Steinberg’s Virtual Bassist VST instrument gets a review in Computer Music magazine, who give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. First impressions count for a lot, and they call the Virtual Bassist user interface well-designed and clearly laid out; “The controls all hang together well, and allow you to sculpt an impressively broad range of tones.”

They mention a few of the little features of Virtual Bassist that allow even a simple one-finger keyboard player to generate a rich, live-sounding bass line. Note mode allows easy playing of chords, and the latch function has the program continue playing even when you stop. This enables Virtual Bassist to just keep playing, and you need only “nudge” it every so often to inject a bit of variation.

You can select various tones and types of bass, and styles ranging from ’60s soul to nu-metal and most points in between. There are also several virtual effects pedals, with the Wah in particular scoring high marks.

Numerically, Virtual Bassist scores a very good 9 out of 10. They sum up by saying, “this is an accomplished piece of software capable of creating credible and high quality basslines and sounds that would be at home in both bedroom and professional productions.” Or even professional bedroom productions, I suppose. In the end they say that this is the best so far of Steinberg’s virtual instruments — “Virtual Bassist is a whole lot of software goodness that’s well worth the asking price.”

Buy Virtual Bassist at SameDayMusic.com