Folks I'd like some feedback on whether this is worth pursuing or not. I've been experimenting with a dedicated soundfont for plucked strings: my focus is on mandolin family instruments because that's what I play, but there's some guitars sampled as well. Here's some test renderings (all dry with no effects):
Fingerstyle acoustic steel string guitar.
Plectrum acoustic steel string guitar.
Ensemble mandolin piece (2 mandolins, mandola, and Octave Mandolin).
The soundfont itself is in my dropbox (caution: very large file!!)
If you examine the font you'll see that the guitars have two presets each: one of these has a "_h" suffix and is a humanized version: each note has had a random amount of delay and volume attenuation added. This is of course a poor substitute for a real humanization program, and the effect is quite subtle, but my gut feeling is that it makes a difference on chords or where there are multiple instruments as the notes don't all sound exactly together. It's a bit of an experiment so I'd welcome feedback.
It's also worth noting, that while tremolo is an essential part of mandolin technique, tremolo rendered with these fonts is so excruciatingly awful that there are no examples presented above (it sounds like a machine gun going off in case you're wondering). I've tried a number of workarounds including sampling actual tremolo, but I don't have anything I'm happy with yet. If anyone has any better ideas I'm all ears.
Anyhow let me know what you think: good bad or indifferent!