Schmiederbait.

[jloeb]

This sounds really good…

http://www.premiersoundfactory.com/modu ... -p-36.html

[mhschmieder]

Thanks for the link; I had seen brief mention of it the other day when I was far too busy to even bookmark it for later, so hadn't heard it yet. It's all personal taste, of course, but I absolutely detest it. It reminds me of the upright basses in Spectrasonics Trilogy, which have a honky character to my ears that sounds too much like a piezo pickup and a DI vs. a ribbon mic or two capturing the darkness and warmth of the wood and the brilliance of the string harmonics.

Maybe more demos will be posted later and we'll find the library has more than just one personality. It appears to be more deeply sampled than others, so it may well be an improvement on what's out there. To be frank, I don't care much for ANY of my upright bass sample libraries. If I'm not careful though, I will have spent as much on libraries as my real upright bass.

For this library, there appear to be multiple mic positions and maybe I'd prefer ones not covered in the existing samples. I'm not hearing a human connection at all; no sense of fingers hitting strings.

[jloeb]

Hmm - I hear that "honky piezoness" as intimacy and detail, so there you go, different strokes. But I can see how one might not like that in a mix, though I generally feel that it's easier to notch down what's present in a signal than to try to pump up what's absent, especially ITB.

With regard to the feel thing, I agree that's a tenacious problem for most upright libraries. This one is my new favorite on that front, you might like:

http://straightaheadsamples.com/shop-2/ ... head-bass/

Focused on walking lines rather than solos but capable of either with some care, it's kind of a brilliant approach to the problem in that it uses Kontakt Time Machine and note duration "articulations" to give you distinct full, quarter and eighth note, plus muted, multisample sets triggerable by keyswitch as a strategy for recapitulating the sound of a performed line. For straight walking jazz bass or the like, it's as good as it gets with samples IMO. Also, I think the body mic in this library might have a tone you like more.

The weaker points of this library are that, first, because of the multimic tempo lock design (I presume), this is mono, so you won't get any spacious stereo image from it out of the box, which may or may not be a problem; in practice i don't find it one. Second, it has no "fx" samples - slides, knocks, noises, although that's a very solvable problem (i.e., take Vienna Upright, mono everything, dynamic EQ with spectrograph & ear comparatively on i.e. a low and high E to match the sounds, run through the same FX chain as Straight Ahead and there's your fx samples).

[mikehalloran]

This one is my new favorite on that front, you might like:

http://straightaheadsamples.com/shop-2/ ... head-bass/

It probably isn't the G.A. Pfretchener 7/8 that I used to own but it looks and sounds like it. Yea, that sounds pretty good.

I prefer a less intimate sound with more room. I have yet to find a library that sounds as good as my bass did when recorded in a church where I used to work.

[jloeb]

True, nothing's as good as the real thing it seems, whenever there's a human hand or embouchure in contact with the instrument. (Maybe someone needs to take a serious crack at modeling *those* as well as their interactions with the instruments! Bye bye CPU…)

[mhschmieder]

I did download and/or buy that one from Straight Ahead Samples a few months back, and though I wasn't initially impressed by their jazz brushes library (compared to other alternatives), the quick visit I had with that library did impress in terms of its timbral territory at the very least.

Perhaps because Charlie Haden is my ultimate bass hero, and because of ECM's (and his other labels') recording techniques, I have always liked a very warm woody sound for upright bass -- at least in the context of jazz.

[mikehalloran]

As much as I admired Charlie Hayden, I never liked his recorded sound.

The fact is that no one listens to a bass with one's ears a foot or two in front of the top. This includes the player. This is why I've never bought any of the sample libraries I've heard.

My best sounding bass recordings are done with a ribbon about 10 feet away or even ambient room mics with no transducer pointed at the bass. If I can make some time, I'll open a SoundCloud account and show what I mean.

I've made a few stabs at putting together my own library. Unfortunately, I should have done this when I could still play. I just can't find enough clean notes in my old recordings.

[Shooshie]

As much as I admired Charlie Hayden, I never liked his recorded sound.

The fact is that no one listens to a bass with one's ears a foot or two in front of the top. This includes the player. This is why I've never bought any of the sample libraries I've heard.

Close-miccing is a solution to noisy environments, but it comes at a price: you have to use some kind of reverb or room-sampled software. If I take a close-micced sample such as what you described, and put it in Altiverb with a virtual mic at, say, 6 meters, give or take a few, it sounds like it's supposed to sound. It just takes some searching to come up with the right studio or hall space in Altiverb.

[mhschmieder]

It's funny, the recording process was what finally got me to sell my Eminence Upright Bass (which had a piezo pickup for live purposes) and buy a Chinese 3/4 body upright. There wasn't enough BODY and depth to get the sound I needed on the Eminence, but the guy did a great job filling a niche for those who wanted a true acoustic upright that would fit in a compact car.

I still haven't gotten around to recording my current upright bass, so the recommendation for a distance ribbon mic is very helpful. So many suggest the close-miked approach, but this may also be why I haven't liked any of the current libraries. I'll have to check out the Straight Ahead Samples library again because it might be the first to use a distant mic.

[jloeb]

I'm with Shooshie on the mic issue - distance from a close-miked library can be simulated, and very well. Proximity to a far-miked library, not so much.
You can't un-dilute what's been diluted without a lot of undue effort.

Simulating the connective tissue of a performance is a much bigger issue for samples, and much easier to achieve in a close-miked scenario. Add reverb/distance at will.

A real bass and bassist with a good ribbon mic would be the best option, naturally. But sometimes ya just can't go there.

[mhschmieder]

I think it depends on whether multiple mics were used, as otherwise you're still going to be dealing with a radical difference in ratio between the various elements of the sound (strings, fingers, resonance, wood, etc.) that are unrelated to room ambience for the most part.

[jloeb]

True. I think Straight Ahead did a reasonably good job there - three perspectives, all relatively dry, but lets you play with those ratios to taste.

[mhschmieder]

Sounds good then. I'll check it out in a few weeks (I have off-site training coming up and will have zero time for production work for a bit). I know I didn't buy it (a bit pricey) but I might have downloaded a free subset teaser.