Hi everyone. I started producing speed/power metal and I'm looking for a good bass vst.

I've searched quite a bit before settling for Prominy's SC2 for the guitars, even though it has only 6 strings... at least it sounds realistic enough, has good round robin and offers picked tremolo.

Now for the bass.. phew. No tremolo with Prominy's SR5. Shreddage Abyss is only fingered and doesn't have tremolo. None of the Submission Audio stuff seems to have it, altough being metal oriented...

Right now I'm faking it with Ezbass, but maybe someone can suggest anything better?

 

AmpleSound usually have a great choice of articulations.
Would Metal Ray5's legato modes fit your bill?

 

Doesn't SR5 do tremolo by repeating a note from a keyswitch? So you can tremolo in time on two keys. I haven't used it in ages but I swear I thought it did that.

 

Maybe this might be one for you:

Ample Bass P Lite II (ABPL)
https://plugins4free.com/plugin/2505/

 

plugins4free is mistaken, ample sound doesn't offer either tremolo or tremolo picking as an articulation, even though ABP has a bit more choice than AMR.

SR5 advertises it can, but there is no sampled tremolo (unlike the guitar stuff Prominy have released).

The idea for both products is that you have to trigger a "repeat note" articulation, and play with velocity and such until you get a decent tremolo emulation out of it.
I really like Ample Sound for legatos and such, but strumming and repeated notes (including palm mutes...) sound always super robotic. Tremolo can't be perfectly on time... and I don't want to spend a lot of time programming a tremolo that will inevitably sound "meh".

But I might give SR5 another chance though, my first attempt wasn't so bad. But it's still faking it, based on the quality of the software round robin.

(attached files are from product manuals. No mention of tremolo in the whole ample sound manuals)

 

Last edited: Jan 8, 2023

I've spent years searching for a virtual guitar instrument corresponding to what I wanted. I've never found. In the end, the solution was to learn to play guitar. And instead of losing time searching for a fake guitar, I wish I had started to learn guitar earlier ! Guitar, bass... not expansive instruments, and with so much ressources available to help learning process ! ;)

 

In a vacuum, it's always better to play on the real thing. But working with MIDI is a necessary evil in modern production, especially when multiple people get involved: nobody has time to understand by ear what is being played; they want to see it on the piano roll.
Even more so when collaborating. Let's say I have to orchestrate over electric guitars, no way I'm going to spend hours trying to figure out what the guitarist is playing in his solos; especially with all the effects (and possible mistakes) happening. So I'll ask him to produce a MIDI track or a music sheet, and I'll give him a MIDI chord track etc so everything goes smoothly and he understands my take on his composition. Basically: MIDI doesn't lie, whereas everyone's knowledge about an instrument or general music theory is different.

At the end of the day it's just a demo track for the bass player to work on, later on it will be performed live of course. We're doing metal after all, not electronic music ;)

 

Last edited: Jan 8, 2023