Review: Shreddage 3 Legacy by Impact Soundworks

Impact Soundworks have brought their classic guitar library, Shreddage, into the new and improved Shreddage 3 engine. It retains the aggressive, classic rock/metal tone of the original library while giving you many quality-of-life upgrades.

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Review: Shreddage 3 Legacy by Impact Soundworks

The Impact Soundworks Shreddage Guitar series of Kontakt libraries have been a staple for many composers over the years, offering some great sounding samples and nice features for a relatively low price. It all started with the original Shreddage library, all the way back in 2010, and while Impact Soundworks has steadily released new and improved guitar libraries over the years (Shreddage 2, Shreddage 3), they’ve decided to re-visit the library that started it all. The result is a great success, bringing a fairly old library back to life in the improved engine.

Shreddage 3 Legacy sells for $119.00 from Impact Soundworks

Thoughts

The interface here will be instantly familiar to anyone who has used their guitar libraries in the past, particularly the most recent iteration, Shreddage 3 (Tip: Stratus is available as a free download with limited features). The main page shows you the image of the guitar’s fretboard, and has a bunch of knobs for adjusting various options. The interface can actually feel a little messy and overwhelming at times, so I highly recommend you watch the walkthrough videos on the Impact Soundworks website: guitar libraries, in general, can be very tricky to learn and program, as it’s such a complex instrument with so many ways to play. The library uses keyswitches to trigger each articulation, and there are quite a lot of them: sustains, power chords, mutes, pinch harmonics, tapping, the list goes on.

Not only are there quite a few articulations, but there are also many additional ways to play the instrument: using hammer-ons, choosing which string to pluck, where to position the player’s hands on the fretboard, using vibrato, slides, pitch bends, strumming with up-strokes or down-strokes, positioning of the capo, etc. All of these are customizable options within the library, so real guitarists who know the instrument will have a TON of control here, as this library is very deep. Don’t be dismayed though, anyone who has never played the guitar before can easily leave these options alone for now, and have fun just sitting down and playing the guitar with your MIDI keyboard. It does have a steep learning curve, but it’s also very playable and the process can be simplified quite a bit if you are overwhelmed at first.

When you first load the instrument, the sound is very dry, but Shreddage legacy comes with many sound presets as well.

These instantly apply different effects and/or cabinet simulations, to give you a huge variety of sounds without much tweaking at all: from heavy, aggressive metal, to classic rock, even more ambient, shoe-gazing type styles and jazz. This instrument is quite versatile.

You can also apply a wide variety of effects and re-arrange them in the signal chain in any way you choose, if you prefer to start from scratch and build your own tone.

One small critique, the guitar only has the bridge pickup sampled, meaning it’s quite bright and twangy, almost “squawky” with distortion (Think of the tone from AC/DC’s guitarists). I am not sure exactly which guitar they sampled here, though I assume it’s a Gibson SG (or a replica with a similar build and sound signature) based on the illustrations, so while they have included some amazing clean tone presets, it will never get as warm and smooth as a guitar can when using the neck pickup, which slightly limits the versatility here.

Rounding out the package is the strummer mode, which allows you to press a chord on the keys, then hit two separate keys to trigger up-strokes and down-strokes to simulate someone strumming the chord, and the Articulation Management page which allows you to customize keyswitches and tweak a few options relating to the articulations and how you trigger them. There is also a more resource-friendly “lite” version, which is a nice touch for those with more limited system resources. All in all, this is a fantastic package that excels at more aggressive tones in music, such as rock, punk, and metal, but can also hold its own with clean tones. From simple power chords and “chugging” palm mutes, to more advanced bends, slides, and pinch harmonics, this library is great for beginners and pros alike.

Facts

Shreddage 3 Legacy requires Kontakt or Kontakt Player 5.7 or above to run, requires about 3gb of disk space, and Impact Soundworks has listed a RAM requirement of at least 6GB.

Shreddage 3 Legacy sells for $119.00 from Impact Soundworks

Demos of Shreddage 3 Legacy by Impact Soundworks

Videos of Shreddage 3 Legacy by Impact Soundworks

Contributor Brian Freeland reviews Shreddage 3 Legacy by Impact Soundworks
“Impact Soundworks have brought their classic guitar library, Shreddage, into the new and improved Shreddage 3 engine. It retains the aggressive, classic rock/metal tone of the original library while giving you many quality-of-life upgrades.”