 The Rickenbacker 330 Electric Guitar, a legendary character guitar from the 1960s, which has now been made available for use in your productions by Amplesound. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Pete Townsend, Paul Weller, Johnny Ma, The Edge, all players of the Rickenbacker 330 Electric Guitar. If you bought this guitar at the moment, it would likely cost you a few thousand dollars. However, it can virtually be yours via a new plugin from Amplesound at an absolute fraction of that cost. We'll talk later on in this video about a great deal you can get on this virtual instrument at the moment. But first of all, I want to let you know that at the beginning of this video, all of the guitar work you heard in the demo was created using this plugin. So let's dive in and take a look at the beginning of this video. We heard this guitar in its most basic state using the sustain sound. I played a few arpeggios and it sounded like this and when we're playing arpeggios like that, it's reasonably easy to get an authentic sound. After all, we're just playing actual recordings or samples of an actual Rickenbacker 330. We're triggering each of those recordings when we press the notes on our keyboard, yeah? Now when we are playing arpeggios, just a basic sound like that, as I say, we can recreate an authentic sound. But on the guitar, we do much more than play arpeggios, of course. There's many ways in which guitarists express themselves with articulations on the guitar. Different ways of playing the notes and different things we can do to the notes. So we need to have articulations available to us. If we're going to try and fool the listener that this is a real guitar. Now there's a few articulations available in all amp or sound guitars, most of them the same across from one to the other. There can be slight differences as we'll see in a moment. We can see them all down here with these icons, but we can also play them on our actual piano keyboard. When we press them, it's going to change the sound of the guitar in some way. So these are called key switches. Let's just quickly go through what they are right now. We had the sustained one, which we already heard. There's also natural harmonics. We've also got a palm mute. I use that in the intro. Yeah, and then we've got a slide in. Really nice that. Then we've got a legato slide. This is where we play one note and then play another one afterwards. It was slide from one to the other. Now note there that when we hear this, we hear the sound of the frets being rolled over with the finger. Okay. It's not like doing a pitch bend or something like that. We're actually hearing the individual notes in between. Yeah. It's really important that adds to the authenticity. We also have a hammer on that's where you just sort of play one note. You actually pick one note and then you play another one without picking. And then we also have this. This is different with this particular instrument. I haven't seen it in the other Ample Sound plugins. I haven't played all of them, but I haven't seen it in the others. So Morden is another kind of articulation we've got here. Have a listen. Yeah. It's just like a little kind of a trill effect. Yeah. It could be a real time saver that rather than programming something like that in using sort of hammer-ons and things, you can just play it there. Very, very handy indeed. Now one really important key switch in my mind is this one here at C sharp. And we use this to set the actual hand position. We can see the hand position currently up here. It's the guitars being played around about the 14th fret, okay? That will automatically happen as we play, but we can also set it manually. So if we press this key switch, you'll see that some of the other keys turn yellow here and that is how we select our hand position. So I'll just press it and press a position and you can see that we move down to the zero position there. I'll just do a few others. You can see the hand position is moving around. This is really important on the guitar. With different hand positions, different things are actually possible, okay? And also it does change the sound of notes because I don't know if you know this, but the same note can be played in various places on a guitar and it will sound slightly different in tone even though it's the same pitch. So for example, I can play a high E here. Yeah. And that's currently being played on the open E string, the highest pitched E string that is. Now I'll change the position here to say the second position there. I'll play it again. Now that same note is now being played on another string on the B string. So listen to the two. Oops, sorry. Yeah. And another one again is being played on the G string there. So we get a different tone with different positions. If you're going to be programming guitar parts, it's really important to make use of these in my opinion to get the most authentic sound. Now some of the other things you can do apart from just play the notes on the keyboard is actually you've got some sound effects up here and all of that kind of thing can add to the authenticity as well. Now in the sort of second part of my demo where there's bass and drums and things came in, I used a number of different methods, different articulations. I also moved the hand position to help with the authenticity of the sound. Let's have a listen to that again