Ample Sound Ample Guitar LP III 4.0.1

Version 4 brought a fingerstyle library captured with a 1959 Reissue, so the plugin now handles delicate picked parts as convincingly as a cranked power chord.

Where do you put it in a session?

Drop it on an instrument track and treat it like a recorded guitar. The built-in amplifier and effects mean you can print a finished tone without a separate amp sim on an insert.

It sits naturally on an aux send, not a stereo bus

It is a mono instrument at heart, so it is less common on a stereo bus, but you can route its output to a reverb or delay aux for shared ambience just as you would a mic'd cabinet.

What styles suit it best?

The fingerstyle, picking and string-effect articulations cover a lot of ground: warm neck-pickup jazz, biting rock riffs and articulate blues phrases all sit comfortably in a mix.

How it shapes up next to other Mac guitar instruments

A question that comes up in the studio is how Ample Guitar LP III sits alongside instruments like Native Instruments Electric Sunburst or the Orange Tree Samples Evolution line. They all aim for playable, deeply sampled electric guitars, but the approach and the sweet spot differ.

Electric Sunburst tilts toward an out-of-the-box polished rock and pop tone, with a streamlined interface that suits someone who wants a quick, mix-ready part. The Ample Sound plugin gives you more articulation switching under the fingers — palm mutes, harmonics, slide-in transitions and the full fingerstyle library feel like a wider palette, especially for parts that need to sound arranged rather than just performed. The trade-off is that you spend a little longer dialling in the performance.

Orange Tree’s Evolution guitars are famously smooth for keyboard playing, with a scripting engine that makes legato lines feel forgiving. Ample Guitar LP III leans the other way: the strum engine and the way it handles fret noise and release samples reward careful MIDI editing, and the raw tone has more midrange push, closer to the character of a real Les Paul through a valve amp. If your track needs polite, translucent clean picking, Evolution might be the quicker route. If it needs a part that bites through a dense mix with a bit of cabinet growl, the LP III is the more assertive choice.

Built-in amp and fingerstyle let you skip tracking a guitarist

Songwriters and producers who build arrangements without always tracking a live guitarist tend to bond with this plugin fastest. The combination of the fingerstyle library and the built-in amp means you can sketch a complete verse — picked intro, strummed chorus, a slide up to the bridge — inside one instance, without stacking three different libraries.

Film and game composers working to picture also extract value from the string-effect articulations. Harmonics and fret scrapes that sound incidental on their own become texture when layered under orchestral beds. And because the tone controls mirror a real amp’s EQ section rather than a generic three-band strip, mixing engineers who normally treat DI guitars can use familiar moves to shape the sound.

Guitarists who program rather than record late at night — flat dwellers, parents with sleeping children — often pick it up as a silent writing tool, then re-track with a real amp later. The MIDI export option means the performance can drive a different instrument or a hardware synth, which is handy beyond the obvious guitar duties.

Questions that usually come before installing

Runs natively on Apple Silicon and back to macOS 10.13

Yes, the current build runs natively on both Apple Silicon and 64-bit Intel processors. If you are still on a 2013 Mac Pro or a late-model Intel laptop running macOS 10.13 or later, the plugin loads without Rosetta gymnastics.

How much hard drive space does the sound library want?

The full sample set is substantial — a Les Paul with multiple articulations and round-robins is not a lightweight undertaking. You choose what gets installed during setup, so if you only need the picking and fingerstyle patches and can live without the full strum engine, the footprint shrinks considerably.

Authorise once and it stays offline forever

Once authorised, it runs offline indefinitely. The Activation Manager handles the initial handshake with a Challenge Code and User ID, and after that nobody phones home during a session.

A producer’s Wednesday evening

Consider a producer who writes sync music for library placements. She has a brief for a blues-rock instrumental with a moody, late-night feel — something between a smoky bar and a desert highway montage. She opens a new session, loads Ample Guitar LP III on an instrument track and picks the neck humbucker patch with the built-in amp set to a slight break-up.

For the intro she uses the fingerstyle library, plucking a slow arpeggio, letting the release samples breathe between chords. The verse switches to a palm-muted picking pattern; she draws in a few slide transitions where a real player might shift position, and the Fret Noise knob adds just enough string squeak to sell the illusion. For the chorus she switches to a strummed patch, keyswitching between upstrokes and downstrokes to build a push-pull groove. By the time she adds a send to a spring reverb aux, the cue sounds like a four-piece band tracked in a room — and the only instrument that was actually played live was the kick drum.

• macOS 10.13 or later
• Intel and Apple Silicon support
• English interface