Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 4/5 Stars
Sonora Cinematic already offer a felt piano instrument and now they’ve applied the same approach to guitar. Felt piano works by placing felt between the hammer and strings to produce a soft, muted sound, and this library takes the guitar in the same direction using commercially available felt guitar picks normally used with nylon string instruments. This produces a soft tone that lends itself well to further processing. Softstruck runs on both the free Kontakt Player and the full version of NI’s Kontakt.
The recording sessions used three electric guitars: a Butterscotch Telecaster with an added middle pickup, a Les Paul with humbuckers, and a semi‑acoustic Duisenberg with a P90‑style pickup, used for the flatwound string samples. The user interface is intuitive with a simple layout and enough control to allow for sound‑shaping without getting bogged down with complexities. There’s blending between four sound sources and the controls can be automated for creating evolving textures.
On opening the library in Kontakt you’ll see three Softstruck instruments: Butterscotch, Flatwounds and Single Cut. From these are derived a number of presets created by blending four faders designated Amp 1, Amp 2 and two pedalboard chains, Board A and Board B. Board A seems dedicated to fluttery, ambient delays while Board B creates a reverse delay type of effect. Two further controls add Reverb and Atmo, the latter having two switchable modes that add either a fluttery delay‑meets‑reverb ambient effect or a lush granular type of reverb. There are also five different master bus effects: 1969, Ensemble, Gentle Move, Miroirs and Memoria. These add subtle but useful changes to the overall sound. Ensemble creates an almost honky‑tonk piano sound while Miroirs adds a reversed delay and 1969 a delay that sounds like a tape emulation. Gentle Move adds a thickening effect and there’s also a dedicated double‑track button at the bottom right of the window. Memoria seems to add an interesting ambience to the sound.
As you might expect, the raw sounds are all clean plucks influenced by the use of a felt pick, giving them something of an electric piano, toy piano or music box character. Once you start blending the sounds it turns out there’s quite a lot of scope for creating different pluck, pad and underscore sounds. Board B combined with Atmo adds a lot to the overall texture, and keeping Board B set high and the other faders low creates useful long‑decay pad sounds with a softer attack. Conversely you can emphasise the attack by bringing in more of the amp sounds. The sounds also lend themselves well to further processing using your existing plug‑ins, from rotary speakers to lo‑fi wobble.
The sounds produced by Softstruck are very usable across a range of genres with enough variation to keep them interesting.
While simple in concept, the sounds produced by Softstruck are very usable across a range of genres, with enough variation to keep them interesting, and given the low cost of the instrument, it has to be seen as good value.