So how is your plug-in band coming on, then? With a combination of Steinberg's Groove Agent and Virtual Guitarist plus Yamaha's Vocaloid, all that is required is a bass player. Enter, stage left, Bornemark's Broomstick Bass. Given how well received products such as Virtual Guitarist and Groove Agent were, it is perhaps surprising that a 'virtual bass player' hasn't appeared before now. Just like buses, you wait for ages for one and two arrive together. Off the mark slightly before Steinberg's own Virtual Bassist is Bornemark's Broomstick Bass. The Bornemark name might not immediately be familiar to many SOS readers, but Sven Bornemark led the production teams for both Groove Agent and Virtual Guitarist, so his pedigree is well established. Of course, musical auto-accompaniment is not a new idea, but the type of 'virtual band member' provided by Groove Agent or Virtual Guitarist has taken the process to a new level by including a high-quality sample collection. Whatever your own personal take on auto-accompaniment in the creative process, with virtual guitarists, drummers and singers already available, bass players were the next obvious target. So is Broomstick Bass a valuable 'session musician in a box' or a bunch of 'cheesy keyboard-style' presets? Let's get the lowdown. Broomstick Basicsīroomstick Bass is constructed from four elements. First, a large sample library (just over 800MB) has been built from 21 different bass instruments and is divided into four main types acoustic, electric, keyboards and pedal basses. Incidentally, the plug-in takes its name from one of these instruments - a homemade 'bass' consisting of a metal bucket, a broomstick and a piece of string (see the screenshot above for an image of this). BROOMSTICK BASS TORRENT FULLĪ full list of the instruments is provided in the 'Touching All The Basses' box later. Second is the auto-accompaniment section.

This consists of dozens of individual styles, each grouped into a general musical genre (see the 'Style File' box for details).

As described more fully in a moment, each individual style actually consists of eight variations (bass riffs or patterns) and these are adjusted automatically to fit the chords arriving at the MIDI input. This provides a collection of the more common processing options used with bass sounds and includes a three-band EQ, a pitch-shifter, compressor, chorus and overdrive. BROOMSTICK BASS TORRENT MANUALįinally, a Manual mode is included where Broomstick Bass can be used as a playable virtual instrument using any of the sampled instruments from the library. Bass Boxīornemark recommend that Broomstick Bass is run on a minimum 800MHz Pentium III PC under Windows XP, or a 600MHz G3 Mac under Mac OS v10.3, both with at least 512MB of RAM and 850MB of disk space.

Broomstick bass