momentarily deconstructed, before moving on to the next compartment, which relates to amplifier choice. In this section, there is a choice of three different amplifier styles, namely AC Box, Plexi and Hot Solo. Each offers tone control, using traditional concepts such as treble, bass and presence, but is also equipped with a number of cabinet and mic configurations. If you are not seduced by the finer intricacies of guitar cabinet mic’ing, fear not! Cinesamples have done the heavy lifting, with superb modelling and microphone options, such as Ribbon, FET and even a rotary configuration. The contrast can be surprisingly effective.
Beyond the guitar-based stalwarts of amps and stomps, Continuum Guitars is furnished with a comprehensive delay section, offering five different flavours of delay, from cleansounding modern repeats, to tape and vintage types. The usual affiliated controls for Time, Feedback and Modulation, are included here. The timing ingredient locks directly to your host
DAW, making it easy to snap rhythmic passages into place. Finally, at least in this opening salvo of guitar-inspired components, there’s a brilliant contingent of five reverbs; each of these is either exacting by descriptions such as Plate or Spring, or more enigmatic with a leaning toward a reverb branding. Tide, for example, is perfect for those Black-Hole ambient reverbs, that modulate and dissipate for hours.
Back to Source
The one point we found slightly counter intuitive, might be informed by the way we like to work with a plugin of this kind. It’s incredibly easy to call up a preset and tweak all of the facets mentioned, and this is highly rewarding sonically, but arguably does not lead you to the crux of the plugin, and its source audio.
If you have a preference for creating your own patches, there’s plenty of capacity for this, with 40 user-assignable patch locations. You’ll want to explore the lower portion of the plugin, which is where you will find the source audio. This can be difficult to locate at first, but once found, 16 guitar source-elements can be selected as a starting point, with further creative capacity within each selection. Depending on your choice, the lower portion of the window will present either vector pads or a sequencer. The vector pads are used alongside the vector source audio elements, by way of moving between different layers, which exhibit different tonal colours or pitches. Thanks to the built in key-switching control, 12 vector pad settings may be organised across a lower octave on the keyboard, with the ability to move or morph between each configuration, depending on the user-assignable speed. It’s very effective and useful for creating real interest, even with just a single held chord.
Conversely, the Sequencer element appears automatically while selecting source audio which relates to muted and rhythmic audio. This is great for creating more conventional guitarchugging, where it’s easy to place accents. This can then be extended further with the use of the mod-wheel, which adds realtime dynamic control for those heightened swells, as grooves build. The sequencer is capable of up to 16 steps, with control capacity of a number of elements from within the main instrument. This can all be programmed simultaneously so you can control the delay time, while also controlling distortion, drive or even momentarily reversing the sample. One of our favourite tricks was to add and remove the reverb mix, creating an instantly interesting texture, which feels unique.
Cinematically different
Armed with 16 pieces of source audio, it’s a debatable point that it would have been great to have even more, but it’s testimony to the capacity of this instrument that you can do so much with the limited samples up front. Having lived with Continuum Guitars, it’s fair to say that its cinematic leanings are obvious, but it does have great capacity to cross over into other forms of production. cinesamples.com
“It’s testimony to the capacity of this instrument that you can do so much with the limited samples”