Cloud Bass by Sound Dust Review
Cloud Bass is a carefully recorded Bass in the Pendle style that you may know from other Cloud Instrument libraries. If you want to learn more about the Cloud Instrument Series you can read more about Cloud Viola2 which we covered before.
Sound Dust is the brainchild of Pendle Poucher, a Brighton UK based composer, sound designer and lover of funny noises. Sound Dust did send a review copy with no strings attached. See also our Ships Piano³ by Sound Dust Review, INFUNDIBULUM#1 by Sound Dust Review, Modular Chaos Engine Vol 1-4 by Sound Dust Review, Cloud Viola2 by Sound Dust Review, Pendleonium³ by Sound Dust Review, and FRICTION (DIVA presets) by Sound Dust Review.
Installation
It is a 1.2isch download and requires FULL Native Instrument Kontakt 5.6.8 or above, the free Kontakt player will not be sufficient.
Sound
Cloud Bass offers low rumbling, cinematic, booming and whispy swarms. There are several unheard sounds with the common and well known Sound Dust vibe included. Pendle from Sound Dust spends a lot of time in my studio experimenting with different ways of making noises. For this library, he was trying out different ways of using bow rosin. It made click and Pendle found something new when he wreck the bow altogether and tried other and new materials.
Pendle recorded with several microphone methods and mixed with extraordinary double bass articulations and a pick of multi-sampled analog sub bass waveforms. Cloud Bass is a rather heterogeneous brute to the common orchestral or jazz double bass sample libraries that are available in the market.
There are eight articulations included which are all deeply sampled through eight ‘oscillators’. You can dial in effects per ‘oscillator’: low pass filter, high pass filter, tremolo, eq, tape, saturation, pitch selection, pan, reverb send and delay send. They do fit in concert and are easy as a combination or solo ready to include in your next track. Sound Dust libraries scream for your imagination and creative part of your brain to experiment and further shape the sound.
- Twine 1: bowed with five meters of coarse brown garden string, five round robins per note per note – AKG C414 large diaphragm condenser mic mic
- Twine 2: bowed with five meters of coarse brown garden string, five round robins per note per note – Barcus Berry Planar contact mic
- Twine 3: bowed with five meters of coarse brown garden string, five velocity levels per note -AKG 411 contact mic
- Long Accent Bow: bowed with a real bow, five round robins per note, minimum three velocity layers per note – AKG C414 large diaphragm condenser mic
- Short Accent Bow (high): bowed with a real bow, five round robins per note – AKG C414 large diaphragm condenser mic
- Beater – thumped lightly with drum beater, five round robins per note, five velocity layers per note – AKG C414 large diaphragm condenser mic
- Col legno: Latin for ‘gently thwacked with the back of the bow’, five round robins per note, minimum three velocity layers per note – AKG C414 large diaphragm condenser mic
- Sub Bass: six selectable analog multi-sampled waveforms recorded from Moog Voyager and DSi Pro 02
There are many bass (string) libraries and other instruments bass products we reviewed. This not only because of its price position is essential Kontakt library you need to get your hands on. I would put this in the range of MODWHEELs (The Lowdown V2, Bass Banjo), 8Dio (66 Basses, The New Basstard), Audio Ollie (Scoring Synths), Cinesamples and Spitfire Audio’s Albion Series, not to forget Musical Sampling (Trailer Bundle) products. There are plenty of options to choose from if you are looking for bass instruments, there are many more I know and used which I did not list here.
User interface & Usability
The developer Sound Dust included 60 snapshots, which all showcase the strength of this library.
Sound Dust’s Cloud Bass has a UI that gives you more way to adapt the sound you need and adjust the result through an additional internal tool.
Available Master Effects and implementation
- High and Low pass filters with resonance
- Three band equalizer
- Rotary speaker emulator
- BPM synced tape delay
- Morphing EQ
- 11 Speaker cabinet emulators
- Filth control
- Master unison control for up to eight voices per note.
- Velocity to volume amount control.
- Aftertouch to pitch bend amount control.
- Aftertouch to filter light/dark control.
- Advanced architecture with automatable midi control of everything on the interface.
- Data readout window shows useful settings of each tweakable control
Rating: Five out of five stars
Cloud Bass is Brilliant as so many other libraries from the boutique sample developer Sound Dust. Cloud Bass is a wide-ranging library that can produce low-end, ethereal swarms, crusty pads, and some lovely warm throbbing bass sounds.
Rating: Five out of five stars
Cloud Bass is Brilliant as so many other libraries from the boutique sample developer Sound Dust. Cloud Bass is a wide-ranging library that can produce low-end, ethereal swarms, crusty pads, and some lovely warm throbbing bass sounds.
