Electric Bass | Future Music

THERE'S A FIERCE OLD war raging in the software bass market at the moment. Steinberg's Virtual Bassist and Bournemark's Broomstick Bass are just two of the contenders vying for your cash.

Ueberschall's latest addition to their Liquid Instrument range is a bit of a different beast though. Yes OK, it's essentially still a ROMpler that's stacked with bundles of sampled bass loops, but what sets it apart from the pack is that it gives you the ability to manipulate the actual notes of them.

Alright, so you can't add new ones or change the order in which they're played, but you can shorten or lengthen specific notes, delete ones you don't want and adjust their pitch, meaning that you can effectively rewrite the grooves to fit.

It's all down to Ueberschall's collaboration with Celemony, who are makers of the impressive Melodyne correction software. Let's get things straight right now, though: Electric Bass is purely and simply a sample player plug-in, so there's no way you can play in your own melodies - so it's tweaking the provided loops or nothing.

Luckily for us, these are all of a top-notch quality, and there are hundreds for you to manipulate to your hearts desire in the Editor screen. And the results? Superb! All of the loops sound highly realistic, regardless of how much you mangle them, retaining their human groove and feel. Every bass sound has been recorded cleanly so you can unleash your own effects on them and there's a good span of samples across the genres, meaning you should be able to find something that'll roughly suit your needs before you have to get the scalpel out.

Any criticisms? Well the interface is a tad fiddly on occasion and the installation procedure is a touch on the archaic side (involving manually copying files across to your hard drive), but on the whole there's very little to pick fault with. Overall it's a great value package, that'll serve your bass needs well if working with loops is your specialty.