Velvet Guitars

The mellow side of guitars.

Elegant warmth. Effortless mood.

Velvet Guitars elevates classic guitar tones with a warm, emotive glow. From gentle sustains to imaginative soundscapes such as toothbrush-played strings and bowed, evolving textures, it offers a uniquely emotional palette of sounds. With five signature guitars, two iconic amps, real spring reverb and expressive FX, Velvet transforms every idea into a rich and evocative creation.

The Sound

Velvet Guitars captures a wide emotional and sonic spectrum, from soft, velvety tones to raw, cinematic textures that push the guitar beyond its traditional role. It’s about warmth and depth, but also atmosphere, tension, and movement.

It offers familiar, soulful tones alongside distinctive articulations like shimmering harmonics, reversed swells, and textured feedback drifting through real amps and spring reverbs. These tones can sit at the heart of an intimate ballad or expand into sweeping cinematic soundscapes.

Every sound was recorded through real amps, real spring reverbs, and with creative performance techniques, resulting in tones that feel intimate or unsettling, nostalgic or otherworldly.

Velvet Guitars celebrates the full expressive potential of the instrument, where beauty meets strangeness and emotion always leads the way

The Recording Process

Velvet Guitars is designed around usable, musical sounds you’ll reach for immediately. Rather than aiming for clinical perfection, the natural character and subtleties of the instruments, amps, and recording chain are preserved — the small imperfections that make a performance feel human and alive.

Recordings were tracked with high-end signal and preamp chains to capture body and texture while remaining production-ready and plug-and-play.

The result reflects the kind of studio precision any pro engineer would desire. Velvet Guitars uses the classic combination of Shure SM57 and Royer R-121 ribbon microphones, tracked through Rupert Neve Designs Shelford channels.

The Guitars

Velvet Guitars includes five distinct personalities, each tuned for warmth and color:

• Velvet Guitar - a classic semi-hollow icon, played with fingers and subtle vibrato.
• Mellow Baritone - a semi-hollow baritone with a thick, woody tone, played with a pick.
• Shimmer Guitar - a ’60s-style solid-body offset with unmistakable jangle and a floating tremolo system.
• Semi Hollow - a non-traditional jazz guitar with a rich, rounded tone, played with an extra-thick pick.
• Amped Acoustic - a vintage acoustic recorded through a magnetic pickup and routed through the same two vintage amps as the electrics.

Together, these instruments offer a broad emotional spectrum while maintaining a cozy, velvety, and distinctive overall character.

For the more experimental articulations, additional guitars and equipment were used - including a beautiful lap steel for slide textures, select electric guitars with unique personalities, and tools such as a violin bow, coin, toothbrush, and a lo-fi tape machine.

Amps and Spring Reverb

Velvet Guitars draws its tone from legendary classic vintage amps, often referred to as the American clean and the British chime. With their carefully chosen tubes and speakers, these amps play a crucial role in shaping the sound, transforming each note with the authentic character that defined an era.

The spring reverb is equally special. This is the classic amp spring - the kind known for its unique character and depth. Instead of relying on modeled or impulse response reverbs that produce a static, predictable sound, this approach captures the liveliness of a real spring. Every sample was recorded four times, through two amps, each with dry and wet options.

The result is an ever-evolving, dynamic reverb that adds depth and character to your music, just like the classics.

Tremolo

Authenticity drives every element of Velvet Guitars, right down to its tremolo. The two tremolos, modeled directly from the vintage amps used, are faithfully recreated so your music carries the true spirit of the classics.

To expand the palette, three additional tremolo styles inspired by well-known pedals are included, offering a wider range of characterful modulation options for your compositions.

For modern convenience, sync-to-host functionality is also available, blending analog heritage with digital ease for seamless integration into any production workflow.

Authenticity, Playability, and Versatility

Velvet Guitars is built for authenticity, playability, and versatility. Its streamlined interface keeps the experience effortless - no tricky key switches or complicated controller setups. Everything you need is right at hand, from dynamic sustains and expressive chords to evolving swells, harmonics, and immersive textures.

Choose from sustains, mutes, dead notes, bowed and other experimental tones, slides, swells, tremolo, lush chords, random texture patches, and more. Each preset provides a blend of both vintage amps, with separate dry and wet versions so you can shape the amp tone and spring reverb to your liking.

The mod wheel becomes a powerful creative tool, enabling seamless switching or blending between articulations such as open and muted sustains, major and minor chord variations, or varying levels of complexity in cloud textures, tremolo, harmonics, and feedback patches. Velvet Guitars encourages unrestricted creativity, focusing on authentic, inspiring sound rather than attempting to replicate every guitarist’s technique.

Features

• Five Iconic Guitars: Warm, characterful electric and electric-acoustic tones captured from five distinctive instruments.
• Vintage Amps: Choose or blend between two vintage amps synonymous with mellow, atmospheric guitar sound.
• Real Spring Reverb: Dial in the unmistakable character of a true spring reverb for instant vibe and depth.
• Authentic Tremolo: Vintage amp tremolo models plus additional pedal-inspired styles, including full sync-to-host functionality.
• Extensive FX Chain: A curated selection of guitarist-designed FX presets with instant, expressive control via macros.
• Articulations: Plucks, mutes, dead notes, chords, swells, feedback, harmonics, slides, jazzy octaves, ebow, violin bow, plus unconventional sounds like guitar played with a toothbrush, lo-fi tape tape recordings, and unique random textures.
• High-End Recording Chain: Pristine studio sound captured through Rupert Neve Designs® preamps.
• Versatile Sustains: Create dynamic performances with sustains and mutes across multiple guitars and amp setups.
• Chord Options: Easily select major or minor chords in chord-based presets.
• Modwheel Control: Switch or blend between articulations seamlessly for enhanced playability and expression.