SESSION BASSIST – UPRIGHT BASS FROM NATIVE INSTRUMENTS

SESSION BASSIST – UPRIGHT BASS FROM NATIVE INSTRUMENTS

KK-ACCESS REVIEW

The Session Guitar series has grown considerably since the first in the series Strummed Acoustic was first released back in 2016.

We have had some great libraries, guitars , bass, Percussion, and even a Ukulele, but surprisingly no upright bass, but this has thankfully now been addressed with this latest instalment with Session Bassist – Upright Bass!

Here we give you the lowdown, quite literally!

TECH SPECS

Upright Bass will run in Kontakt 7.9 full version or higher, and the equivalent free Kontakt Player, and is compatible with all versions of Komplete Kontrol.

Upright Bass requires 6.63 GB of space on your drive for installation, the library uses the NCW format for it’s sample content.

There are two master Kontakt NKI presets, one for the included patterns, and another for the melody version of the instrument.

There are also a total of 110 Kontakt NKSN snapshot presets, which are the principle sources for the NKS patches we use within Komplete Kontrol.

These are split equally between the aforementioned Pattern & Melody presets, having 55 each.

DOWNLOAD & INSTALLATION

Naturally as you would expect, being a Native instruments product, the Upright Bass is downloaded and installed directly through Native Access 2.

Also in this case, you will not need to worry about pasting in your serial number, as having made your purchase directly through the Native Instruments online store means that your license is automatically added to your account, so all that you need do is launch Native Access 2 and install your new library.

Running an instance of Komplete Kontrol will automatically scan the library into your browser, and that’s about it, well almost!

WIZARD WOES!

Existing Session Guitar series owners will already be aware of the annoying Welcome Wizard, which requires owners to step through a succession of frankly pointless dialog boxes before the melodic presets from any of the Session series products are fully unlocked and enabled for use.

It’s not impossible to achieve with a little OCR, but in my view continues to be a wholly unnecessary access hurdle to jump before you can begin to enjoy your new purchase.

Essentially, when you attempt to load a melodic preset, the wizard will pop up within the user interface. At this point you need to OCR the screen, arrow down until you find the text that states ‘next’, then hit enter perhaps six times in order to complete the steps that are demanded by the wizard.

After this, the melodic presets should be unlocked for all future use, as a welcome state Kontakt .NKA file gets generated as a token.

KOMPLETE KONTROL PLUG-IN EDIT NKS PARAMETER MAPPINGS

Page One – Performance, Timing, Latch Mode, Tempo

Knob 1 – Humanise
Knob 2 – Swing
Knob 3 – Swing Timebase: 8 or 16
Knob 4 – Feel
Knob 5 – M Timebase: 8 or 16
Knob 6 – Timing Shift: adjustable in milliseconds
Knob 7 – Latch Mode
Knob 8 – Tempo Factor: 1/1, 1/2, x 2

Page Two – Microphone, DI Signal

Knob 1 – Microphone/Position: Bridge, Neck, Both, Dynamic, Condenser MS, mixed
Knob 2 – Volume
Knob 3 – Width
Knob 4 – Low Cut
Knob 5 – DI Signal Volume
Knob 6 – Tone
Knob 7 & 8 – Unallocated

Page Three – Muted Notes, Resonance, Noise, Intonation, Octave Down, Polyphony

Knob 1 – Muted Notes Decay
Knob 2 – Resonance Amount
Knob 3 – Fret Noise
Knob 4 – Noise Floor
Knob 5 – Intonation Tuning
Knob 6 – Octave Down On/Off
Knob 7 – Polyphony Mode: Mono, Poly
Knob 8 – Unallocated

ACCESSIBILITY

The Session Series has received some criticism in terms of accessibility, mostly due to the inability to use the GUI based browser in order to choose our own patterns, and assign the keyswitch content.

Upright Bass does not offer any new solutions in this respect, so the compromise as per all of the previous libraries in the series, is to offer the available patterns within the factory snapshot presets.

This more or less appears to cover the majority of the patterns as far as I can discern, there are a stated 224 patterns, and with each of the pattern presets containing 4 keyswitched patterns it does equate to 55 x 4 = 220.

The gotcha is that the pattern you wish to use may not be assigned to the sound, or the patterns you want may be spread over multiple presets, meaning that multiple instances will need to be loaded in order to realise the exact pattern combination you wish to use.

Most of us have learnt to either live with, or workaround this, and thankfully there are always the melodic presets that offer us the opportunity to play our bass patterns manually.

We are also unable to use the drag & dropping or exporting of the patterns into our DAW, however this is a problem not exclusive to the Session series, so it’s certainly not a criticism.

Cross referencing the parameters made available for automation in Kontakt outside of KK, showed that the same controls were available.

UPRIGHT BASSBASICS

Drumasonic are once again the developer behind this release, and they have done a great job of capturing the nuances, tone & feel of the instrument.

This is no small feat, the Upright Bass can be a tricky beast to capture, they are large, the sound is boomy, the wooden construction is sensitive to all manner of knocks, taps, & body noises, that would I am sure have taken some quite meticulous editing of the samples to make it perfectly release ready.

I did once have the dubious experience (I’m reluctant to use the word pleasure here), of recording an upright bass in my studio, and there was quite a fine balance involved in capturing the natural & direct input sound from the pickups.

I also seem to recall not being best pleased about the scratches left by the heavy instrument on my newly fitted laminate flooring , but I’m really not one to bear grudges 🙂

MIC MIX UP?

    There are several microphone types which are selectable via NKS, although I did encounter some confusion here. 

