

Contains a rack of vintage studio quality effects.The programming facilities and arpeggiator are creatively inspiring.Offers a huge variety of powerful, ready‑to‑record bass sounds.An all‑in‑one bass module containing a large number of high-quality, painstakingly multisampled electric, acoustic and synth basses.The big, banging, distorted, timpani‑like low register reminds me why I loved my old Prophet V. PPG In Heavy Fuzz: No guitar bully will dare kick sand in your face once he's heard you playing this.Not so much a bass patch, more an instant pulse‑based music generator. Plucky CS80 Arps: This arpeggio‑based racket gives exciting results when played chordally.Tough Tweety: A muscular, funked‑up bass rhythm patch based on Waldorf Pulse and ARP Odyssey waveforms.Based respectively on Oberheim's Synthesizer Expander Module and Studio Electronics' SE1 rackmount synth, two of the all‑time analogue greats. SEM Square With Four‑pole Filter/Steveland Wonderousness: Big, fat, warm and enveloping, these simple, classic bass synth patches sound great out of the box and respond precisely to small adjustments to the filter settings.The 'nuclear winter'‑style reverb effect adds contemporary ear candy. Lagoon Monster From '50s: Cheesy it may be, but the ultra‑sensitive velocity response of the filter cutoff in this patch demonstrates how accurately this bass module emulates the behaviour of a hardware analogue synth.

The 7GB Basis from Big Fish Audio is one of the few collections that combine contemporary and vintage electric, fretless and upright basses with synth bass, at a similar price to Trilian. Of the dozens of individual bass-guitar libraries out there, Scarbee's select range promise to be the most forensically sampled. To rival Trilian's lavish, in‑depth synth bass section you'd have to be looking at fairly expensive high‑end products like Arturia's 10 Year Suite, a set of eight software instruments modelling the Minimoog, Yamaha CS80, ARP 2600, Roland Jupiter 8 and Prophet synths. On the market now are the 12.7GB Chris Hein Bass, which features a Music Man Stingray electric, a fretless bass and an acoustic upright, while the somewhat larger Yellow Tools Majestic instrument offers a range of four‑string, five‑string and fretless instruments, as well a stand‑up bass. Following the example of Spectrasonics' 1994 Bass Legends, several companies have issued titles that combine electric and acoustic basses.
