Spicy Guitar

Every other plugin on this list is sample-based. Spicy Guitar is the exception — it’s physically modeled. Two French developers, Pierre-André Aebischer and Benoît Dumoulin, built it on a custom synthesis engine that generates guitar tones in real time instead of playing back samples. The whole plugin is about 10 MB in size and includes nine guitar body types (folk, classical, flamenco, jumbo, gypsy), nylon- and steel-string options, and five playing techniques (bend, vibrato, palm muting, harmonics, legato).

The built-in chord detection is the fun part here. You can play a piano-style chord on your MIDI keyboard, and Spicy Guitar translates it into a realistic guitar voicing with strum-up and strum-down options. There’s also a per-string MIDI mode if you want tighter control over each string. Unfortunately, Spicy Guitar hasn’t been updated since November 2019. I tested it on Windows, and the 64-bit VST2 build still loads cleanly in DAWs that accept VST2 (FL Studio, Reaper, Cubase, Studio One).

On macOS, it comes as 32/64-bit Intel VST2 and AU only, with no native Apple Silicon build, and the Mac builds are unstable on Monterey and later. If you’re on a recent Mac, I think it’s better to skip this one. I still have Spicy Guitar on my Windows machine for sketching background guitar parts. It loads instantly, uses almost no CPU, and the chord-detection trick makes roughing in a strummed acoustic idea faster than programming MIDI into a sampled library.