Hi. I’ve been using Hookpad for a while now and it’s been very helpful, I’m very grateful. The virtual instruments sound good. But since I like making rock and metal songs, there’s something that’s really giving me a hard time and that’s the “rock guitars”. They sound completely unrealistic, especially when they do palm muting. There’s no effect that can remove the curse. I’d like to know if you’ve considered or if there’s a possibility of improving or re-recording them. Thanks.
The electric guitars are the easiest to deal with. Just use the clean option and then add effects elsewhere. Just export it as MIDI and load it up in a DAW and you have access to the whole range of pedals and effects.
They are never going to be able to have guitar sounds that will please everyone.
Hi and thank you for your request. The problem with the Rock Guitars is that right now the Amp Simulation and the distortion is happening at the wrong place of the signal chain. As Hookpad is running in the browser we can’t really use any effects as this would use too much processing power. So every effect like reverb etc. was added before bouncing the instruments’ samples which is kind of ok for eqs, reverb and delays but isn’t great for distortion.
The thing that’s missing with our Rock Guitars are the transitions between the notes when one palm mute is still ringing and the next note is already plucked. Those are the moments when the distortion does its magic and really glues everything together. But for this to happen in Hookpad we would have to create all the samples raw and then add the Amp Simulation after our playback engine has transformed the midi notes to audio. Unfortunately we don’t have the resources to this in Hookpad, so even with better samples, this part can’t be simulated and thus we won’t get that much more realism any time soon.
But as I’m a big metal head myself I’ll keep thinking about a better solution. Perhaps we could create a raw instrument without any amp simulation which you could bounce in solo and run through a sim your self. Would this help?
Regards!
Dennis
Yes, that’s a great idea. If they are realistic in their raw version, I will be able to place an effect on them. In another comment I was told to use the “clean” guitars, the problem is that the rock and metal samples don’t have a clean version. The good thing about Hookpad is that the chords, arpeggios and riffs are already done and they adapt to the song. If I had to place note by note it would be an ordeal. I hope you can carry out your idea, and thank you for taking users’ requests seriously.
Ok, then I’ll add this to my todo list. It might take a while but I think this could be something useful. Perhaps I can even create something that doesn’t sound too bad in Hookpad but can be re-amped.
A while back I made a request for rock guitars to be read as the full chord, and not as a single note, when exported to MIDI. Maybe you could solve both problems at once by creating rock guitars that had two versions, distorted and clean. Then users could use the distorted version for demos inside Hookpad, and the clean version for export and putting better effects on outside. Thanks Dennis