Welcome to another installment of This Thing Rules. Today I’m going to be checking back with Sonic Zest. You may remember I reviewed their entire collection of instruments (which I won in a contest) in a previous This Thing Rules. I’ve always really liked their sounds, especially Ambient Cinematic Guitar 1 &2, so when I saw that Volume 3 was coming out, I had to get in touch. Before I dive into the review, take a minute to listen to my demo, “Sacrifice” which was made roughly 80% with just Ambient Cinematic Guitar 3.
Ambient Cinematic Guitar 3 is an instantly playable collection of beautiful guitars for Kontakt. It’s actually just three presets: ACG3 Bass, ACG3 Pad Soundscape and the main ACG3. This is not a very large set, but more of a companion piece to the original Ambient Cinematic Guitar series. What you get sounds great though, and with the help of effects, can be very versatile.
The first 2 Ambient Cinematic Guitars have been Sonic Zest’s most successful products, so it makes sense that they’d go back and expand upon it. This guitar is wonderfully sampled and gives a lush, ambient feel. It would be perfect in all kinds of music from film scores to electronica and everything in between. The main ACG3 preset is just the pure guitar, ready for you to do what you want with it to get the sound you want. Right from the moment it’s loaded, it’s very easy to just start playing and getting good results. Some of the layers of guitar in “Sacrifice” feature ACG3 just by itself with no effects. Some of them have all kinds of effects including distortion and reverb on them, to get the sound I wanted.
The ACG3 Bass is a excellent, deeper version of the sound for building up your low end. It’s no frills, but it sounds great. Last is the ACG3 Soundscape preset, which is predictably beautiful. It is a processed version of the original sound that is layered to create a beautiful wash sound. You can of course layer it with even more of your own effects to make it really big and gorgeous like I did.
Like I said, it’s not a huge collection, which is why this is a rather short This Thing Rules. It is definitely an instrument that could fit in many of my future compositions though, so I can see myself coming back to it time and time again. It’s also very inexpensive! If you get in quick, you can get it for a special promo price of $18.00!
Ambient Cinematic Guitar 3 is available from Sonic Zest on their website.
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David Rosen is an award-winning music composer. He composes original music for films, commercials, jingles, video-games and all other kinds of media projects. He has a vast music library of original tracks available for licensing and is also available for custom compositions. Contact him on the ABOUT page for pricing and availability for your next project.