It’s definitely a great guitar for metal and rock, though, and also for any other genres where a bright, raw sound is a good thing.
The lack of velocity layers, with only the sustain notes having two, is also not that realistic when playing notes with a wide dynamic range through a very clean amp. So, is there anything this guitar doesn’t sound good for? Well, sounding smooth and mellow is definitely not its strength, even if you use EQ to turn the treble down, so jazz or polished pop are cases where it’s much easier to do the job with a different guitar library. I tried replacing a guitar in a couple of projects I’m working on right now with the IBZ, and the sound immediately got a lot brighter and less polite.
SHREDDAGE II PITCH BEND FREE
Run through NUSofting’s DeepBoard effect (a classic free VST), it even does a decent imitation of an acoustic guitar. The muted samples of high strings are very useful for funk, too, as are many of the miscellaneous noises. The brightness and brashness also make it good for funk, and it’s lots of fun to throw an auto-wah (envelope-following filter) effect on it. When going through a clean amp, it can get plenty of twang, and the extended low range also lets you dip into tic-tac bass territory. One thing that sparked my interest, though, is reading a comment on the KVR forum that said this is a good guitar for country. The tremolo articulation definitely does raw black metal well. This is obviously suitable for metal, and testing IBZ I found myself digging up old Danzig and Darkthrone riffs that I probably haven’t played since the 90s. The lowest note on the lowest string is a G, which is only a minor third higher than the lowest note on a standard 4-string electric bass.
SHREDDAGE II PITCH BEND PLUS
There’s a pretty good amount of pick noise, especially for the hard sustains where you can even hear the pick smack into the neighboring (muted) string sometimes, plus release noises. All samples are recorded clean and direct, so there’s no pre-baked distortion, and the sound is consistently bright and aggressive across all the different articulations and across the whole fretboard. So, if there’s one thing this sample library gives you, it’s lots of different ways to play every note. Count four round robins for a lot of these articulations and add note release noises, and it’s easy to see why there are so many samples. The sustained notes are sampled in three versions: normal, hard, and with vibrato. There are also various scrapes, squeaks, slides and other noise effects. There are sustained, muted and staccato single notes and power chords (with up to six different degrees of muting from loose to very tight), pinch harmonics, harmonics, hammer-ons/pull-offs and tremolo notes. When sampling all 25 notes on each of the seven strings on this guitar with a variety of playing techniques, the number of samples multiplies pretty quickly. The samples are of a custom-built Ibanez 7-string guitar tuned to drop G.
Weighing in at more than 13,000 samples and 5 GB of disk space, Shreddage 2 IBZ ($139, or $119 for owners of Shreddage 2, $99 intro price) is a serious, big and detailed sample library for Kontakt and Kontakt Player, made with metal in mind.
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