Sounds & Samples

They must be very busy at In Session Audio HQ, as it wasn’t that long since we looked at their last product Drumatic Creator. This time they’ve taken a break from drum and sequence-oriented instruments to focus on ambient style guitars, in the shape of Guitar Swell. Once again, this is a Kontakt-based instrument that works with the free Kontakt Player plugin. Guitar swells – where a guitarist uses a pedal (or the guitar volume knob) to raise the volume after the strings have been played – is a staple technique in the guitarist armoury. It’s particularly effective combined with reverb or delay, and lets you create pad-like tones that work well as an alternative, or partner, to synth pads. However, the guitar brings with it different playing styles and tones, and this is what Guitar

Swell aims to capture for the keyboard or drum-pad playing non-guitarist.

Within its exceptionally well-designed interface – which uses all the design tools available in Kontakt 6 – you can access ten different guitars recorded in multiple configs, and using a range of octave and ‘shimmer’ effects. These are supplemented with 30+ other sound sources for layering purposes. Patches include both swell-based and regularly played variants. All of them are of a high quality and a joy to play. Individual note, custom and automatic chord modes are possible, alongside the ability to trigger the swell on each note or control it manually via the modulation wheel. The highlyconfigurable multi-effects sections are the icing on the cake here, and ISA’s latest creation is a greatsounding and highly-usable instrument. Another winner.

VERDICT 9.2