without the drums and the bass. You can hear in isolation. I haven't got any effects or not meant just some reverb switched on it, but not loads of effects or anything. And have a look and you can see the articulations being used. You'll see the hand positions moving. You'll hear some effects being used as well. So you get the idea there, especially when that's in a mix. It can sound really sort of authentic indeed. And I'm really loving the tone of this particular plug-in, this Rickenbacker. Now there are some other controls on here which I'll briefly go through. We've got some rough sort of mixer controls so we can mix the DI sound, the stereo sound. We can also mix things like our effects in as well and control the volume of those. We also have a pan control here. Now importantly, we also have a doubling control. Often when we're recording guitars, we will make two recordings of the guitar and pan one left and pan the other one right. Okay. And we get a really nice wide spread. To save you doing that, we have this doubling feature here. So we'll switch that on and then actually let's switch it off and hear it without the doubling first. Now let's switch it on and just turn it up a little bit. Now, especially if you're listening on headphones, you're really going to hear that it's a lovely wide sound. Now the thing we can do, this sort of relates to that sort of hand position is set the capo position. OK, so this is like putting a capo or capo as some people say in different parts of the world on the guitar. Now this is like a transpose feature. But remember, because we're forcing the guitar to be played up above that, then we're going to get the authentic tone of the guitar as it's being played up in that position. OK, so that's what the capo does there. So it's a little bit more sophisticated than just using transpose in your door or something like that. OK, so really, really handy that that's there. All of these things when you use all of these features will add to the authenticity of the sound. But another really important feature in terms of changing the sound is amplification. This is the Ample Sound 65 Delight, a new amp which comes with this new Rick and Bakker guitar. And of course, we can change the sound by using the controls on the amp. We've got, you know, treble, middle bass here. We've also got an overdrive section or high gain section here as well. That's going to make it a lot more gritty, but we can swap out the amp itself. So at the moment, we're using this amp and it sounds like this. If we move over to take this one, we get a different tone again, then we've got this one. And then some more like high gain stuff, maybe not so suitable for this guitar, but it could sound good. I mean, not so much for this guitar, but maybe just that guitar part. So we can change the amp, you know, the amp sound like that by choosing different models. OK, now the other thing that we can do is change the way that this amplifier is virtually sort of mic'd up and things. If we click on this button up here, we'll go over here. We can see the amp now. It's got a couple of microphones on it. We can swap out those microphones for some other sort of famous ones. Yeah. So this one here at the moment, we'll just swap it out. You can see a few choices there. There's some famous condenser microphones, some ribbon microphones, et cetera, et cetera. So we can swap those out and then we can mix all of that over here using this mixer control. We can mix in the room sound, the DI sound of the guitar, the sound of the amp itself there so we can really craft our own sound in the same way, both a guitarist and a recording engineer would. Now, one of the things I did to the guitar in the demo was to apply some compression. And for that, I use the built in compressor, which comes with this particular plugin. You can see it working here. Now, this was primarily to control some of the loudest strums, which I had later on in the piece, which were kind of poking out a little bit and were a bit piercing. Now, I could have just reduced the velocities of those strums, but I did like the tone I was getting at those higher velocities. So I just wanted the volume to be down. So that's why I use this compressor. I also use the built in EQ, which you can see working here just to add a little bit of glassiness to the 2K range there and also to control the low end of things, stop that getting too muddy. I use the built in echo feature as well, which I sort of think of more as a delay. Now, this was working on the left and right channels. As you can see here, you can set different timings for the left and right channels. You can blend them together and also had this in sync with the tempo of my door. OK, just to make sure that those repeats were in time with the music. And finally, I also use the built in reverb, very simple to use. You just set different room sizes here. You can set up the size over here as well, pre delay, etc. Now, all of these effects are used at least in all of the amp or sound plugins that I've used. I've got a feeling they are at least on all the version three versions of all of their plugins, really handy that they're built in like this. And they're all just good enough so that you can adapt them really well without being too complex. So I created my demo just by playing the notes on the keyboard. Yeah, like so, you know, playing the key switches