Realistic Bass Guitar Sound (Part 2)
Last Edited: Dec 4, 2023
As I emphasized before, Scarbee MM-Bass by Native Instruments is one of the better bass guitar virtual representations I came across. It offers various options for playing and controlling. Moreover, I guarantee that if you dedicate time to exploring its full potential, you will not be left unsatisfied. In the previous part of the tutorial for the Scarbee MM-Bass, I guided you through its essential functions and gave you a brief overlook of its interface. Since you are familiar with this, in part 2, I will show you some advanced features.
Scarbee MM-Bass Advanced Features
As in the last part of this tutorial, let us start by loading a fresh instance of Scarbee MM-Bass (by using Kontakt player) to a newly created MIDI channel within SoundBridge.
Perform Tab
In the left part of the interface, you can see a tab with "Perform" written by default. Moreover, if we click on it, the drop-down menu appears.
As you can see above, here we get a list of many different submenus holding various controls. For example, if we click "Players Profile," we can select one of the three styles. Therefore, their playing styles change the fret behavior as follows :
- Pop & Countr: No specific preference for low/high frets
- Soul & Funk: Frets above fret 4 are preferred
- Rock & Retro: Frets above fret 6 are preferred
FX Presets
Pursuing this further, we are moving to "FX Presets," where we can open a sub-menu. It is possible to choose from attractive pre-saved preset banks. My favorite from Standard, Old School, and New Wave is 2020 Lead, which is solely fat and spacious.
Pickup Hit
Next feature from this menu that I would like to mention is the "Pickup Hit". It is basically the sound of a player hammering right-hand fingers on strings when playing hard. With this feature, dialing the Ratio parameter lets you control how much of the pickup hammering sound should be present.
Controllers
One more useful feature of this section is the "Controllers" submenu. Using CC mapping, you can switch between different articulations of the sequence that played. Let's list a few :
- Playing position: This will affect the following note but not lock the position like the holding position key switch (F5-B6) pressed does.
- Slide mode: Is used to activate Slide Mode (by default is set to CC#64)
- Sustain: Used to sustain notes (like the sustain pedal otherwise does)
All this CC mapping can be changed to different lines of your choosing. Let me show you how to engage, for example, the slide mod, followed by a short audio sample of the bass guitar sequence I made using Scarbee MM-Bass.
As you can see in the Soundbridge's MIDI editor, I marked a MIDI CC tab in red. Moreover, by clicking on this ta,b, we enter the submenu where I will choose the MIDI CC#64, which controls the slide mode. Here is what it looks like.
After selecting the MIDI CC#6,4, we are returned to the MIDI editor. I will draw the line for Slide mode by clicking on the "View MIDI CC" tab. I marked it in red in the picture below. The line appears in the middle of the piano roll, but to get the full effect of the Slide mode, I will pull it up to the maximum value, which is 127.
Finally, let us hear how this bass sequence sounds with all the settings I mentioned in this tutorial.
~Scarbee MM-Bass Sequence
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