This morning, right after I purchased The Upright, I was already thinking about this review and I thought: well, I’ll start with the bad and end with one or two paragraphs of positives. Find a nice balance between the two and finish on a complimentary note, you know. Alas, 8 hours later and I honestly do not know with what I'm going to fill those closing paragraphs. I have no idea. So, let’s just start the way I planned to start — with the puzzled look, the frowned forehead and the raised eyebrow — and maybe, when we get to it, there is something good to say towards the end as well, you never know.
Everything that bothered me when listening to the walkthrough and the demos, is alas confirmed — and often revealed as even worse than I thought — now that I have played with the library for quite a few hours. To put it in one word: it’s a plodding bass. It plods. It trudges. It drags its feet. And all because of the fact that it doesn’t have a nicely focused pluck at the start of its notes. (Check the audio examples below, and you’ll quickly hear what I mean). It also sounds, to my ears, as if that pluck is made up of more than one layer — possibly to add the necessary transients that were never there to begin with — but I don't know if that is true. Whatever was done and despite what I assume to be the developer’s best efforts, it doesn’t really work. At the moment of ‘pluck’, things often sound disjointed and sloppy, especially in the upper range of the instrument. (Whatever there is of upper range anyway. More on that in a second.) At its worst, when playing shorter notes, it sometimes even sounds like some sort of slap-back echo: you hear a transient noise and then, almost simultaneously but not quite, some tail of the body of the note, like a kind of strange short delay. Most unconvincing.
Like I mentioned earlier: the range of the instrument is deficient to the tune of almost one octave. I have quite a few other virtual basses and they all have almost an additional upper octave. Which is not nothing. And things aren’t helped by the fact that, to my ears, the highest notes of The Upright aren’t its best feature (for reasons explained in the previous paragraph).
The absence of a convincing, focused pluck also has several other, rather serious consequences: for starters, it makes the instrument much more difficult and unsatisfying to play than it should be. Geoff mentioned in the post above that one of the many appealing qualities of Musical Sampling libraries is that they are very playable, and I agree, but this Upright, I’ve got to say, is a disappointing exception to that tradition. It doesn't play at all well, I'm finding. Because of that weak, strange pluck, it always feels as if there's quite a bit of latency. And not only does it play awkwardly, but it also complicates programming this bass because in any performance where a tight rhythm is of the essence, you have to nudge the midi-notes backwards in order for their perceived moment of transient to align more or less with the beat. How much nudging is required, depends entirely on the tempo of the piece. And, making matters worse, it’s not the same amount for every note. (There is a bit of medium swing with drums in audio example 2 below: listen to the difference between the Premier’s performance and that of The Upright: the former locks effortlessly with the drums, generating a nice forward-moving pulse, the latter (even after adjusting what were at first the exact same midi-data) is much more all over the place, sometimes I managed to get it on the beat, sometimes near it and at other times somewhere in the neighbourhood of where it should be. Hence that plodding, sloppy feeling. Also check the closing fragment of example 3 where it's just Rhodes and bass: both parts are played live (without a guiding metronome), and still the Premier locks quite nicely with the Rhodes while The Upright fails completely at shaking hands with the electric piano.
Another consequence of not having a focused pluck, is that this bass tends to be a diffused, blurred presence in the mix. It’s not its sound that causes it, but rather its weak, uneven transients that make it a somewhat smeary presence in a full mix. In certain types of music, this won’t be a problem, but in any situation that requires a clearly delineated bass, The Upright, I fear, is bound to be a severe problem.
A minor thing: the strings sound a bit dead to me. Or if not ex-parrot-like dead, then certainly quite old. They don’t sing and they fade out rather quickly. Typical of old strings. I can’t imagine that an instrument with overaged strings was used for the sampling session, but that’s what it sounds like to me anyway. (The difference with the sustain of the Premier’s strings is also illustrated somewhere in the audio examples below.)
