Guitar Gaz wrote:Hmmm.... perhaps it's just me but this MODO bass doesn't seem that groundbreaking to me - I have had Propellerhead Reason Bass Refill for several years and I find it brilliant
I think you're kind of missing the point a bit. The reason refill is sample based. It's 3.45GB in size. If you do any sort of repetitive bass line you will run into round-robinitis. Scarbee has been a heavy hitter in bass VIs for a long time. I think Thom Skarbye walks on water when it comes to sampled basses (and, thankfully, other instruments, because his days sampling basses are now over unless he does a multimiked acoustic). His NI Rickenbacker pushes sampling of a bass to the very edge of what that technique can accomplish. It's awesome. But they're huge, multigigabyte libraries and they still can't do repetitive lines with the authenticity that MODO can.
The MODO Bass app is 7 *megabytes*. On a laptop, that makes a difference. With repetition on a string, it sounds better; the excitation of a note occurs while taking into account the previous excitation from the notes before. No sample-based instrument does or can do that. With transitions, hammer-ons, etc, same thing: you hear the effect of the previous state of the string on the current note. Supremely real sound. Sampling simply cannot achieve this.
Could you get by without MODO? Absolutely, no doubt.
But that does not mean for a second that there aren't very powerful reasons to get this amazing step forward in modeled VIs.
As has been said above, it's not flawless; the control scheme could use more customizability and it could definitely benefit from the addition of a legato hammer-on range parameter and from the inclusion of slide noises. But there's still nothing like it, and nothing that nails the core sound of a bass being played with such crazy precision.
P.S. Big retro love for the Variax - I have the Variax Bass. Absolutely no top end, but you've still gotta love the ambition. It's like an old teddy bear.
