Guitar Samples

No other instrument switches between rhythm and lead as easily as a guitar, and most records ask it to do both. Strummed, muted or arpeggiated, it holds the harmony steady underneath a vocal, and eight bars later the same instrument takes the line everyone ends up humming.

Acoustic recordings keep every physical detail of the performance. Close mics pick up string noise, fret slides, the pick catching wound strings and the low-end bloom coming off a dreadnought body, so an acoustic guitar take already has texture printed on it and samples cleanly with almost nothing done to it. Nylon strings soften the attack for bossa nova and flamenco, steel strings brighten it for folk and country picking.

Electric players shape tone with their hands as much as their gear, muting with the palm and digging in or backing off to change the attack. A Stratocaster into a spring reverb tank gave surf its whole sound, funk rhythm players cut sixteenths with the tone rolled back and the amp barely breaking up, and highlife and Afrobeat guitarists in Accra and Lagos ran clean interlocking figures that hold a groove for eight minutes without ever repeating exactly. Fuzz, wah and tremolo covered everything psych, soul and early rock needed from there.

Our catalog holds all of it. Full performances from original master recordings, isolated stems where the guitar was tracked to its own channel, guitar riff samples short enough to loop with no chopping, and royalty-free guitar loops tagged to key and BPM.

Tracklib agrees terms with the label or the producer who owns each recording before it reaches the catalog, so the guitar samples you download are the takes themselves, cleared at the source with licensing covered by Tracklib.