Broomstick Bass Review by Patrick Reddeck

Bornemark Broomstick Bass

In The Beginning...

Bornemark, the makers of Broomstick Bass are looking to provide musicians everywhere with a virtual bassist and an extra bit of inspiration. Now if any of that sounds familiar it's because the man behind Broomstick Bass is also the same man who brought us Virtual Guitarist and Groove Agent, Sven Bornemark. Does the magic continue on with the latest virtual instrument player? Read on to find out!

You Can Handle It. Can Your System?

The first thing you'll notice once you have Broomstick Bass in your hands is the quality of the packaging. The outer slip of the package has a clean and pleasing layout and features a nice black and green color scheme. Once this slip is removed, you'll find a sturdy solid black box that contains a sizable foam pad to protect the DVD and Manual which take up a mere portion of the space. Overall the presentation of the packaging was nice enough to catch me by surprise, which is always a plus.

The installation of Broomstick Bass went as smoothly as I have come to expect from a virtual instrument. There is room for a minor improvement though. The lack of a folder creation option in the install program means you'll be leaving the install program to create a new folder, and that is just annoying and is an oversight on their part.

The single DVD required a mere 811MB of disk space once installed on my machine, although 850MB is recommended by Bornemark. You'll need to be running a VST compatible host on Windows XP with at least an 800Mhz Pentium III class CPU with 512RAM, or better. Otherwise, you'll need a VST or AU compatible host under OS X v10.3 with a 600MHz G3 class CPU and 512RAM, or better. As always when dealing with audio, more is better. I put this software through its paces using Cubase on a Windows XP SP2 machine featuring an AMD 3100+ (1.8GHz) CPU and 512RAM.

Up And Running

The complexity of getting to the music is dependent upon your familiarity with your host sequencer. If loading up a virtual instrument is second nature to you, then getting Broomstick Bass to pump out the bass lines should be, well, second nature to you. Once I had everything installed, all that was left to do was to load up Cubase and select Broomstick Bass from the VST Instruments panel, and I was set to go. Simple.

Is This Thing On?

The interface is split into two pages, main and edit. There are quite a few knobs and settings to go over, but given there is a very nice manual included I'll be brief and focus on my unique experiences.

The Memory tab appears to promise great added functionality at first. But given the moments of lag during the loading of an instrument, it fails as an instrument automation tool or as a tone auditioning tool. I found it best just to load up two instances of Broomstick Bass and do any comparison that way. That is also the manual’s recommended vehicle for changing basses during a song due to the instrument loading lag.

The Shuffle knob will help you turn a swing style into a normal style. This knob is relative which will let you over swing an already swinging style, and that is something Austin Powers and all you swinging cats should find just groovy. Yeah Baby!

The Glide knob will give you an auto pitch bend between the last note keyed and the current one. So far I have to say this sounds a bit more natural than what I have been able to do manually using the bender on my keyboard. The all important Volume knob. This will allow you to get a record contrac... Eh, just making sure your still with me!

Another readout that is particularly useful when you first start playing with Broomstick Bass is the Reference list. When in Auto Mode, this is where you'll find important information about the current variation being played as well as the note on the Control Octave used to activate a particular variation. This holds true for the variation reset key and the stop key. When in Manual Mode you'll get a listing of controls and their corresponding note that adds extra finesse and truth to your playing.

The Style selector lets you chose the following styles: Jazz, Rockabilly, Boggie, Blues, Pop, Rock, Prog Rock, Raggae, Funk, Dance, Fusion, Classic Synth, Streets Of ..., and Odd Meters.

The selected style not only gives you a style of bass riffs to play with but also determines the style of beat used by the drum metronome. The nice folks at Bornemark saw it fit to due away with the standard click metronome, opting instead to provide us with an actual drumbeat in a matching music style. The addition of a nice drum beat really helps pull out the true quality of the basses and is a very nice feature in and of itself. The lack of volume control for the drums leaves something to be desired, and will often require the bass volume to be lowered so the drums can cut through. One way around this is to just roll your own drums using the drum metronome as a style guide. This will give you the extra control and recording quality drums most will desire.

The Instrument selector lets you pick which instrument you wish to play with in the following categories: Acoustic, Electric, Keyboard, and Pedal. Below the Instrument selector there is also a nice image of the actual instrument used for sampling. I find this is a really nice touch, especially if you have never seen some of these basses before, and also because some sample instrument creators will hold that information back. So, anyone hungry?

The Meat of Things

The meat of what Broomstick Bass is all about pares down to two main areas. One being the virtual bassist styles, and the other being the bass instruments. What I did first was to pick a style that I wanted to work with. Since I had a bluesy guitar riff that I wanted to use I picked Minor Blues from the blues styles.

