2018

Price: $39.

A guitar with personality and character. Most people sample the nicest guitar they can get their hands on, but we went for the most interesting. This is over 10000 samples of a Defil Tarantella electric guitar made in Poland in 1972, which is a lot like those cheesy old Japanese and Italian electrics of the 1960s, but even weirder. We sampled it as a 6-string, as a 12-string, in Nashville tuning, and both electrically and acoustically. This is basically the ultimate quirky indie guitar, and a terrible guitar for death metal unless you're making death metal ironically.

Key features:

Three articulations: pluck, hammer-on and harmonic

Plucks sampled with 3 velocity layers

All articulations sampled with 4 round robins in regular tuning, 3 round robins in Nashville tuning

Feedback, string brushing noise, percussive noise and release noise sounds

Every string sampled on every fret

Low E string also sampled tuned down to Eb and D

Three vibrato types: string-bending, violin-style and tailpiece

Muting control for the spy movie twang

Over 10000 samples, 3.76 GB extracted

There were also basses made by Defil during that era - the solidbody Lotos, the hollow Rytm, and the Mambo, which has a body and pickups very similar to this guitar. Looking for a Mambo to sample which did not have a broken or warped neck proved difficult, so it was a Rytm which became Secret Agent Bass.