Funky Fingers
A 1970's funk tone from a Vantage bass
ByPeter Corbett
The story
Funky Fingers is a bass guitar signal chain that I have used several times to get a 1970’s funk tone. The bass itself is an old Vantage instrument with passive pickups. The model is unknown, but I presume it is a 1980’s vintage, and of Japanese origin. It was a birthday gift from my parents while I was in high school, and was second hand at the time.
The recording chain consisted of a Universal Audio 4-710d preamp (dialled some tube distortion and compression), several layered console/DI box saturation plugins, an Ampeg emulation, and a Vari-Mu compressor plugin. The sound is pretty toasted, and in my mind, ready to go without much further processing (for this style anyways).
The lower registers have 5 layers of round-robin, while the upper octaves have only 2 to 3. There are release triggers, at a pretty low level. These are round-robin as well in the Logic Sampler version, but I couldn’t figure out how to program this in DecentSampler. There is some pretty buzz on some of the higher samples, but I thought it added charm and authenticity.
Reviews
It's weird and underrated
The rating, for some reason, is low, and in vain. The guitar sounds very decent. I wrote a track with her and she sounds great there, perhaps. at a quiet amplitude with good overload sounds deep
enough with good sustainGreat classic bass tone
Yeah, I like this bass sound a lot - very simple to use, plays well, sounds great, add a little processing, and you wouldn't know it's a sample. The only teeny problem is this: I love the "pluck" sound when you hit notes at higher velocities a real thing that happens on a real bass, but sometimes that "pluck" shows up at lower velocities and sounds out of place.
Play that funky music!
Seriously good sounds from this patch. Captures the soul of a bass guitar.