More Realistic Acoustic Guitar Sounds

I absolutely love HookPad and enjoy playing/composing many hours daily. My feature request is… well, I’m wondering if there are any plans to make the guitars sound more realistic? I find the acoustic guitar sounds are especially unusable. Would be so cool if it sounded more like an actual guitar. And maybe a few more strum patterns as well? Is it possible?

I don’t believe that they are adding any sounds at all but are just using the system midi sounds. While they could do that eventually, I just export the midi file and load it up in a DAW where I have other instruments at my disposal. I have been using Cakewalk and Bandlab since I am cheap and they are free. They have some of their own virtual instruments and you can download more in Cakewalk.

Hey 348, thank you for your great feedback.

Unlike in a DAW we have very restricted resources as we run Hookpad in a browser. The samples of each instrument have to be downloaded and the whole app is restricted to run only on one thread of your cpu. With more resources you could add more samples and get more realistic instruments. Native Instruments’ Strummed Acoustic Guitar uses 8.5 GB of Samples, we use around 4 MB. Nevertheless I try my best to get the most out of it.
Currently the strumming is generated by a simple algorithm which plucks the different strings one after another. With the current update to the ToneJS framework under the hood we can now work with Midi patterns so at the moment I’m overhauling the drums to make them more realistic. I didn’t think about overhauling the guitars as well but your absolutely right. With the new possibilities we should be able to achieve a better result. Perhaps I’ll find a way to capture a midi performance of a real guitar player. I’ll have to think about it and it will take a while but yes, there is still room for improvement.
Thank you very much for the idea!

Dennis

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As someone used to giant multi-sampled instruments, the sounds are pretty terrible :wink:
But it’s not the size that matters. Modules like the Roland JV-1080 were on countless hit songs and are still used today. It managed 384 patches (including full GM set) with only 8Mb of waveforms and a 66Mhz processor. :man_shrugging:

As for the guitars: arpeggio, fingerstyle etc. are useful, but it’s frustrating not to have any control over the speed or direction of the pattern. Adding half/double-speed and descending arpeggio/finger style variations would be easy yet allow much greater variety.

IMO, the ideal solution is MIDI output support using the Web MIDI API which combined with a freeware MIDI loopback driver could allow using any virtual instrument (+ MIDI FX) inside a DAW.