The free build ships 877 MB of 16-bit samples against 7.8 GB at 24-bit in the paid Ample Guitar M, and the gap is not just resolution. Ample publishes the full comparison itself.
Both versions model the same guitar, a Martin D-41. Both run the same Riffer, the same Tab Reader, the same Strummer, and the same effects chain. The engine is not crippled in any way you will notice while editing.
What changed is the recording sitting underneath it. That is where the free version gives ground, and it gives it in three specific places, only one of which most people ever mention.
A real guitar does not work that way. Fret the low E string at the fifth and you get an A. Play the open A string and you get the same A, thinner and brighter, with a different decay and a different sustain. On the free build, both are the same file.
You hear it most in voicings that spread deliberately across the neck. Drop D shapes, open tunings, anything where the point is the contrast between a heavy low string ringing under a thin fretted note high up. Those parts come out evenly weighted, and evenly weighted is not what a guitar sounds like.
Single-note lines survive this almost completely. A melody, a countermelody, a picked arpeggio inside one position, all of it sounds correct, because you are only ever hearing one string at a time and nothing sits next to it for comparison.
This is the biggest limitation, and almost nobody flags it in the download posts. The Strummer panel still works. The chord modes still work, the SEQ patterns still play, and the whole rhythm workflow behaves exactly as documented. It is firing fingerstyle samples in a strum shape.
A picked strum and a fingered pluck part company in the first twenty milliseconds, where a pick scrapes and snaps rather than rolling off the pad of a fingertip. Strum timing cannot put that back. So strummed chords built from fingerpicked samples land somewhere between the two, which is fine for a demo and audible on anything you plan to release.
If your writing is fingerpicked, an 877 MB acoustic guitar library costs you nothing at all. If you write strummed acoustic pop, it costs you the exact thing you came for.
Processing is where it surfaces. Heavy compression on a quiet fingerpicked intro drags the floor up along with the signal, and a lot of makeup gain on a thin part finds the limit sooner than a 24-bit source would. Convolution reverb on a long tail does the same thing, since you are amplifying decay rather than attack.
There is a quick test for this, and it takes a minute. Bounce the part on its own, compress it several decibels harder than the arrangement needs, and listen to the tails rather than the notes. If nothing surfaces there, the bit depth is not the thing standing between your track and a real guitar.
The thinner preset shelf is the quieter cost. Riffer gives you the full editing workflow in the free build, but a reduced preset library, so the ready-made patterns you would normally lean on while sketching are simply not there.
Both versions model the same guitar, a Martin D-41. Both run the same Riffer, the same Tab Reader, the same Strummer, and the same effects chain. The engine is not crippled in any way you will notice while editing.
What changed is the recording sitting underneath it. That is where the free version gives ground, and it gives it in three specific places, only one of which most people ever mention.
One sample stretched across six strings
The paid library is sampled individually at every string and every fret position. The free one is sampled by pitch, and that single recording gets shared across different string positions.A real guitar does not work that way. Fret the low E string at the fifth and you get an A. Play the open A string and you get the same A, thinner and brighter, with a different decay and a different sustain. On the free build, both are the same file.
You hear it most in voicings that spread deliberately across the neck. Drop D shapes, open tunings, anything where the point is the contrast between a heavy low string ringing under a thin fretted note high up. Those parts come out evenly weighted, and evenly weighted is not what a guitar sounds like.
Single-note lines survive this almost completely. A melody, a countermelody, a picked arpeggio inside one position, all of it sounds correct, because you are only ever hearing one string at a time and nothing sits next to it for comparison.
Fingerstyle samples cannot fake a strummed chord
The paid version includes three sample libraries. Fingerstyle, Strum, and Pick. The free version includes the first one and nothing else.This is the biggest limitation, and almost nobody flags it in the download posts. The Strummer panel still works. The chord modes still work, the SEQ patterns still play, and the whole rhythm workflow behaves exactly as documented. It is firing fingerstyle samples in a strum shape.
A picked strum and a fingered pluck part company in the first twenty milliseconds, where a pick scrapes and snaps rather than rolling off the pad of a fingertip. Strum timing cannot put that back. So strummed chords built from fingerpicked samples land somewhere between the two, which is fine for a demo and audible on anything you plan to release.
If your writing is fingerpicked, an 877 MB acoustic guitar library costs you nothing at all. If you write strummed acoustic pop, it costs you the exact thing you came for.
Sixteen bits only shows up when you push it
The bit depth gets quoted most and matters least. Sixteen bits puts the noise floor roughly 96 dB below full scale, which sits well under the room tone on almost any acoustic recording you would place this next to.Processing is where it surfaces. Heavy compression on a quiet fingerpicked intro drags the floor up along with the signal, and a lot of makeup gain on a thin part finds the limit sooner than a 24-bit source would. Convolution reverb on a long tail does the same thing, since you are amplifying decay rather than attack.
There is a quick test for this, and it takes a minute. Bounce the part on its own, compress it several decibels harder than the arrangement needs, and listen to the tails rather than the notes. If nothing surfaces there, the bit depth is not the thing standing between your track and a real guitar.
The thinner preset shelf is the quieter cost. Riffer gives you the full editing workflow in the free build, but a reduced preset library, so the ready-made patterns you would normally lean on while sketching are simply not there.
