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The Mother Of All Basslines

Does Spectrasonics’ new bass softsynth plug-in Trilian deliver?

Spectrasonics are back with a vengeance with Trilian, the very long-awaited follow-up to their Trilogy Bass Softsynth. Back in the day, nearly every producer who was using softsynths would claim to have used Trilogy to death, as it sounded absolutely amazing and had a huge wealth of bass sounds to satisfy every need.

But Triology has been around for some time now, and newer products have begun to catch up on this marvellous plug-in; not to rest on their laurels, Spectrasonics have been busy totally redesigning Trilogy. The result is Trilian.

Make no bones about it: Trilian is a beast, that boasts a massive 34GB core library featuring highly detailed Acoustic, Electric and Synth basses as well as enhanced versions of the classic Trilogy sounds. In addition, new sound banks have been posted up on their website for users to download. Once installed and played with (it will take some time to really get to know it inside out, because of the immense scale), it feels like the floor has opened up. The bass sounds are Earth shattering.

Trilian covers every aspect of bass design, from synth bass tones, to acoustic and electric basses — every bass sound you’d need from a virtual synth, in fact. With over sixty different four, five, six and eight string electric basses represented in their various styles (fingered, picked, fretless, slapped, tapped, and muted), there are a huge variety of sounds for any musical genre. Who needs a bassist when you have Trilian?

The acoustic bass has got to be one of the most detailed software recreations that I have heard, offering tons of control and musical expression — it actually sounds as if you’re playing a real acoustic bass guitar, and that goes for the electric basses, too. With careful playing techniques and a few of my little production secrets, I was hard pushed to tell that this was a soft synth. OK, real guitarists will argue otherwise, but it is damn good.

For the dance market, the synth bass sounds are something else. Trilian features some pretty hefty filter and oscillating effects, and the resonance and modulation is ideal for electronic genres. In fact, some of the sub bass sounds, and the bass growls, were truly stomach churning. The guys at Spectrasonic used hundreds of synth sound sources to create the base sounds, emulating some of the world’s most exotic and coveted hardware synthesizers, from the original Moog Minimoog and Taurus Pedals, to the latest analogue modular synthesizers like Novation’s Bass Station, Yamaha CS-80, Korg MS-20, ARP 2600, Roland Juno 60/106, Waldorf Pulse, the classic Roland TB-303, SH-101, and many more. A wish list of synths that would cost thousands of pounds if purchased for your studio — now they can all be experienced from one plug-in.

All angles seem to be covered when it comes to editing with Trilian. There are a multitude of extremely powerful editing controls, allowing all sorts of custom tweaking to the sounds, including the FlexMod modulation system, Dual Filters with more than 19 filter types, six full-featured LFOs, dual morphing modulation, adjustable FX racks, and much more. Creating sounds on this can be so much fun, as the world is your oyster with so many user changeable options.

Trilian is designed to be an extremely versatile and user-friendly virtual bass instrument allowing a great amount of performance and sound control. Getting such an accurate-sounding plug-in was achieved by sampling the bass sounds that are at its core to a very high level of detail. Variations can be heard when the sounds are played, like the slides between notes as individual notes are triggered, adding to that natural-sounding experience.

 The user interface has been designed to make editing quick and easy, but it is also feature-rich, so all levels of users can get something out of it at various levels of detail and complexity, from just basic sound choices sticking with the presets, or getting experimental with the FX options and various sound modulation controls.

Trilian’s FX racks include all of the FX processors from their other products Omnisphere and Stylus RMX, including a wide variety of amp and speaker models, distortions, dynamics processors, equalizers, chorus, phasers, flangers, delays, reverbs, unique specialty FX, and more.
Users can also open the Trilian sound library in Spectrasonics other flagship synthesizer Omnisphere. This will allow for even further synthesis and expanded performance possibilities.

This is a monster of a software instrument — it goes further than just being a plug-in, as it is something that is truly amazing and offers a degree of sound control and possibilities that will be very hard to top.

PRICE
£209

CONTACT

timespace.com

VERDICT

Build Quality                           N/A

Ease of use                             4.0

Features                                 5.0

Value for money                      4.0

Sound Quality                         5.0

Hype

A great sounding plug-in, with a huge core library of bass sounds that will cover every bass need in the studio.

Gripe

You’re going to need a lot of free hard drive space to load this baby.

 

A fantastic virtual instrument that improves on the original idea Trilogy, and takes it into another dimension.

 

4.5/5