
Orchestral
Ample Guitar M Lite II
by Ample Sound
I reach for Ample Guitar M Lite II whenever I need to sketch an acoustic guitar part with MIDI. It’s the free version of Ample Sound’s Martin D-41 sampled acoustic, and nothing else in the freeware…
Home / Plugins / Orchestral / The 88E (Impact Soundworks)

by Unknown
The 88E is the weirdest piano library on this list, and that’s the point. Impact Soundworks took the Mattias Krantz idea of tuning every key on a piano to the same note (E) and sampled a whole playable instrument around it. You get atmospheric pads, plucked textures, bent tones, and some outright cinematic soundscapes. It’s not useful for traditional piano parts at all. It’s excellent for sound design, underscoring, and building moody beds.
The interface gives you envelope shaping, transposition, microphone-position blending, and pitch bending. The included snapshots cover short plucks through massive pad swells. If you already have a “normal” piano library, then The 88E is a worthwhile experimental addition. This is the strongest category on the list. Between GLADE, LUX Elements, and the two ProjectSAM libraries, you can write a full cue without spending anything.
Links to impactsoundworks.com — the article includes the official download links.

Orchestral
by Ample Sound
I reach for Ample Guitar M Lite II whenever I need to sketch an acoustic guitar part with MIDI. It’s the free version of Ample Sound’s Martin D-41 sampled acoustic, and nothing else in the freeware…

Orchestral
Echo Sound Works released Vinyl Guitar 2 as a full overhaul of their original Vinyl Guitar. The first version is now deprecated on the ESW website, so v2 is the one to grab.

Orchestral
I love layering odd-sounding instruments in my music, and Somerville Sounds’ Rubber Bridge Plucks is one of my secret weapons for roughing up a guitar mix. It’s a parlor acoustic modified with a…

Orchestral
Multi-samples of a Yamaha Eterna classical guitar, recorded through a CAD E100 microphone, is what you get with PlastikGuitar by Audiolatry. The tone is deliberately a bit cheap and not perfectly in…

Orchestral
Every other plugin on this list is sample-based. Spicy Guitar is the exception — it’s physically modeled.

Orchestral
Most guitar libraries treat harmonics as an afterthought articulation buried in a key switch. Guitar Harmonics Essential, a free library for Steinberg’s HALion Sonic 7, builds an entire instrument…