How to make a MIDI guitar sound real​ (free MIDI files included)

From heavy metal to pop, the guitar is an instrument that’s commonly used across a wide array of genres.

However, not all of us are guitarists, and those of us who aren’t will naturally reach for software emulations. If you’ve ever done so and felt like your MIDI guitar part didn’t sound quite ‘right,’ it could be because it wasn’t idiomatic to the way a physical guitar is structured and played.

In the tutorial video above, we walk through how to make a MIDI guitar sound real by breaking down how to make rhythm and lead patterns that are not only exciting, but also convincing. We use Ample Sound’s Ample Guitar Lite (a plugin that we featured in our list of best free VST / AU instruments) to demonstrate each technique in the video—it’s a great free instrument to have in your collection, far superior to the built-in guitar emulations in most DAWs. The free guitar presets available in Splice INSTRUMENT can also be a powerful source for inspiration.

Watch along to hear each tip in action, and see highlights below—feel free to use the table of contents to navigate to a specific section.

What you’ll learn:

• Chord structures
  • Barre chords, power chords, and open chords
• Strumming patterns
• Melodic lines
• Get free guitar MIDI files

Feeling ready? Let’s dive in!

Want more free stuff? Download Splice INSTRUMENT and start creating immediately with its extensive catalogue of world-class and human-made presets—plus regular Free Drops to keep your inspiration flowing.

1. Chord structures for realistic MIDI guitars

For chord structures, it’s important to take note of the physical layout of the guitar. Most guitars have six strings, and the standard tuning is E-A-D-G-B-E. That means not all standard keyboard chord voicings will directly apply to guitar, because the layout is fundamentally different.

If you’re not a guitarist yourself, it could be helpful to keep a track with these string spacings laid out in MIDI somewhere in your project so you have a sense of where each string starts.

Barre chords, power chords, and open chords

So what chord voicings do work for guitar?

There are tons of chord shapes on the guitar, but one of the most famous is the barre chord. It’s called this because you lay your index finger across the entire fretboard. The shape is going to look like G-D-G-B-D-G on the keyboard, and this can be freely transposed up and down the neck of the guitar. The minor version just lowers the third (B in our previous example) by a half step.

Power chords are a simplified version of the barre chord, only using the root and the fifth—they’ll look like G-D, or G-D-G. These are easy to use as you don’t have to worry about the minor / major tonality, and are a go-to in pop, rock, and metal music in particular.

In addition to barre chords and power chords, knowing the common chord shapes for open chords (shapes that include at least one “open,” or unfretted string), will be beneficial if you want to program more realistic guitar patterns.

Here are the most common open chord patterns:

• C major: C-E-G-C-E
• D major: A-D-A-D-F#
• D minor: A-D-A-D-F
• E major: E-B-E-G#-B-E
• E minor: E-B-E-G-B-E
• F major: C-F-A-C-F
• G major: G-B-D-G-B-G (or G-B-D-G-D-G)
• A minor: A-E-A-C-E
• A major: A-E-A-C#-E

While you can build on these fundamentals with chord extensions, seventh chords, alternate and open tunings, etc., this should be a solid starting point for writing more realistic chords for MIDI guitars.

2. Strumming patterns for realistic MIDI guitars

The guitar can be strummed upwards and downwards, and not all the notes ring at exactly the same time when you do so since the pick has to travel across the strings. For this reason, slightly displacing the start of each note can make your MIDI sound more ‘human.’

In FL Studio, there’s a strum feature that does this automatically by staggering the onset of each note in the chord. Most dedicated guitar plugins will also have the ability to change strumming strokes and patterns. Generally, you want to alternate between upstrokes and downstrokes depending on the tempo—at a slower tempo, or for more aggressive genres like rock or punk, all downstrokes can also sound perfectly convincing.

3. Melodic lines for realistic MIDI guitars

For melodic guitar parts, monophonic lines with stepwise scale motion as well as larger leaps (by even octaves or more) aren’t uncommon, so you don’t have to worry too much about whether most intervals are physically possible for a guitar player. That said, the guitar lends itself very nicely to the major and minor pentatonic scales, so using these in your part writing can be a strong choice.

You’ll also want to keep in mind the unique techniques guitars can perform, like hammer-ons and pull-offs, where you use just your finger on the fretboard to trigger another note as opposed to picking with your right hand. In the Ample Guitar plugin, notes at the very bottom of the piano roll dictate the articulation of the notes being played, letting you specify things like sustain, palm mute, slide in, legato, hammer-on, or pull-off.

A real guitar player will often use a mixture of all of these techniques as they play, so experimenting here is key for taking your MIDI patterns to the next level.

Get free guitar MIDI files

We hope these ideas help you in your journey of writing realistic MIDI guitar parts! As a parting gift, we’ve also compiled some MIDI files that align with each of the tips we covered in the tutorial video—if you’d like to have them in your DAW for reference, you can download the files here.

And there you have it—do you have any questions on the concepts we explored? What instrument do you want to see us focus on next? Let us know in the comments section of the video, and subscribe to the Splice YouTube channel for more tips, tutorials, and insights.

June 11, 2026

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Harrison Shimazu

Harrison Shimazu is a composer, content strategist, and writer who’s passionate about democratizing music creation and education. He leads the Splice blog and produces vocaloid music as Namaboku.