I have been using Finale for 30 years and have always struggled with the very limited guitar instruments available. All my work is for various types of Guitar, ranging from acoustic bass guitar through to 12 string, dobro, requinto, tenor guitar, guitarrone and obviously the many variants of 6 string guitars through steel to nylon etc. I'm quite sure that many other Finale users will also be writing for guitar. Considering this, the variety of guitar instruments available in Garritan is pitiful. Paying around $400 for Garritan Anthology gets you lots of different instruments but practically no guitars as far as I can see. So why is Garritan excluding what has to be one of the most popular and frequently-used genres of instruments? Are there plans to enhance the library? Or am I missing something? Many years ago (at Makemusic's suggestion!) I tried Acoustic Legends HD fron Vir2 but obviously the integration with Finale is clumsy and doesn't work very well. Anyone have any other ideas?? I surely can't be the only Finale user facing this problem!
The Garritan instruments are merely a variety of common instruments, they never claimed to be a complete selection of available instruments. If your needs are not met by these choices, then shop around. There's many different sample developers available. Orange Tree samples comes to mind as have several different guitars.
You will have to create custom HP preferences with these libraries.
Thanks very much Jeffrey, I had not seen Orange Tree before so that is very interesting. I should have explained one of the main reasons that I would prefer to see a greater choice of instruments in Garritan. It would appear that the integration of Garritan with Finale is better than other libraries. This isn't surprising of course, but it seems that the integration between Finale and (for example) Kontakt is not very good. I have struggled with this for years - and both Acoustic Legends (which I already have) and Orange Tree work via Kontakt. For this reason I'd prefer to see more instruments in Garritan, or at least find another library that integrates better with Finale. As just one example of what I mean ... as far as I can see one can only create Key Switches, which I need for Guitar work, in Finale using Garritan. I would love to be told that I'm wrong in that notion, but so far it has been a big struggle to integrate Kontakt-based libraries into Finale. It sort of works, but the functionality seems limited? Am I wrong?
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