Big Fish Audio | Computer Music | BASiS Product Review
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BASiS | Computer Music

Rating: 8/10 Back to BASiS product details

BASiS features over 7GB of sampled, electric, fretless, upright, slap and even synth bass patches, including all the usual suspects, including Fender Jazz and Precision Bass, Musicman, Rickenbacker and many others. Native Instruments' popular Kontakt Player 2 powers this instrument, and its potent architecture has been used to good effect. The electric basses feature the ability to miix phase-aligned DI and amped input, and if you still can't get the tone you're after, you could always run a 100% DI'ed tone through your favourite bass amp simulator. Various keyswitch modes are available, including ones to force upward or downward slides, a bowed mode for the upright bass, and a legato mode, whereby the playback engine will automatically smooth the attack of each new note. Other realism-enhancing features are the adjustable pick, fret noise, and release noise levels, the latter being the sound of the player damping the strings with their fingers to stop the note - very realistic! The selectable vibrato styles, meanwhile, aren't your usual sine/square/triangle LFO-based efforts, and are said to be modelled on those of real players - they do sound very sweet and 'human', we have to say. The included effects section enables you to apply multiple insert and send effects, which makes it easier to quickly customise the sound of a patch, and the included EQ section, while simple, is also handy for sculpting the tone. Overall, BASiS is great: it's a lot cheaper and less hassle than hiring and recording a session bassist, and sounds good enough to fool most people into believing it's the real thing. It's easy to strike a balance between gritty realism and studio polish too. The synth patches are a bit hit and miss, though they do make a nice bonus for those who don't have the time or inclination to program up their own synth bass sounds. If you're looking for a decent-sounding, easy-to-program bass guitar simulation, BASiS is a solid buy

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