 This is the China Gu Qin, a new virtual instrument from Ample Sound and as well as being beautiful, I think it's also very versatile. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The Gu Qin, and I think I'm saying that correctly, is a traditional Chinese 7 stringed instrument and Ample Sound have released a virtual version of it today for us to play with. Before you say to me, hey Mike, I don't write traditional Chinese music, well, neither do I as it happens, but I actually think that this is pretty versatile. Let's take a look. Let's start off by getting a general feel for the sound of this instrument. Now I've been trying to educate myself via YouTube videos of the general sort of techniques and sounds that people use with this instrument and the first thing I notice is how they make use of these seven open strings. Let's have a listen to the sound of those. So they form a lot of the basis of this music I feel and then of course there's the use of, well I was going to say the fretted notes, but there's no actual frets on this, so the non open notes have a listen to those and you may have noticed at the end there this kind of slide up and that seems to be quite a common technique in the music of this instrument. Let's have a listen to that again. You may have noticed there at the end the use of our harmonic again seems to be relatively commonly used. Let's have a listen to those. Now a lot of these sort of sounds are available on ample sound instruments via key switches which give you access to various different articulations. Let's have a look at a few of those. So like all ample sound instruments we play our different articulations using key switches. You can see the various articulations over here on the left hand side and they are mapped to these keys at the bottom of the keyboard here which you can see are a little bit sort of coloured. Now for example if we play this low C we get our regular sustained sound you know just the normal sound of the instrument. Now remember early we had those sort of slides in the music I was doing that by holding down the first note as I played the second note. And then the harmonics that we played earlier we got that by pressing the C sharp key down here and further on from there the next one up we have here is a sort of a short tremolo so if you hit that and then play a note you get the tremolo note and then the regular note like so that can be quite useful. Then we've got some pairs of different effects so this is a slide in from below slide in from above that kind of thing we've got a legato slide here which is a bit longer and another one which goes in the other direction you get the idea of those some of the more interesting ones we've got I like this glissando one here have a listen that can be quite a useful effect I think like right at the beginning of a piece of music or at the end could be quite nice. Then up here we've got some different sort of phrases that you can play they're quite interesting have a listen all of those just by playing one note on the keyboard. Apart from the key switches which sort of change the way that the notes are being played we also have some special effects which are assigned to keys they're at the top of the keyboard you can see them here in green if we play those that sort of percussive sound there another one there strange ones like that this is quite nice So you know the combination of those key switches the sound effects etc really help you to make it sound more like a real instrument and I'd sort of encourage you to make use of them as much as possible now apart from that let's take a look at a few of the other features that we see here in the main interface so this instrument was actually recorded using five different microphones you can see those over here we can control the different ways they're configured with this button here but we can actually really create our own sounds using this mixer so obviously we can adjust the level of each microphone we can mute some of them if we want to or solo some and we can also EQ each of them individually you can see this EQ for microphone number one there so you can really sort of craft a sound there if you like using that mixer then over towards the right here we've got mixer controls for things like the different effects you know the release sounds all of that kind of thing there then we've got some buttons which relate to the way the instrument behaves okay so for this one here for example this is the playing mode now obviously an instrument like this like many stringed instruments has some restrictions you can't for example play two notes on the same string but using this button we can relax that restriction we can go over to keyboard mode for example and that enables us to sort of cheat with the sound of this i prefer it to be on instrument mode personally then we have this legato mode so remember earlier as we played one note we could slide up to another one just by holding the first one down well that button switches that off so you just you know playing them normally without the slide and then we have a button which relates to the way that the open strings are treated so playing the open strings is sort of a big part the sound of this instrument and in this mode i'm in at the moment we play open strings preferably when they're available okay for that particular note however we can change it to a partial mode so that open strings are only used on i think strings two to seven not on one to two and then you know we can sort of switch that off entirely so that you know it doesn't prefer to play open strings when possible at all then talking about sort of playing an open strings we've also got this key adjustment up here so again you know as they say in the tip here the sound of the open strings the timbre of them is really quite different to the press notes here so if you want to get more open strings available in different keys you can change the key over here okay so it sort of retunes those open strings so that there's always some available in the different keys now it's not always possible for us mere mortals to play all of these key switches while we're playing our piece of music and if you like me you'll very often find yourself in the piano roll of your door making fine adjustments to get just the articulations that you want now if you often find yourself doing that then you may find it easier to use the riffer feature we can get to that by pressing this button here and you can see the riffer here it's actually really quite straightforward to use each of the lines at the bottom here or the main lines here represent each of the strings so for example i want to play a note on this low string i can just click there to create the note i can then drag up and down to select which note on that string is going to be played i can change the duration of the note here then while i've got that note selected i can change various things about that note so the velocity for example here or maybe the articulation which is being used i can select that there so that makes that sort of pretty straightforward if you're doing this kind of programming to set up each of your notes so those are the notes on each of those strings and then of course we've got three other lines here this one for example to select some different effects so i've just inserted a note there and i can select the various different effects that i want to play there we also have these which are like glissando effects here that we can play or we can switch over to licks or that kind of thing there and then we also have control over our legato here i'll just put in a note if i can there you go and you can see as i slide up and down i can change the the various different legato types there okay so once you've done all of that and you've programmed in your piece of music you can of course play it here as well and then what's really really useful is we've got this button here we can actually drag this piece now out to our door it will go in there as midi with all of the you know extra notes for the articulations etc there for your piece of music and you may just find in the long run it's easier to use this to program pieces with lots of articulations than using the regular keyboard method if you like all ample sound instruments come with four main effects we can see the first one here this is a compressor very easy to use you set your threshold here you set your ratio like so over here then you've got attack and release over there on the right hand side we've also got a built-in EQ which works in very similar ways to the EQs that you're familiar with with other plugins we've also got this echo which is a kind of a delay stereo delay so we can set various properties for our left and right just delays over here so that can really add something to the sound and then finally we have this reverb section here which is normally switched on when you're playing this instrument out of the box and gives you that lovely reverb sound my first instinct with this instrument was that it was going to combine really well with traditional western orchestral instruments things like strings and woodwind etc have a quick listen to this demo which honestly it only took me about 10 minutes to make this demo but i think it turned out okay have a listen so i also wanted to see how this instrument combines with things like bass and drums so i pulled out my trusty ample bass p one of my favorite virtual basses you can find that on the ample sound website as well combined it with addictive drums and after about i don't know 10 or 15 minutes or so i came up with this demo let me know in the comments down below what you think how well do they combine so i'm interested to hear what you think is this a versatile instrument what kind of music do you think you would use it on let me know in the comments down below now one of the more unusual instruments in the ample sound collection is the ethno banjo i made a video all about that and you can watch it right here