 There are a lot of bass VST plugins out there to choose from, but which ones are the best? In today's video I'm going to give you my top 5 best bass plugins ever. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. We're going to be doing this in reverse order today starting off at number 5 and building up to my absolute favourite at number 1. Now don't forget to follow the VIP link in the description down below to get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music through the sponsor of today's video, DistroKid. Now let's get started with my number 5 pick. A lot of you may be surprised that I've got this Rickenbacker contact library in my top 5 at all. It's a pretty quirky sounding instrument and if you've ever loaded it up you may not have been that impressed. Well let me explain to you in a moment why I think you may have misjudged it, but first of all let's have a listen. So the Rickenbacker is a pretty distinct kind of sound and it's very easy to kind of pigeon hold it and think it's only suitable for one or two different styles of music. Added to that when you do first load this plugin up in its default setting it sounds like this. Now you may like that sound for certain types of music, yeah it sounds pretty harsh could be great for some rock songs but you may think look it's not that suitable for other types of music. But let me show you just how versatile this bass guitar is in terms of sound. So I'm going to start off first of all by clicking on the guitar itself and then I'm going to make some adjustments to both the neck and the bridge pickups. I'll just drag this tone control down just like you would on the real bass guitar yeah and I'm looking to make it a little bit more mellow sounding. Let's have a quick listen. OK it's getting there, it's still got a little bit of edge but I think that's OK. Now the real magic with this plugin or this library happens when you start to adjust and bring in the amplification and some of the other effects just like would happen in real life it's when you amplify a guitar or a bass guitar where the magic happens. You can do that over here by clicking on this amp head here. Now when you first switch this on it's actually going to sound pretty terrible. Just like in real life you really need to plug it into the cabinet. OK so I'm going to switch on that amp just like I have here. I'm going to go straight to the cabinet and I'm just going to switch that on. We've got a choice of cabinets here. We'll look at that in a moment but let's just see how it's sounding now. OK it's sounding much rounder. Yeah I think it can be even deeper and rounder than this. I've already experimented and I rather like this cabinet over here. Yeah you can see there's a number to choose from. Have a listen now. OK that's getting pretty nice and then if we go over here we can also add in some tape saturation. Yeah I'll just push the warmth up here a little bit. We'll have a listen to that. And you can hear now that it's a very different sounding instrument. The kind of bass guitar that you could use on all kinds of genres of music and that is why it's in this top five. Ample sound have a really great range of bass guitars in their collection including some classics and also a really nice upright bass as well. But it's this bass guitar the Ample Bass J which I use more often than not from their collection. It's based on if you excuse the pun offender jazz bass. Now strangely although this is at number four in my top five I actually use this plug-in more than any of the others. We'll talk about why I would do that in a moment. But first of all let's just have a quick listen. So I think the Fender Jazz bass sound is the most versatile of all of them and you know it just can be used in all kinds of genres of music. So that's partly why I go for this plug-in quite often. It loads up real quickly and I know what I'm getting. Also I often use it as a stand-in until I record a real bass guitar and my real bass guitar is a Fender Jazz bass. So that's why I quite often use this plug-in and although some of the other plug-ins we're going to see do have a Fender Jazz bass sound I just particularly like the sound of this one. Now with all Ample sound products you get great control over the instrument. So it's done with key switches. You can see some of the key switches in blue down here. So you can change articulations you know hammer-ons and slides all that kind of good stuff and also some sort of sound effects and things as well. But what I really like about these plug-ins more than anything is I can adjust the sound real quick with their amplification. So you know there's several different amps that you can choose from which just are all distinct in their own way. There's some other effects we have in here. You know EQ compression reverb delay all of that kind of good stuff as well. And you can also go in there and do things like you know swap out microphones on the cabinets and things like that as well. So overall a very very versatile instrument and it's just going to give you that Fender Jazz bass sound that so many of us want. You know up until a few days ago this contact library session basses prime bass was going to be my number three pick. However since then I downloaded and stored this and I love it. This is session basses icon bass. Let's have a listen. Now the power of this line of instruments is in the patterns okay and the sort of compositional side of this. And that's what you were hearing there. Just one of the patterns. However you can still play this in a regular way just by playing you