Waves Bass Slapper $69

The uniquely percussive sound of slap bass is something that every producer should have in their pocket – particularly at this price!

Waves’ latest plugin is built to emulate just one very specific instrumental technique: slap bass, the love-it-or-hate-it thumb-blasting style personified by the likes of Mark King, Bootsy Collins, Stanley Clarke et al.

Bass Slapper (VST/AU/AAX/standalone) is an entirely sample-based affair. Before you can use it, you have to separately download either or both of two sample libraries containing the 3700+ multisamples played back by the proprietary Waves Sampler Engine (WSE) that powers the plugin. The main ‘HD’ library uses lossless compression for maximum fidelity and weighs in at 4.9GB, while the ‘SD’ library uses lossy compression to reduce the footprint for laptop or ‘draft’ usage, at the expense of a hit to sound quality that may or may not be noticeable depending on the musical context in which it’s deployed.

The raw samples were captured from performances by Israeli session bassist Or Lubianiker, with the intention of encapsulating his particular sound in terms of the choice of bass, strings and preamps used. All the articulations required to construct realistic fivestring slap bass parts are included, every one incorporating round robin variations and mapped to multiple velocity layers. As well as the basic slap sounds, the roster of articulations comprises mutisamples for hammer ons and pull offs, index and middle finger pulls, release sounds, percussives, slides and all sorts of special effects such as scratches, squeaks, harmonics and strums.