Bass arpeggiators?

[banditblack]

I have Trilian for my bass sound in my rig and love the natural bass sounds available. I'd like to use the excellent arpeggiator with it to trigger bass grooves and fills in mostly blues context but the presets that exist seem to all be geared toward a "synth bass". Is anybody using arpeggiators for this use, and can you give me some advice? Are they available for download or purchase?

[David Polich]

There are, as you have discovered, plenty of synth bass arpeggiators but very little in the
way of electric bass arpeggiators, which is what I think you're asking for.

The answer to your question is - no, not really. The very nature of electric bass playing kind
of precludes using arpeggios, and here's why - electric and acoustic bass parts usually belong in rock, jazz, blues, r&b, funk, pop and country genres, and they're almost always non-repetitive. Bass players tend to think in a linear fashion, even if they are playing a "pattern", Certainly, you'd never find a robotic repeating pattern in an old-school jazz tune.
it's always changed up somewhat from section to section.

Bass players aren't machines and can't play 100% quantized parts..not in this universe, anyway. Machines can - enter sequencers and synthesizers.

Quantized arpeggiated parts work best with synth basses and in electronic music styles (house, techno, drum'n'bass, trip-hop, garage, EDM, IDM, etc.). I call these parts "sequenced"
bass lines and they work because they lend themselves to synthesizer bass sounds.

My advice is to forget about finding arpeggios that work with electric bass, and just "roll your
own" bass parts.

[bayswater]

Bass players aren't machines and can't play 100% quantized parts..not in this universe, anyway.

Funny you should say that. I remember watching a short video of John Entwistle at a recording session years ago. His bass was clamped in a stand. He walked up to it and seeming to barely touch it, played a quick riff with such precision and clarity that I couldn't help but think he himself was quantized. (But not arpeggiated...)

[mhschmieder]

Entwistle was the exception to every rule.

[philbrown]

Why can't you use DP's arpeggiator MIDI plug?
It ain't pretty but it works.
It would be nice if MOTU would slap a decent GUI on those dialog box MIDI plugs (especially the arp) but I seem to be the only one interested in that.

[mikehalloran]

Not enough information. What are you trying to accomplish? You tell us how you want to do it but not what you want to do.

Let's start with the basic question: Live performance or studio recording?

[stubbsonic]

Nothing wrong with using an arpeggiator on facsimiles of acoustic and non-synth sounds. As mentioned, there are ways to get it there. Some keyboards have arps built in. DP's plug, as Phil mentioned. Kontakt probably has a script for an arp that could be used.

[banditblack]

So it sounds like I would be able, using the motu trigger, to convert any aiff file(say garageband bass grooves) into MIDI ? Then I can drag-and-drop into Trilian's arpeggiator. Anyone done it?

[stubbsonic]

Mike is right. You still haven't given enough information.

For live playing? And are the samples you are talking about multi-note riffs or single notes?

This all can get really messy. If you really describe what you want to do, we might be able to advise you on an easier way to get it done. It is entirely possible you REALLY want to do this the hard way.

[Shooshie]

So it sounds like I would be able, using the motu trigger, to convert any aiff file(say garageband bass grooves) into MIDI ? Then I can drag-and-drop into Trilian's arpeggiator. Anyone done it?

AIFF to MIDI? There's no plugin I know of that does that. Well, I take that back. Melodyne and its ilk can do that. MOTU's pitch layer in the Sequence Editor can do that, but those are somewhat limited in what they can do, and it's rarely a simple matter of pushing a button and out pops your MIDI. It's more like you have to work with the pitch indicators and get them consistent and whole, then you can extract MIDI from them which will need some cleaning up in order to be usable.

But there's no trigger plugin or anything else that I know of that can just convert AIFF to MIDI. I mean, not by MOTU. There may be some 3rd party plugin that works to varying degrees, but again, I think we're talking about Melodyne and MOTU's pitch layer.

At this point I can't figure out exactly what you're trying to do, so I'm not going to comment further.

Shooshie

[bayswater]

Converting AIFF to MIDI, maybe no. But generating MIDI from a sound being played, yes.

[Shooshie]

Oh, is he talking about using audio to trigger MIDI? (Not convert.)

[bayswater]

We're all guessing. Using Trigger and then Arpeggiator plugins would seem to do it, but I don't know enough about Trillian to close the loop, so to speak.

I don't know why you wouldn't just play a MIDI note, real time or recorded, through Arpeggiator, and have the output play a bass VI. Why is the fact that it's a bass an issue? Why does it matter if it's live or recorded? Isn't this just a standard MIDI thing?

[mhschmieder]

You can also experiment with articulation and phrasing without a lot of effort by only notating the actual note changes, and using the Pattern Gate to play with the lengths and spaces of notes. I'll do this sometimes with a synth bass part, where I'm likely to go for simpler note movement than on a bass guitar anyway (although I can think of one part I did that spanned almost four octaves ).

[banditblack]

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions...you guys are well above my experience level with DP and available technology, so sorry I posted my question because I love the sounds available in Trilian, but I can't find any good MIDI bass grooves of the quality of "EZKeys" for piano and "Superior Drummer"

1: Since Trilian says I can drag-and-drop a MIDI file into the apeggiator, I thought if I could capture an audio groove and convert it to MIDI, I could create a bunch of presets that could utilize the "sqeeks" and "slides", etc. available to me.

2: On my rp-1000 guitar processor, I can record using a patch that lowers the pitch and tries to emulate a bass. Since the sound is not good, I thought if I could convert it to MIDI, I could use the much superior sounds in Trilian.

This would not be for live, just recording at this point. DP 7.