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Waves Introduce Bass Fingers!


Larry Shelby

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7 hours ago, Eyal Amir said:

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. :)

 

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.

Edited by Sergio
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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).

 

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6 hours ago, Eyal Amir said:

I was only coding "Flow Motion" even though that synth wasn't my design (Bass Slapper/Fingers was, along with Or Lubianiker).

I think the UI for these two plugins are really stand out. Easy to use and understand. Good work. I also really like the ability to ease back on the velocity and just get a more mellow sound with both Bass Slapper and Fingers. Really good work there.

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?

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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.

 

 

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@Eyal Amir Just noticed that your avatar looks a lot like the guy in the video!! : ) LOL You did that one yourself?

 

I can see that the need for what I am talking about is small. It can be worked around. I just thought maybe I was overlooking it.

I am not a keyboard player, and my bass playing isn't that good either. But I have found that I can take simple bass lines, convert to midi, and send that to Bass Fingers and get some really good results. Better than I am capable of!!

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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...

 

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18 hours ago, Eyal Amir said:

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

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.

 

 

bass-finger.jpg

Record 11 (290).wav

groove-velo.jpg

But overall I would be interested the plugin especially with current no-brainer price. Just hoping its improvements are still in plans ;) 

 

Edited by Piotr
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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!).

Edited by Eyal Amir
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18 hours ago, Eyal Amir said:

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!).

Thank you for understanding point of potential customer who would like to see this plugin at best possible state ;)

About noises you mentioned it was not I was referencing to in my post ;) So thank you for noticing it  by yourself   ;)

I bounced MIDI track played by instrument without any additions so pure DI I guess.

I was writing about about clicks whenever you change preset or amp etc... I checked it also under Studio One to see if it was not Cakewalk specific one. But also there.

It is easy to check. Just run any midi loop and during playing click next preset few times.. Or click amp sim at 'level' section.

It is common way to checking presets and setting using loop as imaging you set preset, play something, stop playing to change presets or any settings and play again etc. It would be terrible workflow with checking whole day ;)

Of course I am aware I can suppress using lowest string and I like this feature in the plugin to choose range in such easy way.

But...  Actually I would like in that loop to use those notes from lowest string :)

Overall there is something wrong with sounds of the lowest string.

Please check this: turn off anything possible to have just pure sound of samples, velocity & string range to max (volume to max) and just try sounds on the same position (for instance 5) on all strings. The lowest one sounds completely different with different sustain than the others.  Or is excellent bass player and for sure has top instruments and string so I guess something happened during recording  (or processing) samples? I guess it is not plugin bug because probably it is playing every sample the same way?

About sharing MIDI I am probably not allowed as it is part of GrooveMonkey commercial library (I am not a bass player so wanted to use loop which was generated by real bass player with real human velocities instead of my programing to be fair ;)

Bonus: try to play lowest E on the lowest string setting manual position to 5 and see which sound (which string) plugin will play  ;)

About tuning issues I will try to figure out a more 'science' way to provide a prove. ;)

I have tried different tuner plugins but results hard to record (maybe it would require recording video what I would prefer to avoid).

Anyway difference is very noticeable,  for instance try to play long notes on the low E string: A and B. Or others ;)

Maybe the thing is related to library was tuned to sounds sustain instead of sounds attacks for some of them? It is quite a big difference between attack and sustain of sound and also for many big fluctuation. Long notes illustrate it perfectly. 


Of course I am ware bass is not synthesizer and it is normal there is the difference but I feel it is too big and this is making kind of anxiety when hearing it ;)

Sorry for my broken English and probably a pain with understanding my bla-bla language. I did my best, google translator still is not very good dealing with my native language so I trusted myself :) 

 

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