Karoryfer Samples has announced the release of Meatbass, a free SFZ sound pack featuring a set of high quality multi-samples of a 1958 Otto Rubner acoustic double bass.
Meatbass is the successor of Drogomir Smolken’s old Multi-Sampled Double Bass pack which was released two years ago. His new double bass sample pack is more consistent, cleaner and warmer sounding. Also, the new SFZ mappings now include additional vibrato controls and a few other performance tweaks which are there to further extend the scope of this free instrument.
It’s worth noting that you’ll need to use Plogue’s sforzando virtual instrument to load the SFZ patches in order to see the on-screen control parameters. You can also use Beat Zampler which already provides access to quite a few useful control parameters on the default GUI.
The quality of the included samples is nothing short of impressive and the same goes for the amount of available round robin variations and velocity layers. Meatbass features two different articulations (arco and pizzicato), both of which are sampled with four notes per octave. You also get upstroke and downstroke samples for each note, along with up to five velocity layers and four round robin variations per note. The result is a very natural sounding acoustic double bass virtual instrument and quite possibly the finest free double bass sound library currently available.
The included SFZ mappings take the original sample content one step further, providing three-voice and six-voice versions of the instrument (in addition to the standard single voice patches). These multi-voice versions of the SFZ instrument work great for achieving those huge sounding wide basses, which sound even better with a bit of extra saturation or mild distortion layered on top.
Drogomir Smolken has recently created a set of SFZ mappings for the popular SM Drums acoustic drum sample pack which was recently featured on our website. It’s yet another must-have freebie if you’re not quite happy with your current arsenal of acoustic drum kit multi-samples.
On a semi-related note, another sound designer Autodafe has announced the release of a free acoustic bass sample pack for NI Kontakt. The sample pack features three types of articulations (fingered, muted and picked bass), although I have to say that I wasn’t quite impressed with the quality of the actual samples.
Audio Demo
Check out the Meatbass audio demo:
Download
Meatbass is available for free download via Karoryfer Samples (189 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 434 audio samples in 24-bit WAV format, 7 instrument patches in SFZ format).
7 Comments
Simbosan
onWow, that’s beautiful. Haven’t found a good stick bass sample set yet. This is something special. Love the demo track too
By “stick bass” do you mean electric upright? I did have one that I recorded samples of before I sold it but, yeah, they’re not as good as this. But I know a South American bassist with a copy of an Ampeg baby bass who owes me a favor, I’ve been thinking about asking him to record some samples…
Wow…”nothing short of impressive” is a more than appropriate description :)
bigcat
onAmazing stuff as always DMan! Grats on another great release.
Luis Gomes
onwow :)
Petros
onI was very grateful to find free samples such as this. I did notice however there are some inconsistencies between sampled notes, at least in the pizzicato set. Some notes were too low and lack the same attack you find in other notes, especially within the vl2 velocity (33-64). I had to edit the samples to some extent to smooth things out or when I use this in a track some notes sound like they drop out even if I know I’m within the same velocity range. I’m just glad I found something I could work with.