The Ultimate Bass Library
by Rob Shrock
Electronic Musician

Link to full article: http://emusician.com/ar/emusic_ultimate_bass_library/index.htm

Achieving the perfect bass track for a song is an obsession for some folks. Certain professional mix engineers believe that if you nail at least the bass, drums, and vocals in a mix, it's much less likely to get vetoed by the record company or radio programmers, because everything else in the mix is only a matter of taste and style. Whether or not you agree with that philosophy, achieving a great bass sound usually takes some work.

Lots of excellent synth-bass sounds are available, but the subtleties of a good electric or upright acoustic-bass performance are much harder to capture in a sample. Out of all the bass guitar libraries available today, a dozen titles stand out.

Here's Rob's pick on 

Sonic Implant's Amps + Pickups ($149.95; Akai, E-mu, Giga, Kurzweil)

If clean basses are want you want, you'll find them on Amps + Pickups. Basses include an acoustic upright; Spector slap bass; hard-picked rock bass; an Alembic bass that's picked, fingered, and slapped; and Fender Jazz and Precision basses. The well-recorded raw samples have lots of attack, almost to the point of sounding a bit generic.

Much attention went into programming the various formats, however. Each takes advantage of the effects and envelope capabilities of the hardware or software sampler for its format, which is where the character lies. (As a result, some of the cool programming in the Giga version I evaluated did not translate well in HALion.) One of my associates preferred the Alembic fingered bass in this library to everything else he heard. Plenty of cool guitars are on the disc, as well.