know regular notes on your keyboard. Now you can do all of this all of the things I'm about to demonstrate that is with key switches but I'm going to do it with my mouse for now just so you can see what I'm doing. So we can just play regular notes here. And we can change the sound of those with articulations that we can see over here. So that was an open sound and then we've got a muted sound. Yeah we've got harmonics and this slap and pop sound. Yeah so you've got some changes that you can make in terms of articulations and then you've got these patterns over here yeah. So I'll just play one of these patterns. That was the one we were listening to a moment ago and another one. And these are just a few of many many many patterns that you've got. These ones are the dusty slap patterns but we can change something completely different. Let's have a try with this one. Of course all linked to the sort of tempo in your door and you can also as I say play individual notes so you can do your own variations as well. So I'll have a listen to this one. And loads and loads and loads and loads and loads more. Now as well as being able to play those patterns and play the individual notes you can change the sound of the bass guitar itself in many many ways. For example we've got bass settings here which is a little bit similar to what we did earlier. We can just change the overall tone of the bass before it goes through amplification. And then we also have an effects rack here including some amplifiers and cabinets as well. And then in terms of the actual playing we have some control over the kind of how human that playing is with things like humanized swing, et cetera et cetera. So this is a fantastic tool. I mean it sounds great as a bass guitar but it's also a fantastic tool in terms of getting something together really really quickly by using these onboard patterns. One thing I like about some of these bases is the way that it makes life so much easier for you. In just the same way as DistroKid our sponsor makes it easy for you to tell people about your music releases. This is the hyperfollow page for one of my EPs Wonderland. When people visit this webpage they can choose for themselves which one of these great platforms they want to listen to my music on. But I didn't have to create this page. It was generated automatically for me when I uploaded my EP to DistroKid. If we visit my DistroKid page here and look at this EP and scroll down you can see the section just at the bottom here where they supply the link for me to share. Now I can share that on places like Facebook where they will automatically be generated my album artwork and people can just click on this and go straight to that hyperlink page. Now this is all included with the base price of DistroKid which is just $19.99 per year. If you follow the link in the description you'll get 7% off of that already great price. This is Easy Bass from TuneTrack and there's a very specific reason why it's in here at number two. But before we get into that let's just have a quick listen. Now with the basic version of this you get a couple of basses here. I was using the Easy Modern Bass but you can also switch to the Easy Vintage Bass. So I preferred for this particular song the Modern Bass and I should mention you can actually buy additional libraries that you can drag into this but you basically come to these two basses. You can also go to some different presets for these. This is on the clean DI one at the moment but as you can see there's lots and lots of presets that you can choose from to get a different sound. This is firm distortion. Let's have a listen to that. So you get the idea there but I don't think that the sort of real strength of this plugin is going in and tweaking the sound. You can't do too much of that. It's basically based on the presets. The really cool thing about this particular plugin is the way that you can compose with it. So if we go to the Groove section here you can see there's loads and loads and loads of different categories and play styles of grooves. So you can go through so I want a disco groove. I could click on that and go to some standard ones and I can find them in here and audition them like so. And then once I'm happy with the groove that I want I can grab it and I can just drag it into my song and I can start to create a composition in that way. Now one of the features that I found really good with this in terms of actually being able to find the groove that I want is this tap to find feature. So with this I'll click on it in a moment but you click on it and then you basically tap out the sort of rhythm that you want from your bass, yeah? So I'll do that now. That was a kind of a rubbish rhythm but it doesn't matter. Then I can just click on find similar grooves. I'll click on that and it's gonna find some which have a similar kind of a rhythm pattern to that. So I found that particularly useful. Now once you've dragged your groove in onto your sort of composition area down here then you can change several aspects of it. Primarily one of the things you can do is go ahead and actually change the chord that the groove is based on. So here I've got an A minor, A minor D to E progression but I could change that from an A minor to let's say a C here. Yeah, and it's then gonna change that. Let's have a listen. Yes, you can hear the chord changing there. So that's very, very handy. It makes it super quick to put together a bass line but you don't need to think of this as a very rigid thing where you kind of stuck with the patterns that you've got. There's