After working out the tempo I turned on Auto Mode. Now that I had the first bass line variation and the drum metronome doing their thing I thought I was ready to lay down the guitar riff, but something just wasn't working. Having the single variation playing the whole time didn't help me feel what I was playing. So I switched to Manual Mode and only the drums where playing, so I thought I was set. Well, as soon as I cut the first take and stopped everything, I went to turn the drums on by clicking the drum button and poof, nothing! After some checking, I came to learn that the drum metronome apparently isn't intended for use in manual mode. So why was it working before? Well the trick to getting the drum metronome working in manual mode is to turn on Auto Mode, key a note to start the virtual bassist and drum metronome, and then switch to Manual Mode. Viola, now you can have the Drum Metronome playing an appropriate style while you lay down all your instruments.

Now that I had a drum rhythm to feed off of I was able to lay down my guitar riffs in my ideal tracking environment. With drums to hold it all up and guitar riffs to do some talking, I was ready to fill it out with the help of a virtual bassist. So back into Auto Mode I go to get dirty with Broomstick Bass.

Now virtual keyboards are great for doing a quick note check while not by a keyboard, but when it comes to playing, forget about it. So I turned to my MIDI keyboard. OK, the first thing I came to notice is that in Auto Mode, you are restricted to a "useful range", which is usually just over two octaves. So whether you key C1 or C3 you'll hear just one pitch. If a user tries to play a note that's out of the useful range, the plugin transposes the input up or down (by octaves), to put all the notes used by the specific style back into the useful range. Most styles are available in two octaves. For example, the style "Essentials" under "Funk" plays all the way from B-0 to A-2 - just two half-notes short of three octaves - without transposing.

When in Manual Mode you'll have 4 octaves to abuse as you wish, and that makes sense since it is functioning as a Virtual Instrument in this mode. Before I start playing, and given that I only have one octave to play with, I'm going to octave shift my keyboard to get the Control Octave in a comfortable position for my right hand and then I can play the bass line with my left. Now if you prefer to use your right hand to play the bass line, you can go to the Edit page and change which octave the Control Octave start on. The default is C5, so just select C1 and you'll have your Control Octave on the other hand. Pretty cool huh.

When I get a new program I always like to twist some knobs, move some sliders, and see what, if anything the program responds to with my keyboard in General Midi 2 mode. Well Volume and Release knobs corresponded to the same slider on my keyboard, Release Noise was under my decay slider, and I found Glide under my Portamento Time slider. So I had the basic Main page controls working without any additional set up or memory sets, something I like. Time to lay down some bass.

This part is all experimentation and with all the playing variations you'll just need to see what works. For the most part the simplest variation starts at 1 and increases in complexity and pace through 8.

Here is a little tip. Holding down the A key on the Control Octave will pause the drums and Auto Mode, and allow you to play in Manual Mode. But holding down the A key isn't ideal most of the time since it kills the drums. A nice little feature that helps us out with this problem is a threshold on the modulation wheel. Press the Mod wheel all the way up and it will cut just Auto Mode, leaving the drums to re-enforce the groove.

Beyond Auto Mode is where Broomstick Bass really shines for those of us who like to write our own riffs. That Control Octave gives so much extra touch it's a wonderbar! For example, one thing I really enjoy doing when playing a guitar is accenting the backbeat with a string slap and with the Smack note (F key) I can pull this off to really great effect. Another great helper is Legato (E key) that blends nicely between the pre-note and current note giving a nice sliding transition. Basically all of the Control Octave is very useful and helps propels Broomstick Bass into a category all its own.

How is the song progressing you ask? Smashing! I've got my backing of drum metronome, my guitar riff, my arrangement of Auto Mode bass riffs, and I just added a little ditty in Manual Mode to round it out. Now the only thing left is to play with the built in DSP on the Edit page to hone the tone to my liking. There is an equalizer that is set up to get the most out of a bass and also to help pick out, well the sound of a pick. Likewise the compressor has been tweaked for bass dynamics, which is why it is a single knob, and though all the instruments are very even you may need this in certain situations, so it's nice to have. Finally the pitch shifter will help give an otherworldly sound and I'm all for anything that helps expand creativity, but for this bluesy song it didn't seem to work but I thought it deserved mention. Well, that completes the song and also wraps up my look at Broomstick Bass. And now, some final words.

All in All

I found the instrument quality and variety to be very nice indeed, and unless your pretty well off, building a collection of instruments like these is pretty well out of reach. The great range of styles means no one will be left out in the cold, and for those less studied, or those who just do their own thing you may just find yourself inspired. The addition of “gift packs” that add new instruments and styles means Broomstick Bass will only continue to improve. The fact that the sample engine automatically pitched a sample up or down after it is played concurrently a couple times is the only large negative I found during my time with the program. But on a positive note, Bornemark quickly replied to my and other users complaint regarding this hole in the program, and I have been assured that the next update will have a switch to allow the user to control if they want the auto pitching on or off. Broomstick Bass is not only a Virtual Bassist but also an Instrument Collection, and it has a lot of extras like the Drum Metronome and DSP. All in all I would highly recommend Broomstick Bass.