RATING: 11 out of 10

The wonderful result of sampling sessions with Marcus Miller, John Patitucci, and Abraham Laboriel.

There are at least two different ways to go about putting together the definitive bass sample collection. One is to sample a variety of basses as cleanly and perfectly as possible, taking care to get as even and neutral a tone as possible across the instruments' pitch and velocity ranges. You'll end up with very playable sounds that react predictably and are easy to control.

Another approach is what Spectrasonics took with the Bass Legends collection being reviewed: hire the best bassists in the world and sample their instruments the way they play them in a "musical context" - unabashedly capturing all the fret buzz, slaps, grunge, chaotic nonlinearities, and what have you. The result is a collection of the most alive and realistic samples we've ever heard. And they're still very playable.

GROOVES

The instrument samples in the Bass Legends collection are on the CD-ROM versions only. Another big part of the collection is phrases and grooves in a variety of styles by three world famous bassists: Marcus Miller, Abraham Laboriel, and John Patitucci. Actually, we understand that Spectrasonics recorded the grooves first, then had the musicians play individual notes with the "musical context" fresh in mind.

Bypassing the pitch change and time compression algorithms in your sampler, the grooves are sampled in all keys at the same tempo. Spectrasonics calls this "Chromazones". To change tempo, you simply change the coarse pitch of the phrase samples to alter the sample playback rate, then transpose the MIDI notes on your keyboard (or other controller) to compensate. A chart is included so you can calculate the amount of pitch change necessary.

Both CD-ROM and CD audio versions contain Chromazones of all 39 grooves which, like the bass sample programs, are divided approximately equally between the three players. The CD also includes "micro-demos" of the grooves being played against the rhythm loops that presumably inspired them.

These are all fresh and interesting grooves and phrases. If you're into groove sampling - and Spectrasonics' research indicates that many people are - you'll certainly find these grooves worthwhile. And those who have religious aversions to using sampled grooves in their music (such as this reporter) would find these bass parts well worth studying. They are awfully good.

SOUNDS

The Bass Legends collection comes on CD-ROM in SampleCell, Akai/E-mu/ASR, Roland and Kurzweil formats. We reviewed the sounds on a K-2000.

Programs are arranged by player. For each, there are subdirectories of basses and grooves. This is a collection of unique bass sounds, and a lot of them: 42 basses, all of them different from one another. There are instruments like Yamaha 5-string, broken Gibson, as well as Fender Precision and Fender Jazz Bass, fretless, and Laboriel's 8-string bass.

There are also many bass hits, pops, slides, and so on. They've been placed on the keyboard in a number of the programs, and they bring the samples to life even more. Lots of the basses are layered at three velocities, and some take up as much as 16Mb - which is the amount of memory you need to get full benefit of the disc. (The one exception is that each player has a 32 Mb mini-menu that you can load in to audition sounds. Two 16 Mb banks might have been better, although programs can be loaded individually.)

All bases come in A, B, C, D, etc. versions. The A versions have the most samples and often include open string samples, while the other versions make compromises to take up less memory - but they're sometimes easier to control and often sound just about as good.

There are many highlights on this disc. Patitucci's Pollman Acoustic is one of them, Miller's Ultronix bass harmonics program is another, there are several great fretlessess- where does one stop the gushing?

Right here with one minor error. On the Kurzweil version only, the bottom E key plays a D on Laboriel's 'Old Soul' bass. Anyone who has the K-2000 disc can call Spectrasonics for instructions on fixing the note, if they don't know already.

But forget those details. The sound quality is consistently great. Actually, you'll most likely find yourself rolling off some high end in a mix, which is a testimonial to how well the instruments are recorded. There's almost no aliasing, & I didn't notice any loops at all. The programs are very well adapted to the K-2000 - good use of chorusing, multiple detuned layers, etc., and aftertouch introduces modulation.

A fabulous bass collection. And it's license-free - you just have to give credit exactly as specified ("Bass samples by [fill in artists], courtesy of Spectrasonics"). Spectrasonics also has other collections, which we'll look at in the near future.

These programs are really inspiring to play. And nobody who's into grooves could help liking the ones on these discs. An eleven.