Native Instruments Scarbee Pre Bass Review

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It’s about that time for some more loving from Native Instruments, and boy have they been busy!

Today I want to take a look at their new bass instrument they sent me to review, the Scarbee Pre Bass.

This instrument is based on the Fender Precision bass, and promises to give you a very realistic bass sound.

So what’s up with the bass and who is Scarbee?

scarbeeprebassWell, first off, Scarbee is a fantastic sample/sound design company that has partnered with Native Instruments to distribute their fantastic instruments.

The Pre Bass is the first of many instruments to come out of this new partnership.

I’m not a bass player, so I can’t tell you much about the fender precision joint, but I will say I love a good bass.

How does it sound?

The instrument itself sounds AWESOME, it is a very realistic sounding bass instrument. ย Not made for subs and synth bass sounds, this is for those real funk, soul, rock…authentic sounding basslines your music craves from time to time.

They’ve done some great programming so that it doesn’t sound stale and lifeless and the programming helps you create some awesome sounding riffs.

Alternations, chords, slides, frets, pickups, hits, everything you’d get from a real bass…it’s all here.

How easy is it to use?

scarbeeI’ve seen some sampled bass instruments before, and it was so hard to use all the features, I just moved on. Now the pre bass does have a lot of features, but it’s very easy to access them all from the performance interface.

If you’re like me, you may not know everything it’s talking about, but they do put some notes in the interface and make it easy to just play around.

They have things like “player profiles” which sets up the sound towards a specific type of music, which is dope.

Eq, chords, pickup, hits, all that can be adjusted. And it automatically alternates “fingers” on repeated notes, good stuff.

You can go as deep as you want, so for all you bassist, you’ll love it, and for all your producers that like me, just want to sound good…it’s good for that too.

It can be as deep or as simple as you want it, and no matter how you use it, the sound will remain top notch.

How do I play it?

kontakt_factory_packshot_gui_screen_01It is a kontakt instrument, but you don’t need the full version of Kontakt to play it, as it works with Native Instruments free kontakt player.

It loads up as a libray in kontakt, and there is only one ย instrument, the bass.

Like I said, everything can be accessed from the main screen of the instrument, so it keeps it streamlined and ready to go.

Loaded up, it takes about 200mb or so, not bad, and it plays good.

I didn’t have any troubles messing with it and I doubt you will either.

With all the features, options, and tweakability, this is a great choice for a superb sounding bass instrument.

If you like that type of bass sound, I wouldn’t look any further than this one.

For all you sub bass heads, I think NI has something else for you! I’ll see what I can dig up!

Go head and checkout the scarbee pre bass over an native instruments website.

Let me know what you think about the review, or about the instrument itself.

10 Comments

  1. whats up joe, love your web site that fender bass is cool from the old school day need to hold the notes a little longer to hear the effect other then that good job going to ck it out at ni web site love the sample keeps you sent me thx, keep up the good work will keep in touch.

    Reply
  2. Ahhh, I see you did some research from our previous post session. I have to say “your” intro” to the pre-bass is a lot more “friendly” than NI’s (theirs is a bit tech heavy). You tend to like to poke and probe through the different menus/options as I or any other person that wants to see what’s under the hood would. Now Mr. I got a Maschine *lol* let us know how pre-bass get along w/maschine in midi mode. My guess is that it may just give you better percussive feel than say w/ keys (my theory being that the bass even with it harmonic & tonal qualities is a strong percussion/rhythm instrument). I’m just envisioning using maschine’s knobs for doing some slick slides & slaps similar to “Slide” by Slave, or “Rush Over” by Marcus Miller & Me’shell Ndegeocello or if you happen to have GuitarRig/Kore use a nice cabinet simulation/fx.just a thought. ๐Ÿ˜€

    As always peace & blessings
    BTW: thanks for your input towards the S/S discount code.

    Reply
    • Whatup J! yeah man, my aim is to provide info for US, I think I’m pretty much the same or similar to most, so when I review stuff I do it with us in mind. All the tech stuff can be found on the websites of the products lol…I just want to see how quick it is to get in and get going.

      I haven’t been using maschine in midi mode really, just stand a lone. Of course if you mean using it just as a midi controller, I can try that out for sure. I’m thinking the only way to really use maschine with midi is in a daw, otherwise I have issues because asio4all only allows one program to use it at a time lol.

      Reply
  3. Thats a pretty nice sound. Did you ever play with Broomstick bass? That had a sweeeeet sound and quite a few models (including an upright and a completely unmusical broomstick bass) , but this one sounds a little more detailed.

    It shouldn’t really matter that it’s only one model though. The bass guitar is one of the most versatile instruments around , in that it’ll sound good in ANY style, so whats needed is one GOOD bass, rather than lots of half-ass ones, and this sounds like a good bass.

    Reply
    • I love how it sounds bro! Yeah, I never messed with that broomstick bass, this bass right here is dope for that specific sound. I think a few good basses are good, because this one doesn’t really cover acoustic bass.

      But for what it does, it can’t be beat and is probably one of the best I’ve heard around.

      Reply
  4. Hey!

    Broomstick Bass actually has MIDI Out – if I’m not mistaken!

    So you could feed the MIDI Output into Scarbee Bass.

    Another nice tool is ChordPulse.

    http://www.chordpulse.com/

    It generates backing patterns from user defined chords. It will play them live and also save them to disc for use in your favourite DAW.

    Including bass lines!

    The Scarbee Bass instruments are excellent and another classic is Trilian by Spectrasonics – which has every bass sound you could ever need!

    Reply

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