RickenbackerBass

TL;DW: RickenbackerBass is the first set of instruments out of Airwindows Free Studio (CC BY 3.0)

RickenbackerBass.zip(532M)

Hi! Here’s something new. Turns out the music I make out of Renoise (such as Skronk) leads to a whole new set of Airwindows goodness, and it’s in the spirit of how I do the plugins.

This is RickenbackerBass. Still no graphics, sorry! This is not here to replace a Rickenbacker(tm) instrument. It’s a Renoise and SFZ instrument that is there to replace ME… or extend me in ways I could not, as a human being, do.

You get six different Rick instruments each playable at a distinct intensity level (lettered A through F: A is softest), three additional RickThumb instruments (A through C: A is softest) played off the thumb only, and a RickXtras instrument that gives you power chords, slides, and clicks/clacks for percussive effect.

All these are recorded in stereo, with the neck pickup on the left channel and the bridge pickup on the right. All these are extremely rowdy and nasty! They’re using Rotosound strings and a heavy attack, and although they are DI you’d hardly know it. They are also 24/96 samples, which will be normal for Airwindows Free Studio unless there’s something else worth doing (like 12 bit samples for use with Radio Music). You can blend them to mono with the Golem plugin, flange the neck pickup against the bridge, run the whole thing through an amp sim (or two amp sims, one for each pickup) or a filter such as XRegion or the Z2 series of sampler-style filters.

This is having me on bass playing the hell out of my Rick, only faster than my fingers could do, and without getting tired or making wrong notes. It’s designed for arrangement and composition: basically load the velocity level that’s appropriate and use that to get a consistent bassline, adding whatever accents or Xtra noises you need.

You can also adapt it into your own creation, and even sell that or redistribute it also for free. It’s a lot like my plugins. Now that I am making music and sample instruments for myself to use, I’ve got folks taking an interest in this and some of them are hot to have me monetize my work since they see how long and hard I’ve been working on it all. My compromise is this: when I put out songs and albums those are old school my property, not designed to be youtuber music or anything like that.

But the TOOLS I use? 100% patreon-supported free studio equipment for all. You’ll know the difference, I’ll be linking to bandcamp when I have songs and albums out (24/96 downloadable, and you’ll be able to hear everything on the album off the Bandcamp page). The samples, like the plugins, get a license (MIT and CC BY 3.0) and my blessing.

And much like my plugins, this is not normal marketing and product-making. This is real specific to how _I_ use things. This one is not set up with velocity layers, it’s manual, by instrument choice. Will I make a velocity layered one? Nope. Can you? Yes, and if you do then tell me in the comments. I’m off making something else.

Will I be prolific with these as I am with plugins? Maybe. Depends how much time I spend in Vermont tracking stuff that I can use on songs… but much like with the plugins, the patreon-supported freedom of this means I get to release stuff that’s DIFFERENT, on every level, and seed other people’s creations in the bargain, and move on.

I suspect if you work with this kinda stuff (or even just have ideas for how to twist it to your own nefarious purposes) you might be off and running with RickenbackerBass, just as it is. I really am serious that basslines ought to be made out of notes of consistent intensity, and that you should pick one level and use that for basslines, with any departures intentional rather than ‘isn’t it great my fumble fingers hit a note softer and now there is variety’. But if you’d like Rick A through F built into a single velocity-switched instrument… you can make one, and you can redistribute it under CC BY 3.0 :)

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