When this NKS control is first touched, it announces the position as either Bridge or Neck, which varies between presets.

However when rotating the control, you will hear the various microphone types being announced, but it then seems impossible to return to the Bridge or Neck setting.

I will need to clarify this, as in some respects it almost seems that two sets of controls have been merged, as to my way of thinking, you would first choose the position, Neck, Bridge or Both, and then go on to select the microphone type using a separate knob.

I may indeed be in error on this assumption, being someone who has in my time caught hold of the wrong end of enough sticks to build an entire wrong end of a forest!

UPRIGHT BASS – PATTERN PLAY

Upright Bass offers a decent variety of patterns in a range of styles, some Jazz, blues, Waltz, and several other genres, there is certainly also a smattering of the finest of Cheddar Cheese among them, but they do try to please everybody and endeavour to cover all, err, basses!

Similarly, there is a range of time signatures on offer, all of which will be synced to your project tempo. I was relieved to see that the pattern time factor control has been included in this release, which allows you to either double or half the pattern tempo in relation to your DAW. This was strangely missing from the Session Percussion library, and I felt this was somewhat of an oversight for a library that is predominantly pattern based in it’s nature.

Latch selection is included, which allows you to choose how the pattern interacts with the sync of your DAW, and lets you opt for where the pattern playback will end in the bar.

Interestingly, I noticed that the sustain pedal did not appear to latch and hold a currently playing pattern, where in say strummed Acoustic it would loop the pattern until the pedal was released, here the pattern only plays as long as a key is physically held, but this could just be me grabbing those wrong ended sticks once again!

The Humanise controls allow you to modify the feel of the pattern, providing more finite adjustment of the all important groove and swing.

BASS NOISE

An integral and important component of an Upright Bass sound is the percussive noises that can be made in tandem with the playing style.

Think of a Rockabilly style bassline, where a skilled player is able to slap and bounce the string on the fret to achieve that clicking element, this can work like a perfectly timed percussion instrument in it’s own right.

Session Bassist Upright Bass, is probably the best attempt to pull this off in a sampled instrument I have seen so far, although you do need to practice the playing technique in order for it to sound convincing.

With Upright Bass, that clacking sound is invoked through velocity triggering,however there is also a keyswitch which when pressed will trigger the percussive fret noises across the playable range.

If you are using the pre-recorded patterns, extra percussive tonality can also be added using the pitch bend, where moving it upwards adds more impact, I found I kneaded to be quick when doing this with a traditional rotary pitch bend, however if using a touchstrip such as that found on the M32, it worked well as you could simply tap the top of the strip to quickly add a percussive element without needing to rotate the wheel.

In the melody presets, the pitch bend reverts functionality to bending the notes, while in all presets the modwheel will add vibrato.

It might have been a useful bonus to have included a couple of presets that exclusively featured a wider selection of percussive and body sound effects, which could be inserted into your recordings to add that little extra realism.

There is no access to FX such as delay or reverb, although some of the more experimental cinematic presets clearly make use of those that are built into Kontakt.

This is a shame, as the option of adding slapback echo could have added a little extra rhythmic potential,, especially if routed to the fret noises.

KEYSWITCHES

As mentioned earlier, in the pattern based presets, keyswitches are used to change between patterns using the notes C1 to D sharp, there are also a further selection which provide performance techniques such as bass slides up & down, and the fret noise.

In the melody presets they also offer not only articulation switches between an umber of playing techniques, but the related patterns are also still available, which gives you the option of combining the pre-recorded patterns alongside your own freely played melodic interventions.

THE SOUND

Session Bassist upright Bass sounds great to my ears, there is enough bass range and low end authenticity to provide a nice solid and genuine bottom end to your tracks.

As is the case with any virtual instrument, making the effort to visualise and play in a way that reflects how a real bassist would perform is part of the battle, and there are enough scripted nuances to make this possible with practice.

Do make a point of checking out the media links at the review footer in order to appreciate the sounds and features of Upright Bass.

CONCLUSION

Session Bassist Upright Bass is definitely a very welcome new member to the session series family.

I am sure there will also be a large number of users who will appreciate and embrace the warm and natural sounding timbres it can add to a track.

In terms of accessibility, there are no real nasty surprises or show stopping letdowns, particularly if you are already familiar with other Session series products.

Session Bassist – Upright Bass is available at the Native Instruments website at the price of £89.00 inc.

Session Bassist – Upright Bass Product Page:
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/guitar/session-bassist-upright-bass/

Upright Bass Product Walk through:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDqpXe8HuCU

Introducing Session Bassist Upright Bass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxcAhR1xFuA

Session Bassist – Upright Bass user Manual:
https://www.native-instruments.com/fileadmin/ni_media/downloads/manuals/Upright_Bass/Upright_Bass_Manual_English.pdf

(c) Chris Ankin

KK-Access.com

12TH April 2024

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Disclaimer

The author can not accept any responsibility for subsequent purchase decisions made as a result of this review,or Any inaccuracies found therein. All opinions and product functions stated are based solely on information perceived as a blind user whilst using the product and/or gathered from official factual sources such as the developer, web or supplied product manual.

About the Author

Based in Buckinghamshire, England, Chris Ankin has worked as a freelance review writer and contributor with articles published in Sound On Sound, Home & Studio Recording and ST Format Magazines.

He has also successfully worked extensively in and around the music, recording, film Soundtrack scoring, Game & media composition, the creative arts, Charitable trusts,publishing, music streaming and property investments since 1982 whilst continuously and deliberately managing to evade any mainstream recognition under his own name by the use of various pseudonyms.

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