Ample Sound Ample Guitar LP III 4.0.1 for macOS

Session players and home producers who need a real-sounding electric guitar without booking a studio time slot reach for this one. It’s a virtual instrument built around a 1958 Gibson Les Paul.

Runs as VST and AU on Mac

It’s a VST and AU plugin, so it slides into Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Cubase, and pretty much any DAW on a Mac. The installer covers Apple Silicon and Intel machines running macOS 10.13 or newer.

What does the built-in rig sound like?

You don’t need a separate amp sim. The plugin includes its own amplifier and effects, voiced to deliver that warm, thick Les Paul tone right out of the box.

What kind of parts can I play with it?

Rock riffs, blues bends, mellow jazz voicings — the sound fits wherever you’d put a real Les Paul. It handles strumming, picking, and slides with a natural feel.

Bottom line: A focused Les Paul plugin that gives you the guitar and the amp in one package.

Does it stay snappy or bog things down?

In daily use, it loads a patch in a couple of seconds on an M1 Mac and doesn’t cause playback stutter when you’re running a dozen other tracks. The sample library is sizable, so an SSD helps — mechanical drives introduce a lag that can throw off your timing during live MIDI input. Memory hovers around 1.5 GB for the full fingerstyle and picking banks loaded together, which is reasonable for a deeply sampled instrument. I’ve noticed that switching articulations mid-phrase with the keyswitch system stays responsive, even at a 128-sample buffer.

Building a blues lead from scratch

I like to start with an empty MIDI clip and a rough idea of the phrasing. Here’s how a typical pass looks with this plugin:

1. Load the Les Paul patch and dial the amp model to a slightly crunchy edge-of-breakup tone.
2. Play in a simple call-and-response line with the picking articulation, leaving gaps for the bends.
3. Open the piano roll and nudge the note starts slightly off the grid — three to twenty milliseconds late on the downbeats keeps it from sounding robotic.
4. Add pitch wheel bends for the long held notes. The range is set to a whole step by default, so a half-bend takes a little restraint.
5. Switch to a fingerstyle articulation for the quieter turnaround at the end of the phrase.
6. Print the track to audio and tuck a room reverb send behind it. Done.

That whole process, from blank project to a usable eight-bar solo, takes me about ten minutes now. When someone grabs an ample guitar torrent to try it out, the first thing they usually notice is how much the velocity layers do for the attack character — dig in harder and the pick scrape becomes more present on the lower strings.

Ignoring the strumming grid

There are a few habits that send new users straight to the manual. The big one is ignoring the strumming engine’s timing grid. If you just hold a chord and expect a realistic down-up pattern, you’ll get a messy wash of notes; you have to set the strum speed and note division in the interface or use the keyswitch to trigger the strum rhythm you actually want. Another common slip is leaving the capo slider at zero and then wondering why an open-chord voicing sounds wrong — moving the virtual capo up a few frets changes the string gauge simulation and the chord shape logic instantly. People who come from an ample guitar mac torrent often miss the fact that the vibrato depth is adjustable per string, not just a global knob, and that makes a dramatic difference on held notes in a slow solo. Oh, and forgetting to match the DAW’s sample rate to the plugin’s internal rate before you bounce can introduce subtle pitch drift that’s easy to blame on the instrument itself.

• macOS 10.13 or later
• Apple Silicon and Intel Macs
• English interface