Free Guitar MIDI: Riffs, Chords & Strumming (Royalty-Free)

Free guitar midi to play & download

Hit ▶ to A/B each one — A is the cleared recording, B is its extracted MIDI. All 8 are free to download, no account. The MIDI carries the notes; you bring the tone — the same file drives Ample Guitar, NI Session Guitarist, or any Kontakt library, clean or re-amped through AmpliTube.

Why guitar is the hardest instrument to fake in MIDI

A piano line quantized hard to the grid still sounds fine. A guitar part quantized to the grid sounds like a robot — and that gap is the whole problem with most guitar MIDI. The instrument's realism lives in details a mouse rarely draws: a strum that isn't simultaneous, a voicing a keyboard player would never finger, a bend that slides continuously between two notes.

Get those wrong and the ear flags it instantly as programmed. That's why the source matters more here than on any other instrument: a transcription of a real performance already has the stagger, the voicing, and the articulation baked in, instead of being approximated note by note after the fact.

The strum is never simultaneous: staggered note onsets

A real strum is sequential, not a block chord — the pick crosses one string at a time. On a downstroke the low strings sound a few milliseconds before the high ones; on an upstroke it flips. Even the strum speed changes within a single stroke. Lay all six notes on the exact same grid line and you get the dead, even spacing that screams MIDI.

Selekt's guitar MIDI keeps that micro-stagger because it was transcribed from someone actually strumming — the onset offsets that read as a human hand are captured in the file, not dialed in afterward.

Guitar voicings don't map to a keyboard: power chords & 6-string shapes

Standard tuning is E-A-D-G-B-E, and guitar chords come out of that shape — not out of stacked keyboard thirds. A barre G isn't G-B-D; it's G-D-G-B-D-G, with octave doublings and a specific low-to-high order. Getting those voicings right is the number-one factor in whether a guitar part sounds believable.

There's also a playable range to respect: power chords and three-to-six-note shapes are the realistic zone, while dense six-string voicings piled past what two hands can fret break the illusion fast. MIDI lifted from a real performance lands inside that range by definition, because a person actually played it.

The 8 General MIDI guitar patches — and the articulations MIDI fights

General MIDI gives guitar eight patches in a fixed order, from program 25 (nylon) through 32 (harmonics), so you can audition acoustic, clean, jazz, or distorted just by changing the program number. The notes stay the same; the voice swaps with your plugin.

What MIDI fights is articulation. Hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, palm mutes, and bends — a bend is a continuous pitch glide written as pitch-bend data, not a stepped note — are exactly the moves that make guitar sound like guitar, and they're the first thing a hand-drawn part loses. Transcribing from a real recording preserves them as the performance data they actually are.

From riff to tab: guitar MIDI as a notation & learning asset

Guitar MIDI and tablature are interconvertible — tools like Guitar Pro, MuseScore, and tuttut move between a .mid and readable tab — so the same file you arrange with doubles as a way to learn the part note for note. That's a second life most sample-pack loops never have.

The catch with the riffs people actually search for is that almost all of them are transcribed off copyrighted records, and a riff is protected expression. Selekt's guitar MIDI sidesteps that: every file comes from a CC0 or public-domain source with a provenance certificate — a real player's feel plus a clean paper trail, not a famous riff lifted off someone else's track.

Guitar MIDI, answered

Is cleared guitar MIDI better than royalty-free?

Royalty-free only means no ongoing royalties — the license underneath can still restrict reselling, require credit, or limit where you use it, and the riff itself may be transcribed off a copyrighted record. Selekt's guitar MIDI comes from public-domain and CC0 sources, which carry no terms at all, plus a certificate naming the source — so the part is clear, not just the fee. Royalty-free vs public domain vs CC0 →

Will this work in Ample Guitar, Kontakt, or NI Session Guitarist?

Yes. It's a standard .mid, so it loads into any guitar VST or sampler — Ample Guitar, NI Session Guitarist, Kontakt libraries — and plays the part through that instrument's own tone. Pick a General MIDI patch (25–32) for a quick acoustic-to-distorted audition, then re-amp through something like AmpliTube for your own sound.

How can I tell good guitar MIDI from a fake-sounding one?

Listen for three things: staggered strums instead of dead-even block chords, voicings that sit in real guitar range (power chords and three-to-six-note shapes, not piled-up keyboard stacks), and articulations like slides and bends rendered as pitch-bend glides. Ours has them because it's transcribed from an actual performance, not drawn in by hand.

Can I use these in tracks I sell?

Yes — cleared for commercial use. Every file comes from a public-domain or CC0 source with a certificate, and the source recordings need no attribution, so you can build a riff or progression into a release without a clearance question hanging over it.

Keep digging

Building a rhythm section? Pair these with free piano midi — the parts were cleared together, so the blend is covered too.