Double-stops is another thing where The Upright is absolutely no match for the Premier. (Again: compared below.) The Premier produces a really nice double-stop sound (at every dynamic level), the Upright’s double-stops don’t sound right at all to me (again largely because of its strange pluck implementation and its weak, almost muted sustains). I do want to add though that of the many sampled uprights I have, only the Premier does pleasing double-stops. No other library, except maybe the Fluffy, even begins to come close.
There’s a few other little things that bother me a bit but I’ve said enough already. I want to add, as a final comment, that I think that Musical Sampling’s insistence on delivering their libraries without any options for adjusting certain tonal or performance-related characteristics, doesn’t do this particular library any favours. I know, it’s the Musical Sampling concept, and it works quite well in many of their previous libraries, but I don’t think it was a good idea for this bass. Sure, you can open the Kontakt editor and start fiddling there, but important things seem to be fixed (or embedded in the samples) and thus unavailable for adjustment.
And this is where I’m supposed to switch to the positives. But I still don’t know what to say. And there must be something good to say, because pretty much all of the previous posters in this thread heard something great in the walkthrough and/or the demos and on VI-C the reception is positive as well, so what is it? What is it that I don’t hear? See, the best I can do is saying that the sound is good. But even that I say without much conviction, because I don’t think the sound is great. Merely good. (And a fraction too roomy as well for my taste.)
Or did I focus too much on something that this library wasn’t designed to deliver: a virtual
all-round upright? (After all, the instrument is described as “a plucked LEGATO upright”.) Should I have ignored the pluck problems and the short note problems and have concentrated exclusively on the instrument’s legato capabilities? Well, let’s go there for a final second and then I have to say this: I find the legato to be of very, very limited use and appeal when the moment arrives to use this bass in a piece of music. In my opinion, before legato, there are at least a dozen or so far more important things which make or break a virtual bass. If those aren’t in place or not done right, in favour of an, in this case, rather obnoxious legato implementation, there isn’t much that the instrument is good for, I believe. Sure, it impresses during a walkthrough, but when the time comes to place a performance with this instrument in an arrangement and a mix, this particular type of legato is often more a hindrance than a welcome feature, I find. It obviously can add something nice to performances at slow or medium tempi (if used sparingly), but for anything faster or anything requiring rhythmic precision (also at slower tempi), it gets seriously in the way, in my experience. (There’s an example of this too: the second half of clip 4.) And it certainly doesn’t make up for the instrument’s lack of definition (which was sacrificed, it seems to me, to make the legato possible). And how many times during a performance does one want to hear those slides? I already had more than my fill of them halfway through the walkthrough.
So, not much in the way of positives, I’m afraid. If I want to end on a postive note, it’ll have to be by praising Music Sampling for what they have done so far — I have a few of their libraries and enjoy them greatly — but, alas, not for The Upright. Or maybe this: I do think a quite a good library can be made with these samples, but it has to be rebuilt from the ground up and the legato feature shouldn’t be the prime concern, not even the second or the third, at any time.
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Audio examples
The first three are comparisons between the Premier and The Upright. They all follow the same routine: first, the Premier plays a little something, followed by The Upright playing the exact same thing. I say ‘the exact same thing’ but in many case, I had to adjust the midi for The Upright to find its best samples for any given fragment. And also, as mentioned earlier, to try and align it with the beat whenever a beat is present.
I tried to do all this without any processing but since The Upright has a much more roomy sound than the Premier, I decided to send the latter through a small chamber reverb to get it spatially closer to the former. Other than that there’s a limiter on the Stereo Out and a bit of roll-off in the lows and low mids which, to my ears, benefits both libraries. No compression or any other processing anywhere (except on the Rhodes which has some delay and plate reverb.)
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
The last example is perhaps a bit unfair in that exposes The Upright in the Unmusical Nude: first, you get all notes from top to bottom in four different velocities (played with the Performance Sustain patch) and then there's a bit that shows how problematic (and intrusive) the legato can become at faster speeds. The latter half was played with the Main Legato patch.
Example 4
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