Eyal Amir

16 minutes ago, Piotr said:

Hi, Eyal

Thank you for visiting us and caring about our opinion

I played a little bit with plugin and have some first impressions if you are curious but please do not hate me for some notes.

I understand how much work requires creating of plugin and its lib but it requires some polishing.

I run a bass loop and checked different settings. I used Cakewalk by Bandlab of course

And first boomer is when changing presets or most of settings to check sounds during playing a loop there are some glitches/clicks. It would be nice if switching were smooth without unpleasant sound artifacts.

 After some presets/settings checks I turned off all FX/amps/tone etc to check pure sound and also test some external amps.

 Secondly I think the lib needs a little bit tuning. I seems to be a little above standard 440Hz. I used tune option to down it a bit (about -16  ) but still some intervals were a little not nice. Probably some batch run over samples with basic sounds would do the trick.

 And the third thing which bothered me was kind of death sounds on lowest string on some notes.

Please take a look at pictures below and wav file. Velocities of notes were not spread  very wide. Played by plugin on the 5th position, all amps/fx/etc turned off.



Hate you? Waves should probably pay you for such a well detailed QA!

That noise you got there does sound nasty. I wonder how that happens, and does it happen every time on the same place (could be a faulty sample).

If you could also attach a MIDI file and preset that recreates the issue, I'll make sure someone at Waves reads it and fixes it via hotfix!

As for tuning: The library should be tuned quite well, but if you find some notes that aren't tuned correctly please report those!

You can email me to eyalamirmusic@gmail.com and I'll make sure this is forwarded to the right person if you find things like that...
 

As a general rule: You might want to disable the B string using the 'string range' slider and use a 4-string setting if you like 'cleaner' sounding intervals in the low registers.
In this mode, you can still go down to a low B, but any note from E and above would default to the E string which has much better tuning (happens on the real bass too!).

If you refer to the tutorial video - that's me.
The avatar was made by a friend of mine who's an artist as a birthday present - I thought it was absolutely awesome so I'm using it everywhere!

Anyway, I actually agree with you about the need of just patching MIDI into a plugin without playing - I do that a lot myself when I'm composing music...

That's was one reason we wanted you to be able to set a 'mode' on the instrument and just 'go' without the need for constant keyswitching which can be a bit tiring with some plugins...

 

45 minutes ago, Grem said:

One thing I noticed about Bass Fingers, if I could ask a question; say I am on the A string, third fret (C note) and I want to slide down to the open A string (A note), how would you do that on this plugin? I know of the sliding key switches, but when I use that method, the slide starts way above the C note I am playing. Any idea?

You definitely bring up a good point:

Currently the slides in the instrument are "Fixed". So they're not really a "From Note X" "To Note Y" slides.

Indeed, this isn't great. But we couldn't find a way to do it that we thought was good enough, so we decided to drop it for now.

The one thing I can say, is that if you look in the keyswitch editor, there's a larger selection of them so you might be able to find one that's closer to the one you need.

6 hours ago, Sergio said:

Nice to see you in the forum. Personally I usually prefer emulations or pure algorithmic code in softsynths but, if one is looking for realistic renderings of acoustic or electro-acoustic instruments, samples are the way to go. And you did a GREAT job with Bass Fingers.

PS: Your 'Theme from Planet Codex' totally sold me this other great Waves synth that, together with Element and Flow Motion, are among my favorites.

I see what you're saying about having a synth just be a synth.
There's indeed something about samples which is always 'fixed' to whatever it is that you recorded to the library, and is usually really limited compared to a physical model or an algorithmic sound generation module.

I'm kinda amazed you remembered "Theme From Planet Codex". 
We actually recorded an 'acoustic' version of it recently with no synths at all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsbWR1fG_rE

Anyway, I'm glad to see you liked the Waves synths! Out of those you mentioned I was only coding "Flow Motion" even though that synth wasn't my design (Bass Slapper/Fingers was, along with Or Lubianiker).

2 hours ago, Piotr said:

Oh, yeah... And it pushed me to schedule download of the lib

Ha! That's awesome. Let us know your thoughts after you jammed with it.

Well, don't feel obligated by any means... I always like to demo things for a few days before I spend any money on it anyway.

1 minute ago, chris.r said:

To make a convincing results you're pushed to think the same way a bass player is thinking, interesting. I enjoyed the other slap bass lesson very much . Just these 15GB if my HD is only 128, eh...

I definitely see what you mean there!

Large sample libraries are indeed a problem on the go - I actually bought an external SSD when I was playing live with BFD3...
There is the SD version which is about 2.5 GB. The sound is obviously a bit less high-res, but you can always switch to HD later without losing your project settings.

Hey everyone, I'm Eyal Amir, and I'm the lead developer for the Bass Fingers plugin.

I actually recently left Waves (moved to another plugin company), but I was still excited to see 'my' plugin come out and read the discussion here.

TBH, I can't add much to the discussion on which sample library/VST is better, as obviously I was very involved with this one plugin.
So on that part I'm looking forward to your observations to see if the sample library quality matches it's size in GB, etc...

After all, the technicals don't matter as much: if the plugin sounds good to you and helps your creative 'flow', great! 

I do wanna share one tutorial I created with Or Lubianiker (the bass player who created the sample library).
We did it to capture a few features we think are cool about the instrument (mainly to do with 'positional' control on the virtual fretboard).

Looking forward to reading your (honest!) reviews of the plugin once you get to demoing it yourself...

Eyal