also this grid editor where you can actually go in and make fine adjustments to those patterns and create your own little sections and things of course, incredibly versatile. As well as this, you can do things like import MIDI or audio and have the plugin create a bass line based upon what it can detect in those things that you import. So my main point about this plugin is yes, it's got a nice sound to it and yes, you can get some additional libraries and you've got a whole bunch of presets but its strength is not really about going in and tweaking the sound. Its strength is in its compositional abilities. And you know, once you've actually created this composition down here, you can actually drag this out into your door and drop it there and you could actually use these patterns with other plugins as well. So I think this is fantastic, particularly as a compositional tool. Now before we move on to my number one pick, I just wanted to make some honorable mentions for some plugins that could have been on this list but didn't quite make it for whatever reason. The first one is Trillion Bass. This is an absolute classic bass plugin. I used to have it installed on my system. It's not anymore. And part of the reason for that is it's quite big. So there's a lot of basses in there which is one of its plus points. But I just find that it's starting to age a little bit now in terms of its workflow and you know, the way that you can adapt the basses and things like that. But it is definitely worth looking at. I'll check out some other videos about that if you're considering it. The next two are bass fingers and also bass slapper from Waves. Now these probably wouldn't quite have made it into my top five anyway. They may have been at six or something like that. However, I am hesitant to recommend any Waves plugins at the moment. I'd like to see a better track record from Waves first with in terms of the way that they treat their customer base before I recommend their plugins. That's one of the reasons why they're not in there. Now let's look at my number one pick. Not only do I think Moto Bass 2 is incredibly deserving of the number one spot here but I happen to notice just before I started making this video that it's being sold at an incredible price at the moment for this full version, yeah? Before we get into that, let's have a quick listen. Now if you've found that you were not all that happy with the sound of the bass there, that's fine because I have to say that this is easily the most versatile of all of the bass instruments that we've got here in terms of being able to change the sound. Now particularly with the full version that we're looking at here, that's partly possible because of the range of bass guitars available. You can see them all here. All of the classic ones you'd expect plus some upright basses in there as well. The list is just incredible. So you can sort of get your sound going just by choosing a particular model of a bass. But beyond that, where it's really at with here is with the actual customization you can do to the sound. For example, I can change the playing position by dragging this little thing around here, okay? So if I put it all the way up here, it's gonna be quite mellow. And if I put it down here, it's gonna be a little bit more sort of high end and it's got a lot more attack to it down there. It's subtle, but have a quick listen. Now a far more drastic change comes about when I start to move the pickups around you. I'll just push this bridge pickup all the way up here. Have a listen. And then you can change things like the playing style for example. So we were using fingers there, there's pick and there's slap as well. Have a listen to those. So there's all kinds of things about the playing style you can change. You can even go in and change things about the strings. Yeah, the type of strings that are used. Also whether this is a fretted bass or whether it's a fretless bass, we can change that here as well. The number of strings, whether you're using a drop tuning, the age of the strings, the gauge of the strings, all kinds of things about the strings there that you can change, which all change the sound. And then we looked at this a little bit earlier, the electronics, we can certainly move the pickups around. We can also swap them out for different pickups completely as well, which drastically changes the sound. Then we can sort of mix those pickups together. We can also go into the studio mode where we've got a couple of different choices of amps in there as well, as well as some stomp pedals that we can use in there as well. And on top of all of that with the different sounds of the bass, we've also got some patterns to choose from. A lot of patterns to choose from in different genres. You can find the ones you like and then you can just drag these out into your door here and you can play those patterns there. So this is why this particular plug-in is my number one pick, okay? Now it's being sold currently. I just happened to notice over at Sweetwater for $99 for this full version. Yeah, that's where you get all of these sort of bass guitars and things in there. Now normally this would cost $299, so $300 and it's kind of just under $100 now over there at Sweetwater. So definitely check out the link in the description down below and I wouldn't miss out on that. It's only for this month I think. So a bargain indeed. Now all of the drums that you heard accompanying today's basses were created with addictive drums too. One of the best drum plugins in my opinion and you can find out why right here.