Review: Jaguar by Wrongtools (for Kontakt)

Maybe you haven’t heard of Wrongtools yet. They are a small developer based in Norway, and they focus on creating easy to play Kontakt libraries from quirky sources. They have glass percussion, a fingerimba, and a runebomme. They have ambient clavinets, and a celesta duet.

And they have Jaguar.

Not the feline incarnation, obviously. Rather, it’s a 1963 Fender electric guitar of that same name. Now that you do have heard of Wrongtools, and of Jaguar, lets dive a little deeper, shall we?

This is the sound of a 1963 Jaguar Electric Guitar recorded in great acoustic environments and multiple high-end microphones. Routed to a Fender Twin Reverb Blackface, a Roland jc-120 and a VOX AC30 Custom. Mixed down to three channels (spot, 2m and 5m) plus an added stereo spring reverb.

Wrongtools

It can be so simple

There you have it. It’s a nice Fender electric guitar, recorded in a great sounding room, with three mic positions. What else do you need to know? The link to Wrongtools and your credit card number. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. 

If you use the spot mic only and turn off all additional reverb, you get a close and dry sound. That’s for all of you who want to match the sound to recordings made in a small recording studio or even a home studio booth. It’s not as dry as a studio booth. But then again, you wouldn’t leave a studio booth recording untreated, would you? So it should be fairly easy to get the two to match.

Dial back the spot mic and use the 2m or 5m mics, and you get a more ambient sound. It’s still dry enough that you want to add additional reverb. But it is a bit further back and has a nice room sound baked in. If you don’t want to roll your own reverb, the separately recorded stereo spring reverb is excellent, as are the in-built impulse responses.

The library runs on the full version of Kontakt 6.4.2 or later. It’s 3.47 GB in size and offers up to 9 velocity layers and 3 round robins. That’s pretty good. Unless you absolutely need to play a hundred same-note repetitions per minute at the exact same velocity level. In which case I recommend not playing the guitar at all. Maybe some ornithologist offers a sampled woodpecker library you might prefer. The animal, not the guitar.

Anyway, this library also comes with 25 useful presets. More about that in a minute.

The unexpected side of a guitar library

If you are loading up the library for the first time, start with the patch ‘clean taster’. This is your vanilla patch, with quite a few options for you to mix and mangle the sound. Apart from the mic positions (including the recorded spring reverb), you have a selection of impulse responses to choose from, a delay, an LFO, vibrato, and a low pass filter. All of them automatable if you so choose. Play around with them for a bit and you will get the hang of them pretty quickly. If you need some inspiration on how to combine several settings, load up some of the instrument presets. They are cool and lovely, and they will inspire you to create your own presets.

If these controls aren’t enough for you, you can go under the hood too. Press the little cog-wheel icon at the bottom left. You will now be looking at the settings page.

Here you get more granular control over all the parameters. You can adjust the dynamic envelope, set a pre-delay for the reverb or change its tail length, change the stereo width of the patch, and on and on. You can also adjust the velocity curve of the instrument to make it respond the way that feels the most natural to you. 

Despite this amount of customisability, the instrument is as simple to use as plug and play. With 25 presets to choose from, there is a lot of ground you can cover alone with these. And if you are the tweaker-type, you can adjust everything to your heart’s content.

And now for the best part. Click on ‘FX’ to the right of the cog-wheel-icon to access the effects presets. These are eight different effects impulse responses, each one affecting the sound in different ways. You can control them on an X-Y pad. 

You can make sustain notes and chords evolve slowly, or simply mangle the base sound of the patch by setting the x and y controllers to a point you like and then not move them at all.

In combination with delay, LFO, and vibrato, that’s a lot of sound design potential right at your fingertips.

It’s really fun to explore all of these options. And if you need good old electric guitar sustains, just return to the clean taster patch and you are all set. What you get here are samples of a great instrument, recorded expertly in a great sounding room. This in combination with the tools for underscore sound design is what makes up this library. 

The caveats

Not a lot. Only two, actually. Whoever created the walkthrough video [Pretty certain that’s Kaada – Ed], he is taking a pianistic approach to the library. Don’t let that distract you. You can play these guitar patches like a guitar too, you know. Or you can make use of the effects and use them to create pads. Still, between the walkthrough video and the demos on the homepage, you get a very good idea of how the library sounds and what it is capable of.

These are all sustained samples with a recorded release when you let go of the note. No strumming samples, staccato, palm muting, or power chords samples. That shouldn’t surprise anybody, given that it’s called an underscore guitar. Still, it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t a full-blown, all-purpose electric guitar library, like Impact Soundworks Shreddage series, for example. Jaguar is a library of unique playable electric guitar sustain samples, combined with a set of tools for sound design Perfect for underscore.

Find out more about Jaguar from Wrongtools