Ample Sound Ample Guitar LP III 4.0.1 — Mac version

1. Start with a clean DI channel

Load the plugin on a fresh stereo instrument track. The raw samples are based on a 1958 Les Paul, so you get that woody neck-pickup warmth before you touch a single knob. Play in a part or drag MIDI in. Resist the urge to drench it straight away.

2. Shape the core tone

Use the built-in amp and cab sims to find the character your mix needs. A touch of drive and a 4x12 cab can sit a blues lick in a sparse chorus, while a cleaner setting leaves room for rock rhythms to breathe.

3. Send to an effects bus

For jazz lines, route a send to a parallel bus with a gentle plate reverb and a slap delay. Keeping the main track drier preserves the note definition, while the bus adds width without washing out the transients.

A full part, start to finish

Here's a workflow I use for a blues-rock rhythm part that needs to sit under a vocal without getting in the way.

1. Load the plugin and set the input to your keyboard or pad controller. Pick a neck pickup patch and drop the amp drive to roughly a quarter.
2. Record a four-bar loop playing simple triads around the fifth and seventh frets. Don't quantise yet.
3. Open the strum engine and set the voicing to a barre shape. Let the strum speed follow your playing, not the grid.
4. Add a touch of spring reverb on the built-in effect chain. Keep the mix low, around 15 percent.
5. Bus the track to a parallel compressor and blend it under the dry signal. This keeps the attack but adds sustain.
6. Pan the track slightly left and send a short delay to the right. The part stops feeling static.

After that, I'll usually nudge any early or late strums by hand. A few milliseconds of human timing beats tight quantising for this kind of part.

Dialing in a raw tone before adding the amp sim

First pass: find the voice

I start every session by browsing a handful of patches with the amp bypassed. The raw Les Paul samples tell you straight away whether the part wants the bridge or neck pickup. Once I hear the right core tone, I switch the amp back on and adjust drive until the notes bloom without fizzing.

Second pass: play the part

I record in short sections, four to eight bars at a time. For a fingerstyle line, I'll use the version 4 fingerstyle library and keep my MIDI velocities uneven. The articulation switching responds to subtle changes in how hard I hit the keys, so a light touch gives you ghost notes and a firmer one brings in a snap.

Third pass: fix the feel

Most of my editing is done in the MIDI editor, not on the audio side. I'll humanise the timing, adjust a few note lengths, and maybe add a slide articulation between two phrases. Then I bounce the part and slot it into the arrangement with everything else playing.

Bypassing the amp sim to hear the samples clearly

• Leaving the amp sim on while browsing samples. Everything sounds muddy and samey. Bypass it first, then add it back once the raw tone is right.
• Treating it like a synth. It's a sampled guitar with real string behaviour. Playing block chords at velocity 127 across five octaves will never sound like a person with a pick.
• Ignoring the articulation keyswitches. Slides, hammer-ons and palm mutes are mapped to keys you might not touch if you play only in the natural range. Learn them, they change everything.
• Overloading the effects chain. The built-in reverb and delay are useful, but stacking them under a busy mix turns the part into wallpaper.
• Forgetting to check latency. On older Macs, a heavy buffer can make strumming feel disconnected. Lower the buffer while recording, raise it when mixing.

Doubling the part with a capo voicing from the plugin's strum engine can thicken a chorus without fighting the vocal.

• macOS 10.13 or newer
• Runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs
• English interface