Acustra Acoustic Guitar

Modelled Steel Strings

Protocodus

• Six modelled strings, no samples
• Finger, pick and thumb; guitar-aware chords
• Stereo mics, room and a separate piezo output

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$45.00

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Audio examples

Put an expressive steel-string guitar in your rack. Acustra models six interacting strings, a bridge and a resonant body in real time. Shape fingerstyle parts, picked riffs and strums, then choose microphones or piezo. Requires Reason 14 or later.

Acustra brings an expressive steel-string acoustic guitar into the Reason rack. Play an intimate fingerstyle melody, a bright picked rhythm or a rounded thumbed part, then shape the guitar and its capture to fit your production. Eight factory patches offer starting points from parlor fingerstyle and palm-muted picking to open tunings and stage piezo.

Six physically modelled strings interact through a shared bridge and resonant body. A ringing string can excite its neighbours, while touch, picking position and the notes already sounding affect the response. Every note is generated in real time, without recorded samples. A live fretboard follows fretted, released and sympathetic strings.

Find your touch

Choose Finger, Pick or Thumb and shape the attack with Touch, Pluck Position and velocity. Guitar-aware note allocation places notes on strings and frets: finger chords can pluck together, while picked chords sweep across the strings. Automatic down/up strokes, direction keyswitches and a tempo-aware release window help phrases connect.

Add palm muting, tension vibrato and pitch bends, and hold notes with the panel, a sustain pedal or a keyswitch. Release Noise adds damping contacts and subtle wound-string brushes. For connected sequenced phrases, a dedicated MIDI note-28 cue commands hammer-ons and pull-offs from a held source note.

Choose the guitar

Explore Parlor, Auditorium, Dreadnought and Jumbo constructions with Spruce or Mahogany voicing, then choose Standard, Drop D, DADGAD or Open G tuning. String Age moves from fresh and bright towards worn and darker. Subtle contact-to-contact pitch variation gives repeated notes movement; rear-panel Detune adds an optional wider spread.

Shape the recording

Choose stereo microphones, a mono microphone or a modelled under-saddle piezo and preamp. Blend the pickup beneath the microphones, adjust its blend polarity, or process it independently from the dedicated PIEZO output. Room adds early reflections and a tail to the microphones while the pickup stays dry. Body and Stereo Width help place the part in your mix.

Inside the rack

The engine combines stiff-string waveguides, two-plane string vibration, a shared bridge and a modal body. Body, wood and capture choices reshape this physical model, giving you control over both the instrument and its recorded perspective.

Twenty active controls support automation and Remote mapping. Rear connections include Note/Gate CV, main stereo audio and the independent piezo output. Choose 1x, 2x or 4x oversampling; new instances and factory patches start at 2x. Higher quality settings use more CPU, while 1x offers more processing headroom.

Requires Reason 14 or later. The existing audio and video examples feature earlier versions.

Version history

1.9.0

Refined playing response with gentler velocity contrast, more consistent fixed-velocity strums and subtle player-contact damping of the body. Added per-contact pitch variation, refined hammer-on/pull-off and release behaviour, and improved microphone-room response. Retuning calculations were optimized, and the eight factory patches and panel assets were synchronized with the update.