LaPaz E-String

Hey hey! My name is Hidde, and this here is my first go at sampling an instrument.

A few years ago my younger brother received a LaPaz guitar for his birthday after telling us he wanted to learn guitar. In the end, however, he rarely ever played the thing. Seeing this, I decided to adopt it myself, and though I still can’t play a lick, that doesn’t mean I can’t put it to use. I’d been interested in the idea of sampling an instrument since first joining Pianobook little over a month ago, and I thought that the guitar would make a perfect first attempt.
I think that, in some serendipitous way, my lack of skill at both the guitar, and at sampling may have been a boon in this case. As this was my first time sampling something, I thought I’d give myself less of a challenge by one sampling one string (the lower E-String), sampling only one octave of said string, and using those recordings to make a pad like sound. I ended up making three presets, utilizing four to seven round robins per note -the fluctuation came from me messing up notes, redoing them, and later thinking they sounded fun anyway. I did make sure to only include four in the more “vanilla” preset. Each recording did have noise reduction on it, but with me sitting so close to the mic, and being very inexperienced in recording in general, there’s still a fair bit of background foley from me shuffling around, or my headphone cord tapping against the guitar. I actually quite liked how that foley sounded in context of the final pads, so I decided to keep it in -gives the pads a bit more texture in my opinion.
As I have neither Kontakt nor Logic, I was only able to make a DecentSampler version. I included a lowpass filter and reverb knob, as those were the only ones I was confident I could make.
In the end, I’m really pleased with the result! I hope it can be of some use to you guys too!

Cheers!
Hidde