and then just recording that in my door where I could actually edit my performance on the piano roll view, which I think almost all doors actually have. And I like to work in that particular way, but that might not suit you. OK, it might not be your way of thinking about things. So it's nice that ample sound do provide some different methodologies for creating performances. One of the things you can do is go over to the strums, sorry, to the riffer feature over here. This is a different sort of way of looking at things. Each of the first six lines here that we can see represent a string on the guitar. This is very much like tablature. OK. And here we can just input a note for that string. So I'll just input a note there. And if I drag up and down, I can select the actual pitch or the fret position for that string. So we're doing things on a string by string basis. We can adjust the duration like so, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one of the things that we can do. Another thing we can do is insert whole chords. So if we go down to this line down here, so these first six lines are the strings on the guitar, but these last a little bit different. If we go down to this one, we can put in a strum. So I'll just do that. There's a C major chord. I can change its duration there. And also I can drag up and down to change the chord itself. And you can see that that chord has appeared there. So that's one other way of inputting things there. And we can also add our effects yet. So. And as well as those effects, if we do have a note in there like so, then we can change the articulations. We can change, say, the sustain here to a palm mute. We can, you know, put in slide in, slide out, all the different things that we had available to us before. So we can, this is just a really different way of inputting performances that may suit you and your way of thinking. Now, one of the things which is sort of more difficult to do, and I'll just get rid of all of those, one of the things that's more difficult to do with my method and with this in a way is strumming. OK, strumming, if you want to get it to sound good, can be quite time consuming. Now, if you just want a really quick result with strumming, if it's just in there in the mix and you don't need it to be particularly detailed or authentic, then you can make use of the strummer feature here. So the thing that we're looking at here in this area is we're looking at the actual strum pattern, this current pattern. We've got different patterns that we can choose. And you can see there's different sort of strum articulations. If you like, there's down strokes, there's up strokes. You can play different notes, different strings individually to create arpeggios in with it as well. With this current pattern, it's sounding like this. Very standard kind of a strum pattern. Now, it's playing a C major chord over there because we've got C major selected. We could select a different chord. And we can change what type of chord it is there. So that's a D minor chord at the moment. You can select the different types there. OK, so you can set up the chords that you're using in your song. And then you can actually play all of this on your actual keys. OK, so you can play this performance, switch from one pattern to another, using different keys. So yeah, strummer is another great way of just quickly getting things going with your particular song. And the third methodology we have is not so much a way of sort of playing things, but a way of importing performances because we also have this tab view as well. So if we go over to the tab view, we can actually import some particular types of files in here, OK, some tab files of a few different types. And you can import those directly in here and then play them from within the plug-in itself. OK, so some different ways of controlling this instrument. Now, if you head over to the Ample Sound website at the moment and I think you should, you'll see that there's a winter sale on. That includes this new Rick and Barker guitar that we've been looking at in today's video. So if we head up to the Purchase tab here, you will see that currently, let's just scroll down a little, you will see that currently this particular guitar that's right at the top there should be $119. They're selling it for $89. That's incredibly good value for a plug-in of this quality, I've got to tell you. Now, I'm also going to invite you to listen to the demo at the beginning again, but also this time, why don't you have a listen to the bass guitar because in the demo, I was using one of Ample Sound's bass guitar. I'll just show you here. It's the ABP, the Fender Precision Bass. I use this on a lot of my tracks, one of my favorite bass sounds. That is currently $95, OK? I can't stress how useful this plug-in could be to you. So if you want to save a little bit of money, then I would think about snatching that one as well. Don't forget to follow the link which is down in the description below. Let me know in the comments down below if you're thinking about adding this plug-in to your shopping list or maybe you've already bought it before the video even ended. And why wouldn't you, while these plug-ins are at such a great price? While you're checking out the prices on Ample Sound's webpage, why don't you take a look at their Strat Virtual Instrument? I made a video about that right here.