The Strategy library is based on a Fender© Stratocaster© electric guitar.
This guitar has been used by countless musicians for over 60 years and is still one of the most sought after guitar instruments.
It features 3 single coil pickups (bridge, middle and neck) that give it a very unique and tweakable tone. We were able to sample all three pickups separately and give access not only to the 5 positions available on the real instrument, but you can also control each volume separately and even mix the 3.
It comes with a set of 10 very realistic effects and 8 different amps modelled after most of the best guitar amps on which you can choose exactly how you set the microphones, providing you with all the necessary tools to shape its sound exactly like you want.
It features our powerful strum engine, pattern maker and song builder available in our other guitar libraries like the Sunbird or the GD-6, making the Strategy library the perfect tool to create accompaniments or solos.
We sampled it very deeply, all frets of all strings with upstrokes, downstrokes, round robins, releases, staccatos, mutes, palm mutes, hand blocks, slides, hammer ons, pull offs, retriggers, fretnoises and other articulations. All of this detail allows us to reproduce the real playing of a guitar player, and easily.
There are basically 4 modes, the solo mode that allows to play melodies, the chord mode that helps playing strums or picking, the patterns mode that does all of the strumming or picking for you and the MIDI mode that allows you to use your preferred midi guitar controller.
Strumming machine
The Strategy can strum, in various ways, up, down, muted, in legato and allows finger picking. Everything is modeled after meticulously analyzing thousands of real chords played by guitarist. Every aspect of the strumming engine can be tweaked to achieve the sound you want.
The chord recognition engine helps converting any chord you play on your keyboard to a real guitar voicing. Recognizing a chord is made through a database of thousands of standard chords, and you can edit every chord or even add new ones.
The chord hammers feature lets you play left hand hammer ons and pull offs while strumming or picking.
Realistic patterns
The patterns mode is very similar to the chord mode, the chord recognition engine works the same way, but this time the triggers are not simple strums anymore, they are a set of patterns that you can loop, adapt to the tempo or the metrics, change the velocity in real time using a controller, synch to your host, add groove to.
You can choose from a large selection of patterns or create your own using the pattern maker and assign them to each trigger key to create a full song in a few clicks.
Pattern Maker
Creating realistic guitar patterns has never been easier. You can create strumming, picking, or finger picking patterns in seconds and even make them of an infinite size.
We even made the sharing of these patterns easy, just save them and send them to other users, the database can only grow!
FX section
The most popular FX associated with a strat guitar are available, Chorus, Phaser, Flanger, Wah (manual and automatic), Tremolo, Delay, Rotary speaker, Tube saturation, tone stack, spring reverb, and a set of 8 known amps with different mic settings.
You have everything you need to tweak the sound to your preferences and we included some presets to get you started.
Song Builder
The song builder panel is the feature that will let you compose songs extremely quickly. Sometimes playing a series of chords can be complicated, especially if you are not an advanced keyboardist. The song builder allows you to decide which chord will be triggered when selecting only one note. For example pressing only the C will be recognized as a C Major. You can repeat the operation for the whole 12 notes of the octave and this way construct your songs and play them easily.
We included a selection of presets to give song ideas, chord progressions, modes or chord types.
Combine this with the patterns and pressing two keys at the same time is enough to play a song.
Solo mode, automatic hand position
The solo mode is very simple, and is suited to play melodies. It uses a smart hand position system that decides for you where a real guitarist would put his hand and which string he would play. A piano only has one middle C for example, but a guitar offers a few different options and our script will decide it for you. You can of course deactivate it and use only the first hand position if you want.
The Strategy features our powerful legato engine that will automatically trigger legato, hammer ons, pull offs, or slides and the legato distance will define the maximum interval in which the legato will apply.
You also have access to key switches to play palm mutes, harmonics (flageolets) or even percussion sounds and control the legato engine.
Preferences / Pickup mixing
The 3 pickups (neck middle and bridge) were recorded separately allowing you to use the built in 5 positions switch or to even use them all at the same time with different volumes.
On top of this, you can use the doubling feature that allow you to play two guitars at the same time.
For each playing mode, you can decide if you want to play with a pick or with fingers.
In the preferences panel, every aspect of the library can be tweaked, the release, fret and pre-notes volumes, as well as the midi response of your keyboard.
MIDI guitar
If you own a MIDI guitar and want to expand its sound capabilities, then the MIDI mode is for you, all you need to do is select the 7 different MIDI chanels your guitar outputs and you are ready to play.
installation: move the R2RUVI file from the R2R folder to C: \ ProgramData \ UVI \ R2R