We spent the weeks since the release of Acou6tics working on the 1.1 update, which adds quite a lot of new features and improvements to the playback engine. Today we want to give you a short overview on what’s new and what has changed.

New Features:

 • Playback: Picking mode:

If you turn the Strum Speed knob all the way to the left, the engine switches into picking mode.This means that chords are no longer automatically voiced as guitar chords and makes it very easy to switch between full chord strumming and picking.

 • Legato: Quick controls added to the main page:

When switching to legato mode the strum settings knobs are replaced by legato settings knobs. This, for example, allows you to quickly change or automate the crossfade and sample start of the legato samples, which can help you to make a legato line fit perfectly and to achieve the best possible realism.

 • Legato: Play Slide:

The new Play Slide keyswitch (G#0 in legato mode) allows you to connect two notes via slide on any string. To play a slide, press the Play Slide forced keyswitch and keep it pressed, play a note, also keep it pressed and play another note. As long as the slide is physically possible on the fretboard, the engine will now play a slide. The faster you play the notes the faster the slide will be.

 • Legato: Engine and sample update:

The legato engine has been rewritten from scratch and most of the Legato Setup page settings have been changed as well. To get a full overview over all the new settings please refer to the updated manual, which covers all the changes. One especially nice feature of the new legato engine should be mentioned here: it’s now possible to mix polyphonic playing and legato lines. You now can, for example, play a chord, keep it pressed, play a trill and switch back to polyphonic playing. To switch to the new mode go to Advanced Setup → Legato Setup and disable Force Monophonic.

Additionally to the engine update, all legato samples have been recut and the best possible start for each sample has been set, which helped to improve the legato playing a lot.

 • Realism: Hit next string noise:

This simulates a rest-stroke, where the finger rests on the next string after plucking the string, which produces an additional attack sound and more punch. This is especially useful for the finger picked instruments, especially when playing Flamenco for example, where this technique is used quite often. You can setup the volume, probability and at which velocity the additional noise is added by going to Advanced Setup → Noise Setup.

 • Realism: Bad notes:

This allows note buzz to be added at the beginning of a note. To setup the volume, probability, and when the buzz occurs (only at a higher velocities, for example), go to Advanced Setup → Noise Setup.

 • Sequencing: “By MIDI Channel” instruments update:

It’s now possible to mix by MIDI channel string positioning with auto detection. If the MIDI Channel is in the range of the strings, e.g. 1 to 6 or 11 to 16 (since the latter is how GuitarPro outputs the channels when exporting MIDIs) the engine places the note exactly on that string. If you set the MIDI Channel out of the range, e.g. 7 to 10, it uses auto positioning.

The way to work with this is the following:
   1.    Set your track MIDI Channel to any channel between 7 to 10 while working on your song,
          that way the “By MIDI Channel” – Instrument behaves just like the normal one.
   2.    When finished with your piece, mark all events in your track and set the MIDI Channel to
          any channel between 7 to 10.
   3.    Set your track MIDI Output to “omni”.
   4.    Now you can go through the track and tweak the string positioning whenever you feel like
          a certain string should be played by simply changing the MIDI channel for those notes
          to the string you want to play them on.

Note: There are two By MIDI Channel modes. One goes from 1 to 6 (MIDI channel 1 = lowest string, MIDI channel 6 = highest string) and one which goes from 6 to 1 (MIDI channel 6 = lowest string, MIDI channel 1 = highest string). The mode can be changed in Advanced Settings → String Setup.

Note: Obviously if using By MIDI Channel instruments, each instruments needs its own Kontakt instance (unless you want to double track, then you can use two instruments in one instance).

 • Other features, improvements & bug fixes

➔ Fix: Various smaller mapping issues fixed accross all instruments
➔ Fix: When rotating the User Chord-knob while playing back a MIDI track in a sequencer or playing live, sometimes a “Array out of range” error was displayed in the status bar of Kontakt
➔ Fix: 12 String loaded up in legato mode
➔ Improvement: The strum noises have been adjusted. Strumming in general should sound quite a bit more realistic and better now
➔ Improvement: All noise volumes Advanced Setup → Noise Setup now are at 75% per default. The difference to 100%, which was the old default value, has been compensated. So there now is more headroom to adjust those settings
➔ Feature: Play On String 6 to Play On String 1 forced keyswitches (starting at C-2) added and included in the default mapping. This is especially useful when using Acou6tics in a sequencer since it allows you to quickly force the engine to play on certain strings via keyswitch

Click here to download the Acou6tics 1.1 update.