Native Instruments Electric Sunburst £89

Electric Sunburst is the latest instalment in NI’s ‘Session Guitarist’ collaboration with Drumasonic (who also created the well-regarded Strummed Acoustic 1 and 2 libraries). These are all based around a series of predefined patterns in a range of styles, designed as a way of adding realistic guitar parts in your tracks. Although the 154 patterns can be mixed as you see fit, they are broken down into 31 ‘songs’ that each have a specific sound and intent. These cover arpeggiated picking, strumming and full-on riffing, with sounds ranging from the pure and clean to high-gain ‘shred’. The original instrument was captured via signals from both pickups as well as a close mic, meaning that the dirtier tones are reliant on amp modelling for their sound. This perhaps make them less convincing than the cleaner tones – though this does open up the option for you to use your own virtual rig if required.

One area where all the Session Guitarist libraries excel is in their playability. Patterns are locked to song tempo and follow chord changes automatically (including major, minor, no-third, diminished, augmented, half-diminished, suspensions and more). This pattern-based approach doesn’t always provide as much flexibility as an instrument based solely around single-note samples, though it is generally far more realistic. However, Electric Sunburst takes a hybrid approach which switches to individual note-based samples for arpeggiated patterns.

For those without access to a decent guitarist or recording rig, this instrument library is definitely worth checking out. Bruce Aisher www.native-instruments.com