I’m wondering if there is a nice sounding bass VSTi that can do hammer ons and slides, but doesn’t take a year and a day to learn to operate, and isn’t very expensive.
I see the “gold standard” Trillian is $279 dollars, and I imagine it has quite a steep learning curve. I just want to throw in something a little bit more cool than simple keyboard driven bass lines, but don’t want to lose a lot of time learning something new to do so.
I know, I want my cake and eat it too … but is there anything out there quick and simple for a bass hammer on and slide (that sounds good)?
Spent years looking myself, ex bassist now with arthritis still wanting to produce expressive bass parts.
Some people have mentioned the scarbee ones but Trilian seemed much more like it to me, plus you get all the synth stuff too…
It does have its limitations and it does take a little while to be able to get the best out of it, but like most things you get out what you put in… Actually building a full ‘multi’ patch for the Music Man bass and then creating an articulation map for it was a little time consuming initially but it’s helped me to understand it to a greater depth than some other soft synths i have.
It’s been around for quite a while now and is probably due for an updated version…
It IS pretty impressive though and a good investment for what it does…
Ymmv as they say though.
Afterthought… i’m not sure but i think halion sonic se MIGHT have one or two bass VX patches on board, you can fake hammer ons by making the hammered notes legato if there’s a preceding note, usually sounds fairly realistic, you can sometimes get away with using pitch bend for a slide too, i used to set the bend range to an octave and manually draw slides in the pitchbend window in the midi editor, in a dense mix it can sound fine but a bit weird on its own…
No worries, Just been checking out MODO bass as i wasn’t familiar with it…
Had a good listen to the demos, some of it was fairly convincing but some of it was way off… possibly the crappy demos aren’t really helping… it’s MUCH more expensive than trilian too…
It’s a nice idea alright and definitely a few strides in the right direction in terms of flexibility but it’s just not convincing me… i think i’d much rather wait to see what spectrasonics decide to do next.
What kind of track/s are you working the bass into?
If it’s not too prominent then it would be worth trying those tricks i mentioned earlier if you haven’t already, before you throw money around.
Actually, I’m a Bass Player (among other instruments) so I don’t use those VSTi’s.
But, how easy is it?
Well, I opened them up just to try . . . and realized that as I played some notes were sliding and others were hammering . . . I guess that’s pretty easy.
There IS a method to it (which I don’t remember), but it’s predictive. So there you go!
"Walk On The Wild Side " was an upright bass with an electric bass guitar overdubbed on top playing tenths above . See YT for a TV interview with Herbie Flowers about the recording :
Session guy Herbie got double the fee for adding bass guitar on top .
… but is there anything out there quick and simple for a bass hammer on and slide (that sounds good)?
