VI rhythm guitar grief

[Gone To Lunch]

I am working on a song that is retro, 70s, country-pop style, aiming for early Eagles album sort of sound.

I am not a guitarist so got the NI strummed acoustic (SA) to do the rhythm guitar which sounds very nice, but I am dissatisfied as I find the un-editable available patterns are often too busy. Basically, I want Glen Frey but there’s too much Nile Rodgers. I want to layer some very simple strum patterns, but the NI SA has got too much chukka-chukka filling in with 16ths. The sort of thing that solo singer-songwriters do to fill out the sound.

So I got the Orange Tree Evolution Steel String (ESS) which enables me to edit my patterns as I want, but doesn’t sound as good a strum as the NI SA. I have spend many days and nights learning all the nooks and crannies of the ESS, which is fully editable. I think the problem is that the fully editable OT ESS plays back a chord made of six individual string recordings played back simultaneously whilst the un-editable NI SA plays back a chord as a single recording, and therefore includes sympathetic resonance etc from the soundbox and other strings as a single entity.  Which is why it sounds better, ie more lifelike.  Because it is the real life sound.

I have only modest experience of recording actual acoustic guitars, and it also sounds to me that the OT ESS is quite close mic’ed and the NI SA isn’t.

So next I tried the free PSP piano reverb because it is apparently based on string reverberation, and put that on the OT ESS and that helped a bit.

But I am still craving the strum sound of the NI SA with the editability of the OT ESS.

Is there any other processing I can try ?

All suggestions gratefully received.

(Note I cannot afford to hire a real guitarist to do it for me, which would probably be the best solution.)

[IAA]

https://www.musiclab.com/products/realguitar/info.html

Pretty flexible and authentic sounding.
I use for all my guitar parts.

[ManFromGlass]

I use it too sometimes. It’s great!
The company does do sales.

[Zukan]

I had the first ever Real Guitar plugin as it was sent to me for review and it was good even then and we're going back quite a few years.

[scottfreems]

I don't know if this helps, but I had an issue with the quality of 4 guitar tracks -- 2 panned L; 2 panned R. They played the same thing and, it sounded like a big pile of garbage (even after alternate EQing). What I did to clean things up was grab my SSL Native Reverb, and add a medium to large room reverb (5-10 ms pre-delay .8-1.0 s) on a track receivings sends from the L and R guitar busses. Just turn it down to taste. I was amazed at just how much that early reflection cleared things up.