 So Ample Sound have just released their slide lap steel instrument. I'm going to start this video off with a 30 second demo that I made with it today starting now. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. So actually everything you heard in that demo was from Ample Sound. We had three instances of the slide lap steel in there as well as their Martin guitar, a great acoustic guitar and also a Fender Jazz Bass from them as well. Also worth checking out from Ample Sound. But we're going to focus on this plugin today starting off with the basic sound and the key switches. So normally with an instrument like this, I like to start off with the sound as it is out of the box without doing anything to it. But I have to confess with this one, you do have to work just a little bit at it to get it sounding how you probably want it to sound. I'll explain what I mean. Here's to how it sounds out of the box. Not very inspiring. And that's because with this particular instrument, we associate it with particular articulations or different ways of playing it, which gives it its character if you like. Now with Ample Sound Instruments, like many other virtual instruments, we achieve this through what we call key switches. So it's a special group of keys on the keyboard, which are set aside to change the way that the instrument is played, often called articulations. So you can see them on the interface here at the bottom part of the keyboard. These are keys which have those sort of blue markers above them. They all create a different articulation. Now I think the most important of these is on E0. I'm going to start off with that one because I think it creates one of the most useful sounds with this instrument. And that is a legato slide. If we press this key and then press one note after another, we get that slide here. And that's definitely associated with the character of this instrument. So I wanted to point that one out first. We'll take a look at some more now, though, starting off right at the bottom with C0. This is just our basic sustained sound, which we heard earlier. As I said, not very inspiring, but you definitely need to use it. You can't be sliding with every single note. So you definitely need your straightforward note. But when you mix up with the articulations, you'll get some great sounds. One of the great sounds is on C sharp. Yeah, if I press that, we get some harmonics. Very, very nice indeed. Very, very pretty. Moving on from there on to D. This is where we get the first of our slide types. If we press this and then play a note, you hear that slide down to the note, yeah. Now interestingly with this one, if we play the note first and then the key switch, we get a slide up here. So interesting. Now it won't always work. So a particular note. So if we play this one, for example, this is an open string, we can't slide up from that. And that's authentic to the instrument. If you wanted to slide up from that particular note, you would need to play in a different position. We'll talk about that later. But if you do get this and try it out and you think, hang on, that's not working. That's intentional. It's not supposed to be working. Okay. That's just the nature of this particular instrument. So it's very authentic in that way. But with many notes, we will get that slide. Now with the next one up, with D sharp, we get the same but in reverse. So we'll play the key switch first. And then the note, we get that slide up. That's probably very useful to you. Especially if you're playing kind of bluesy stuff. Now interestingly, if we play or the same again, I should say if we play the note first and then play the key switch, we get that slide down. Yeah. Now these, when we do it in that order, when we get that sort of, we play the note first and then the key switch, the harder we play the key switch determines how quick the slide is. So we get a quicker slide, like so if we play that harder. Moving on from there, if we go up to E, that's the key switch we talked about before. So our legato slide. And then moving up from there to F, if we play that and then play a note, we get a lovely vibrato. Moving up from there to F sharp, we get sort of buzz on the end of a note. I love that because it just makes it sound imperfect if you like. It gives that sort of authentic sound. A little bit of fret buzz kind of going on there. Moving up from there, when we go to G, we get a really interesting change now. The next couple of fascinating because these enable chords, but you'll see that when I press that G, this kind of bottleneck slide appears there. We're going to start to play some chords. Now I'm going to move my mouse over this key switch because this gives you a good idea of what's going to happen. We get different types of chords depending on what octave we're playing in. Now I should mention, by the way, we're not actually going to play chords with our fingers. We're just going to play one note at a time, depending on which in which octave we play, we get a different chord. So down in the lower octaves, we get power chords. Now you'll notice that it did a slide into that and that's because I played it quite hard. But if we play it a little bit softer, we don't get the slide yet. Very useful indeed. So we get power chords down there. Next octave up, we get our minor chord, just a basic minor chord. Next octave up, we get minor sevenths. What a beautiful chord that is, hey. And then finally, another beautiful chord, minor ninth. Just love those chords. Now, of course, we want some major chords as well. So we achieve those with the next key switch up, which is G sharp there. Again, I'll hover over that. And this is where we get our major chords. A little bit different this time. So in the lower register, we get just our basic major chord. Next octave up, we get a major chord again, but just an octave higher. Next octave up, we get a major seventh. Another favorite chord of mine. Listen to that again with a slide. Beautiful. And then the next octave up, very important chord in all kinds of different types of music, a dominant seventh. Again, with the slide. So those are the major key switches. Now I did mention earlier about different playing positions. We got one final key switch, which is up here on C sharp one. Okay, this is one where we press this key and then you'll see there's a bunch of sort of yellow keys appear there. Those set the position that we're going to play in. So if we press that and then just one of these lower ones, we start off in the zero position. And as I press different keys and succession, you can see it's moving up up here. Now this is important on this instrument in more than one way. But first of all, it's looking at the first way it's important. Just like guitars, it changes the sort of tone. So if we were playing this, yeah, just that little harmony there in the lower end of the instrument, then we play the top end. You can hear there's quite a different change. We'll go see