Broomstick Bass

From the team behind Virtual Guitarist and Groove Agent, here comes Broomstick Bass: your personal bass player. Created by musicians for musicians, this bass tool will give you a flying start when you’re composing and arranging. Choose any mix of pre-defined and self created bass lines. A rich assortment of new and vintage basses is at your disposal, complete with useful effects.

Broomstick Bass is loaded with realistic, musical patterns that will fit into your creations. It is low on gimmicky features and high on solid musical functions that you will come to depend on every day.

So Easy To Use

If you have used Groove Agent or Virtual Guitarist you will be familiar with the intuitive user interface offered in these ground breaking products. Broomstick Bass carries this rich tradition forward. On a single screen you can view almost all the parameters and controls you would want to access during a the creative process. Styles, Basses, Chords and Modes are accessible with just a click of the mouse. And interfacing and synchronization with your host program is virtually automatic. To top this off the Broomstick Bass comes with an informative, enlightening, fun-to-read user manual that was not an afterthought but a rich, emotive document.

20 Sampled Basses

The Broomstick Bass starts with high quality, realistic samples of real 20 fine bass instruments that runs the gamut of basses employed in most styles of music you can imagine. The sound is rich, deep and full of the bottom end that your music demands.

Cool Auto Patterns

Broomstick Bass contains over one hundred musical styles for automatically playing common, useful bass lines. Once installed, just play a note on the MIDI keyboard or a chord and Broomstick Bass will play along with you, just like a real Bass player. Change chords and Broomstick changes with you. Change to one of several pattern variations on the fly or at precise points in the music.

The pattern vault covers a wide range of musical styles that can fit into Pop, Jazz, Rock, Dance, Funk, Blues, Reggae, and odd meter music. And you can even mix it up with odd time signatures and trigger special articulations like staccato, slides and pulls.

Chord Recognition and Nuance

Broomstick Bass is more than just clever bass patterns, there is serious musical intelligence under the hood. Like a real bass player it will react to more than just simple triads, it recognizes maj7, 7, 6, +5, -5, m, mMaj7, m7, m6, m7-5, sus4, 7sus4, sus2 and dim.

With such a wide range of instruments like electric, acoustic, keyboard and pedal basses, nuance is the difference between sounding stiff and sounding real. There are controls parameters for Poly/mono, Glide, Release time and Release noise. These controls add a highly useful degree of realism that you expect from a real bass player.

Built-in DSP

Adjusting the tonal character of the bass is an essential part of making Broomstick Bass your very personalized bass player. These DSP effects from db Audioware include EQ, Pitch Shifter, Compressor, Chorus and Overdrive.

Expandable

Buying Broomstick Bass is just a first step because expandability is the cornerstone of this product from its inception. Most Expansion Packs are free. We call them Gift Packs and they are available to everyone registered for Broomstick Bass.

For example Gift Pack 1 is available now. It offers new instruments and styles for even greater creativity. Included are two new instruments: a beautiful violin-body Höfner 500/1 Beatle Bass and a nasty SidStation bass that makes retro computer game fanatics shiver with joy! In addition, there are 12 new styles covering a variety of genres. And, it's absolutely free to registered users

We wanted a cool set of sampled bass instruments, complete with all the specific nuances you would expect from a live bass player. So we recorded some of the finest acoustic, electric, keyboard and pedal basses available and turned them into useful and musical sample sets, ready to load at the press of a button. Imagine changing the entire instrument after the bass line has been recorded!

We wanted a cool set of professional bass lines, complete with suitable variations within each style to make songs more realistic and interesting. So we created a vast number of musical styles (including some odd meters and really unusual bass lines) and categorized them in genres and styles, ready to load at the press of a button. Imagine combining a reggae or rock mood with the gentle touch of your latest ballad!

We wanted a cool set of DSP tools to personalize, enhance and tweak the bass instruments with. So we included a nice selection of useful bass specific effects from db audioware's Quantum FX library, ready to fine tune at any stage during your song creating process. Imagine boosting your heavy synthesizer riff with a sub-octave or adding some frantic overdrive to the Hammond B3 pedals!

We wanted a cool set of Gift Packs to expand the arsenal of basses with, complete with suitable styles and preset mastering. So even while you're reading this, we're collecting more instruments for future inclusion in Broomstick Bass, ready to download for free from our website. Imagine adding a Höfner Beatle bass, a Hohner Pianet Duo or even a jug bass to your bass collection!

My first instrument was Virtual Guitarist, a piece of software that behaves pretty much like a real rhythm guitarist when you feed it with chords from a MIDI keyboard. Next came Groove Agent, a modern-day version of the drum machines.

Then there were so many voices calling for a virtual bass player that I could not resist creating one. My head was (and still is) filled with cool ideas about future creations, but I felt that I had to do this bass thing before I went on.

I’ve been communicating with plug-in developers ever since my first music PC with Cubase VST 3.5, but it wasn't until Nov. 2003 that finally I met my long time plug-in hero, Dave Brown. We discussed producing all sorts of fascinating and creative tools, stuff we’d really want to see in the shops, and started making plans for our first creation: the bass player.

My first recording was the Fender Jazz Bass, a good place to start. Lars Westin, who'd helped me with my previous instruments, edited the audio files while Dave started building the engine upon which wonderful new instruments can be created.

Bass players Mads Vinding, Jan Hellman, Johan Axelsson and my brother Dan helped me recording the instruments I needed, following my very particular specifications for this VSTi: normal notes, loud notes, slides up and down, hammer-ons and pull-offs, staccato notes, noises etc...

As usual, it was a relief to hand over the entire audio content (all the bass instruments) to Uffe Börjesson. After having worked for almost a year with a project, one easily gets "deaf." I always give the all-important mastering job to Uffe and rest assured that the sound is as good as can be.

Francesco Maisto completed the GUI in record time and my friend babusjka finalize the packaging and manual and soon we were ready to release Broomstick Bass.
Broomstick Bass is a collaboration of many talented people made for other talented people like you.

Enjoy!

Sven Bornemark.