MINI REVIEWS

Web timespace.com

Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/AAX/Standalone

Toontrack‘s EZdrummer 2 (10/10, 205) and EZkeys (various scores for various versions) virtual instruments give music producers everything they need to create authentic sounding drum and keyboard tracks; and now the band is one step closer to completion with the introduction of EZbass.

At the heart of EZbass are two multisampled electric bass guitars – a ‘Vintage’ Fender Jazz and a ‘Modern’ Alembic, totalling around 2GB of samples – each of which is used as the basis for a variety of presets that, in typical ‘EZ’ style, incorporate fixed effects racks. These take in amplification, EQ, reverb, chorus, distortion and more, and although you can’t simply build your own rack from the ground up, the presets provide more than enough starting points to get the sound where you want it to be.

Both basses come in picked and fingered versions, and a comprehensive spread of keyswitching articulations enable realistic performances to be played via a MIDI keyboard, from the expected slaps, downstrokes, ghost notes, etc, to the more technically complex Polyphonic Legato and Slide.

Like its percussive and melodic counterparts, though, EZbass features its own powerful clip and song sequencing environment, which lets you really go to town designing incredibly convincing basslines within the plugin itself, either from scratch or based on any of a huge library of included MIDI grooves. You can even drag a drum kit or keyboard MIDI file in to automatically generate a compatible bassline framework, and convert audio bass recordings to MIDI, both systems yielding impressively accurate results.

EZbass absolutely delivers on its promise of making utterly lifelike b-lines a snap to put together. The two multisampled instruments sound fantastic and contrast well (and we don’t doubt that expansion packs will add more in the future), and the sequencing tools are first class – it’s essentially a complete mini DAW for electric bass. Another EZ win for the Toon’, we can’t recommend EZbass highly enough.

n10/ 10n