if we can go higher. Quite a different change in tone there. So there's the same two notes I'm playing, but just because they're playing it on different strings, they have a different sound to them. Now the other reason why this would become important is because sometimes you don't want to be playing or you can't play certain harmonies or certain harmony combinations in particular positions. So if I play these, you hear some harmony that works there? That one works. Next one up. What's happening there? It's not quite happening. If you see, it's just playing one note quickly after the other. And that's because when you're playing down that position, it's not possible on this instrument to do that. So you would have to move up to a slightly different position and then you can play that harmony. And again, like I said earlier, some of the slides won't work when you're starting off with open strings. So again, you would use this same functionality to change it so that you can achieve those slides. So you may also have noticed that there's some other keys which have colored markers above them right at the top of the keyboard here. And those are mostly special effects. So if we play those. Some great little sounds there. Now we can control the level of those with this little mixer section here. So you can see the effects volume is controlled there. We can also control the level of the release effects and some other things there. So there's a little basic mixer there for those things. Just to go through the other elements of this interface here, starting over on the left here, we've got a different mode there. So stereo or DI mode there. And then we've got a little mixer so we can blend the DI and the stereo sounds in there as well as a master volume there. We've got a pan control there. And then we've also got a doubling feature. It's switched off at the moment. So our instrument at the moment sounds like this. But if we switch on doubling, it's sort of like when you record an instrument twice and then pan each one of them left and right, you get this sound. If you're listening in stereo, especially with headphones on, you'll hear that right away. And then we can control the width of that with this control here. So I'll make it really wide or narrow, really wide again. So that's that. And then we have this capo control here or capo. Do you say capo or capo? Let me know in the comments. I'm sure you will let me know either way. So I'm going to say capo for this video. As you can see, as we sort of move this up and down, it's like putting a capo on the instrument. So it's like a transpose feature if you like. But it's really cool. It means that you can play the sort of same notes on the keyboard, but different pictures going to come out and it's going to change the sound of it as well because it's going to be playing it further up the neck. So that's very, very handy. And that's basically the main features of the interface. Well, by the way, if you're finding this video useful, could you go ahead and hit that like button for me? Do it right away so that you don't forget. And if you do like this kind of content, make sure you subscribe and ring the bell so that you get notified about all of my other wonderful videos here on YouTube. Now let's get back to this wonderful video. So apart from this regular way of playing the instrument with your keyboard, there's also another way or another feature that we get with Ample Sound Instruments. And that's called Riffer. If we switch over to Riffer here, you can see it. And I'll just quickly hit this play button here. You can hear this little demo. Now this is a very different way of approaching our sort of writing or creating with the instrument. If we look at this closely, we can see that we have a line for every single string here on the left hand side. So one, two, three, four, five, six strings there. Then we have a line for effects. And then we have another line for chords. So it's a different way of approaching it here. We're setting which string we're playing the note on and then we can set the actual note itself by sliding up and down. And then we can set all kinds of attributes with that note. So we can set the pitch there as well. We can set the velocity. We can set the length of the note. And then also those articulations that I was talking about earlier, we can set those here as well. You may find this a more sort of straightforward way of creating. Now when you've actually created a riff here, you can either go ahead and trigger it with a note on the keyboard. If we go all the way back to our keyboard here, right at the top here, sorry, this one, we can actually trigger our riff from our keyboard. So you could just set it playing just like that. Or you can actually drag this out as MIDI if you like onto your track in your DAW. So it's just a probably a more straightforward way of actually creating parts for some people depends how your brain works and how you like to do things. I personally just I'm quite happy to use the keyboard for it and then do some editing. But I know that many people absolutely love riff, ripper, ripper even get the name right Mike. Let's move on. So like many other amp or sound products, we get a nice selection of amps and effects going over to the amp section here. We start off with this toy type of amp, which is the default amp gives us a fairly clean sound. A few different ones here, Fender style amp there, moving on a jazz kind of thing. Even with some, we get the heavier amps that we would get with the amp pull sound guitar. So this is a Marshall style head here. If we play it, it's crazy, isn't it? I wonder if that's copyrighted. Not sure. Anyway, so we get a selection of heads, heavier ones there as well. And who's to say what, you know, which amp you should or shouldn't use depends on what sound you're after and a selection of cabinets, the ability to change the microphones around as well. We normally get with the amp or sound guitars, you get it with this one as well. They all sound fantastic. It's great to have them there. Moving on, we also have a selection of effects as well. So as usual, we have a compressor there. We have an equalizer. We also have an echo, which is a kind of delay type effect. And we have reverb as well. Now I want to mention that this instrument is normally going to be sold for $119 US dollars. But at the moment, Ample Sound are selling it on their website for $89 US dollars. So if you're interested in this at all, then now may be the best time to buy. You can follow the link in the description down below for that. I'd also love to hear your comments in the comments down below. Let me know what you thought about this instrument, whether you think you could make good use of it. Have you got any particular pieces of music that you're working on that you think you could use this in? I would love to hear from you on that. Thank you so much for joining me in this video and I'll see you in the next video.