add real sounding bass guitar to your songs with this
free bass vst plugin ample bass p lite ii from ample sound i'm zane
welcome to simple green tech where i do weekly audio tech tips tutorials and
reviews to help you conquer the tech and unleash your creativity now i've linked
to the ample bass p lite ii plugin down in the description so you can
easily head over to the ample sound website
grab this plugin for yourself and check it out on your own
now let's give it a quick listen and then i'll come back and talk about
some of the details and then we'll do some more audio tests
like in a mix and i'll add a bass amp sim and maybe some effects
so the ample bass p lite 2 doesn't sound too bad for a free bass vst
plugin i actually used this plugin for a couple of years before i bought an
actual bass guitar and i was always impressed with the sound
this is a 64-bit plug-in that's available on mac
and windows in vst2 vst3 au and aax formats
ample base p lite ii has a 16-bit sample depth at
44.1 kilohertz so it's cd quality and of course you can use this in
projects that have higher settings it's a 450 megabyte plugin as it's made
up of 443 samples so you're getting a decent
range of real bass sounds here it features sustain hammer on and pull
offs plus accent articulation which is pretty
cool and for a rock country or pop bass sound
this will get the job done and i'm sure it will sound great in
other genres too in case you couldn't tell this is an emulation of a fender
precision bass which is a very popular bass guitar
for many different styles of music now let's look at the interface a little bit
you'll see when you play a note it puts a blue dot on the fret and the string of
the bass so you can know where on the fret board of the bass it is that you're
playing now if you want to use the hammer on or
pull off feature you must first press the f0 key on
either your midi controller or on this keyboard here or by putting a
midi note in your midi clip and now you can see
when i press that it turns this light on for the hp here that just means
the next thing that we press we can use the hammer off and pull on so
let's try that right now and then it turns off after every time
you use it so you would have to press this again to use it again or you can
use the auto hp feature and this only works
in the standard mode so right now i have it in solo mode and i'm going to go over
these different modes in a minute but if i go into standard mode you can
see the auto hammer on feature
but it doesn't handle the pull offs quite as well when you do it that way
and if you don't have a midi keyboard you can easily program this function by
placing a note on f0 before each hammer on and pull off
that you want to do and you must do it each time as it turns
itself off after it's used or like i said you can use the auto hp
feature on here now let's look at the three modes so you
have standard mode and this allows you to play only one
note on each string at any time but you can play
more notes on multiple strings so you could do
chords on the bass guitar the next mode is keyboard mode and this allows you to
play multiple notes on the same string at the same time
so it's not very real sounding but if you want to use it you can
and then you have solo mode and this allows you to
only play one note no matter what string you can only have
one note playing at any time so let's look at playing a chord
now if i tried that in solo mode
it only plays one of the notes so you can see you have some knobs and some
sliders over here and the first one is this auto buzz and
you can turn that on and off and then you can adjust the
frequency of the buzz and what this is fret buzz so it gives you that
realistic fret buzz sound so here's what it sounds
like
and then right here you have the accentuation noise frequency knob
and the on off switch for that so this knob controls the frequency level of it
and this slider here controls the gain level of it
so let's turn this on and then we'll adjust the slider here while we play
and you have some more sliders here for different fret sounds
then if you click up here on this tab button
you can actually load in tab into here and it will play it
now i'm not really a tab user so i haven't been able to try it but it looks
like it supports gp files so if you're into tab you
probably know what that's all about but what i want to do now is test out
the ample bass p lite ii with a bass amp sim and i'm
going to use the free bass amp sim that i recently reviewed called
bassprofessor and i'll be sure to link to that video below just in case you
want to check it out so let's play around with that a bit
now i want to try this free bass vst plugin in a mix with
similar settings that i would use on a real bass guitar
but before i get into that i just want to ask if you're enjoying this video so
far getting some value out of it can you please give it a thumbs up it
really helps my channel out and i appreciate it so much
now let's give ample bass p lite 2 a listen in a mix
and in case you're wondering what i've got going on here i've got
the original bass sound which is just the raw bass sound here
it's on this bass guitar di track and you're just hearing the raw bass not
being processed except for i've got a r comp on there which is a waves
plugin and then i have this eq and it's just allowing the low low bass
sounds come through so this is what it sounds like on its own
and then after that i have this bass amp sound so i've got it sent down to
another track here where i have the free bass amp on there
and then i've got an eq which is going from
where the lows stop this is continuing on and then i'm accenting some of the
mids there and here's what they sound like together
and then i have this bass track before the eq
being sent down to another track with the same eq on it
and another r compressor and this time i've got a little bit of a
saturation distortion plug-in on there so here's what it sounds like all
together
and that's all being fed into a bass bus where i have more plugins on there
and the reason why i have this bass bus set up this way is because i can control
the lows and the mids and then i can also control
that saturation sound all independently here and then i can
control the overall level of all of those
combined which is how i handle regular bass guitars and
this actually sounds pretty good the thing is i used one of those
audio to midi tools to get this bass line to sound very similar
to what the way i played it and it's a little stiff so
it sounds a little better when you're just playing it on its own
and if you want to check out even more free vst plugins
click up here or click down here to see what youtube thinks you should watch
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thank you so much for watching for simple green tech
i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon