Bass sounds

[mazz]

Another sample question:In lieu of bringing a bass player in to the studio, what are folks using for bass sounds (not loops)?I'm particularly interested in solo acoustic bass and also electric bass (p-bass, rickenbacker, etc). I've pretty much got synth bass covered already.Spectrasonics Trilogy looks really nice. The demo video on their site is pretty impressive.Any other ideas out there (besides bringing in a great player.... that goes without saying)? Mazz

[davewalton]

Trilogy, Trilogy, Trilogy. As a dedicated bass module you can't go wrong. I would put it in the same category for the bass as I would put EWQL for the orchestra.There's no "Rick" but the upright acoustic bass is scary real and it has a nice selection of electric basses from modern 4-string to old school, rock 'n roll overdrive, a whole selection of fretless basses as well as a nice selection of picked and slapped basses. Plus it has tons of slides, squeaks, thumps, harmonics, etc.That's my 2-cents as their unofficial, unpaid, spokesmodel.

[matto]

The obvious competition to Trilogy Is Yellowtools' Majestic, which IMO beats Trilogy easily in the Electric Bass department and has an at least equivalent Upright. It doesn't have any synth bass.I only own Independence, their sampler, which has a limited selection from the Majestic library, but those basses are great.Otherwise you'd have to piece it together. Scarbee's J fingered seems outstanding for a Fingered Electric, Chris Hein has a great Warwick, and Larry Seyer's Upright is still considered one of the best choices for upright.I also find the Fingered and Fretless from The Kontakt 1 Library (not K2) to be quite nice, but not on the level of the above options.HTH,matto

[davewalton]

Quote:I used to use Trilogy a lot but since I play real bass I found out how much Trilogy sucks although for a keyboardist it's really great! Gunter,I'm hijacking Mazz's thread for just a second. I don't know anything about doing midi using a bass or guitar as the controller but I've always wondered if something like Trilogy or Majestic would be really useful if you could trigger it by playing a bass with midi capability (if such a thing exists). One bass guitar, many bass guitars via Trilogy (or Majestic) seems good in theory but does that translate into reality?

[ernstinen]

I've got some great P-bass and Jazz-bass samples in my old Emu e6400 sampler. I have no idea where the samples came from, but they work really well. Maybe Emu will give you their secrets (but probably not! ).Ern

[matto]

Dave, as I understand it Bass to Midi triggering never really took off because traditional pitch to midi conversion technology can't track the low notes produced by the bass fast enough to allow for the kind of (low) latencies that would be acceptable to your average bass player (who is part of the "rhythm section" after all).Since bass notes have LOOONG waveforms and the converter needs to see a certain amount of it (I would guess half a cycle or so) to know which note is being played and spit out the corresponding midi note, the timing ends up being too loose.I second the Wizoo Basses, quite good and reasonably priced if you can use or convert the supported formats. This site was recently down after Digi's aquisition of Wizoo, so I had already written it off...good to see it's back.matto

[mazz]

Thanks everyone for the replies.I hadn't heard of the Yellow Tools or Wizoo basses. Some of the demos sound very good. The acoustic bass is what I am most interested in at this moment.I really like the way Trilogy handles repeated notes with the use of alternating octaves between the hands (as shown on the video demo). Do the other libraries mentioned have ways of dealing with this dreaded "machine gun" effect?Thanks a lot.Mazz

[matto]

Quote:I really like the way Trilogy handles repeated notes with the use of alternating octaves between the hands (as shown on the video demo). Do the other libraries mentioned have ways of dealing with this dreaded "machine gun" effect?Not sure about Wizoo...but Majestic has both index and middle finger samples for all major articulations (long notes, short notes, muted notes), so it goes far beyond Trilogy's "True Staccato", which only works with short notes. More info here: http://www.yellowtools.us/cp21/cms/index.php?id=331The main difference between T and M is that T gives you a lot more different bass instruments, including synth basses, whereas M gives you fewer instruments, but each is sampled in a lot more detail. T's library is 3GB and covers perhaps 50 or more instruments (hard to say exactly how many); M has 16GB dedicated to fewer than 10 individual instruments.So it really comes down to what your needs are. One last thing, if you're on a Intel Mac, neither T or M are compatible as of now. M may have compatibility by the upcoming Musikmesse (end of this month), T has announced it for fall 2007.HTH,matto

[mazz]

Hey matto,Thanks for the info.I have a ton of synth bass samples so I'm good there.Still on a G5 and will probably be for a couple of years.I'll think seriously about Majestic. I wonder if I can get it at guitar center?Thanks,John

[horacejesse]

Are some of you folks using loops or samples for instruments that you actually know how to play?!!!