MODO Bass Review Posted

[MikeRivers]

I've been playing around with IK Multimedia's physically modeled electric bass virtual instrument for a few months now, learning things I never knew about my DAW (Reaper), how a VSTi works, and mostly about why one bass and one bass player sounds different from another. What started out to be a review with a slant toward its value in learning how the instrument works and the ways that both design and playing technique affect the sound ended up being a lengthy article about what goes on under the hood and how it can be measured (and the results of my measurement).

 

If you want a great sounding and flexible bass plug-in, get it. That's the short review.

 

You can jump directly to the full article by clicking here

[bookumdano4]

cool

[nat whilk II]

Thanks, Mike, for the review. I'm going to have to read it more than once - wonderful depth of coverage.

 

I've been waiting for the better reviewers to hold forth on Modo Bass - and until your article I wasn't finding much. No Sound On Sound review, no Musicplayer.com review, etc. Gearslutz has a longish thread on it, but it's lots of posts by not many people. With Gearslutz, my rule is to first find consensus among a good many experienced posters before jumping on any product bandwagon.

 

IK Multimedia just ended a whopper of a sale (last day was 3/31) but I notice that Sweetwater is still offering the sale price through April 8th. I'm probably going to spring for the crossgrade special since I have - at least I'm pretty sure I have - a qualifying product registered.

 

nat

[MikeRivers]

I was going to announce that sale, but then I edited and re-edited and editited again and then it was officially over. Glad to hear that Sweetwater is still offering the deal. Let me know what you think of it. With something like this, while I hope I fully explored it, there's always something that I miss, probably something important to somebody.

 

I looked around on forums, too, to see what other people were saying about the program so I'd have a good idea of what to look for, and didn't really find much of anything useful, not even on the IK forum. About the only thing useful that I found there was that someone complained that it went out of tune. I thought I noticed that, too, but then I realized that what I was hearing was a slight shift in the overtones when playing with alternate fingers (which seems to be the default). But checking with an electronic tuner and a frequency counter, it was always right on pitch.

 

Tell me how the latency works for you. As a one-finger and half-brained keyboard player, it didn't bother me a bit, but I knew that my subjective opinion wouldn't be worth a hoot, so that's why I pursued finding a real number. Some people say that anything less than 30 milliseconds isn't bothersome, but those are people who build high-latency products. I think that 10 ms is a better target and the best I could do on my system was 9 ms.

 

[Mats Nermark]

I have it and I like it a lot.

 

Slap bass is not very good but it never is on bass plugins, samplers or ROM-based synth as that playing technique is very difficult to replicate.

I also found in this first version that you can't render a mix in Studio One unless you render in real time. That will be addressed and fixed in the next update.

 

Cheers,

 

Mats N

[MikeRivers]

I have it and I like it a lot.

 

Slap bass is not very good but it never is on bass plugins, samplers or ROM-based synth as that playing technique is very difficult to replicate.

 

I'm not surprised that the slap isn't all that exciting. After all, it only does two things, slap and pull, and always does them in the same position, with the only variation being when there's a pull following a slap. I can't imagine anything I'd record that uses slap bass, but certainly others will.

 

I also found in this first version that you can't render a mix in Studio One unless you render in real time. That will be addressed and fixed in the next update.

 

You mean rendering the MODO track while rendering the whole project to a stereo file? I never tried that (with any plug in, ever), I only rendered single MODO tracks to new audio tracks. I'll see what happens when I try to mix down a song with an unrendered MODO track in Reaper.

 

 

[MikeRivers]

I also found in this first version that you can't render a mix in Studio One unless you render in real time. That will be addressed and fixed in the next update.

 

That might be something particular to Studio One. Today I set up a 16 track about 4 minute long project in Reaper, and it took 1 minute and 38 seconds (about 3x real time) to render it. Then I added a track with MODO Bass, rendered again, and it was just a few seconds longer. This was on a 2.8 GHz Core2Duo CPU with 4 GB RAM, running Windows 7 64-bit.

 

 

[Mats Nermark]

 

That might be something particular to Studio One. Today I set up a 16 track about 4 minute long project in Reaper, and it took 1 minute and 38 seconds (about 3x real time) to render it. Then I added a track with MODO Bass, rendered again, and it was just a few seconds longer. This was on a 2.8 GHz Core2Duo CPU with 4 GB RAM, running Windows 7 64-bit.

 

 

Interesting! I heard that the problem is also present in Cubase, but that may or may not be.

 

Or the update is already out.

 

Cheers,

 

Mats N

[MikeRivers]

My version is 1.0.2, which came out in December. That was an update from the original release, and as far as I can tell, the only update so far.

[Mats Nermark]

That explains it! I have not updated at all.

 

Cheers,

 

Mats N