Sample Logic HeartBeat Guitars
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars
If you are looking for some instantly inspiring modern rock guitar and bass riffs and grooves to drop into a song or soundtrack project, Sample Logic’s HeartBeat Guitars might have you covered. HeartBeat Guitars is designed for the full version of Kontakt (but also provides all the sample content as REX loop files), and includes nearly 3300 individual performance samples that are organised into 209 construction‐kit‐style Kontakt presets.
The library format is very straightforward. Each of those 209 presets contains a set of related guitar or bass performances, each initially mapped to an individual MIDI key for triggering. The performances themselves are generally several bars in length. As you trigger a specific sample, its naming information indicates useful performance, key and chord details. In use, you can simply trigger individual loops from a construction kit to build an extended performance ‐this is mix‐ready modern rock guitar made about as easy as it gets.
The sound‐design options are equally simple in use. The row of rotary controls under the main waveform display provide pitch‐shifting, attack/release adjustment, low cut and high cut (with modulation if required), three user‐selectable FX slots, plus Driver and Sweetener FX (the latter two are multi‐effects providing saturation and polish to the sound). The Edit All Samples switch (located top right) lets you apply these controls globally to all samples within the loaded preset or, for extra flexibility, to configure different settings for each individual sample. Finally, via the mini keyboard graphic located on the right beneath the waveform display, you can take the last played sample and map it chromatically across the full MIDI note range. If you want more options with a specific sample such as the option to slice the loops then you can, of course, simply import the REX files into your DAW and get creative.
With such a straightforward approach, HeartBeat Guitars is incredibly easy to use.
Ease Of Use
With such a straightforward approach, HeartBeat Guitars is incredibly easy to use and, once you find a combination of performances that work together to inspire an initial idea, it’s easy to then build other arrangement elements around them. The streamlined UI does mean that the library’s value to a potential purchaser lies very firmly with the sampled performances. To my ears at least, these are very well done — modern, plenty of attitude, but not (thankfully) too much by way of pyrotechnics; good as song building blocks or hooks but without getting in the way if you wanted to layer a lead or vocal part over them. There are useful examples to audition on Sample Logic’s website.
Simple in both concept and use, if you need some cool modern rock and bass guitar performances to kickstart a song or scoring project, but don’t have a suitable guitarist to hand, Sample Logic’s HeartBeat Guitars might have just the loop‐based ammunition you need.