Product Reviews

Trilogy - total bass module has been designed as a one-stop shop for bass samples and it does a spectacular job of this, with a vast range of professional-quality sounds. Over a two-year period, Spectrasonics collected and recorded an enviable collection of instruments to create the 3Gb core library.

Deploying all this bass in your music is simple: access sounds via the central display, select a patch via the pop-up menus and away you go. Pitch, filter, resonance, modulation, four different types of low-frequency oscillator (LFO), amp envelope, glide and curve controls are included and all can be edited and automated. Factory presets can never be overwritten, so no harm can come of mucking about, and any changes you make to a patch are automatically saved and recalled with your song, which is something of a lifesaver.

The attention to detail throughout is superb. The upright acoustic bass section, for instance, includes either a miked or direct pick-up version and was recorded using a Neumann u47 tube mic through a Neve console - the kind of equipment few musicians will ever get to use, let alone own. It sounds divine. The electric section, meanwhile, features Fingered, Fretless, Muted, Picked and Slapped categories played on four, five or six-string basses. Finally, the Synth section has two main categories, Patches and Waveforms, and features bass samples and raw multisampled sounds from almost every classic synth known to man, including the TB-303,

Human touch

Plenty of special detail illuminates the sounds. With the guitar samples is a finger-noise release layer, which adds hundreds of tiny imperfections, such as fret noises, subtle string squeaks, cross-notes, taps and mutes, all of which add real character.

Most samples consist of two layers, A and B, and the relative levels can be adjusted. The Layer display shows which layers make up a patch. The A and B buttons allow either individual or simultaneous editing. Also worth mentioning are the True Staccato versions of the samples, mapped across the keyboard to offer the most realistic performance of repeated notes.

We tested Trilogy as both a VST plug-in and an Audio Unit plug-in, running in Cubase SX and Logic 6 respectively, on a 1GHz Power Mac G4 DP and a 600MHz iBook (both running Mac OS X 10.2.3) and the performance was fine. As with all Spectrasonics instruments, the more powerful your Mac, the more smoothly it will handle the highest-quality patches in Trilogy.

Part of Trilogy's appeal, apart from the quality of its samples, is that all your bass sounds can be in one place. There is no need to go hunting around lots of CDs, loading half a dozen soft or hardware synths in the same song. Other synths have their charms, certainly, but Trilogy's comprehensive sound and feature set is a powerful combination.

The only small complaint is that the LFOs can't be synched to the host tempo and they all use a sine wave. However, Spectrasonics has already said that more waveforms and synch capabilities are planned.

There is no other virtual bass instrument available like Trilogy. It covers all aspects of bass tone and while the Acoustic section is particularly lovely, the Electric and Synth sections also impress. While Trilogy's appearance on OS X as both a VST and an AU plug-in does not automatically make every other bass synth redundant, they might well start gathering some virtual dust. If ever there was desert-island bass-emulation software, Trilogy is it.