It sits proudly, but never clouds the picture. The sound can be best described as having the joy and playfulness of a bouncing ball it drives a track along with great authority and its tone seems to fill the frequency spectrum, yet it has the magical ability to leave other instruments in the mix plenty of room to breathe. SRB is very easy to get to grips with and a real delight to play. If a sampled bass can capture the imagination and provide hours of pleasure through simply being played on its own, it must have something going for it. The legato slides were sampled at three speeds, the choice of which is determined by the key velocity. The sustain pedal itself (CC64) is used in conjunction with consecutive overlapping notes to produce legato string slides: an essential articulation for creating the illusion of a real bass. SRB can play polyphonically up to four notes (obviously!), but the Sustain keyswitch renders SRB monophonic, and simultaneously functions like a traditional sustain pedal, useful for keeping repetitive eighth-notes sounding 'connected'. A 'Force Hammer-on/off' keyswitch also enables hammer-ons, normally invoked by overlapping two notes a semitone or tone apart, to be 'forced' across much wider intervals, as long as they're within the range of the currently playing string.

On SRB, the player can now perform trills and buzz trills at their own speed, for as long as desired. The scripting for trills and buzz trills has been considerably improved from previous Scarbee basses, which offered only short trills of preset speed and length. While the most frequently used articulations (sustain, hammer-on, pull-off, grace notes) are available directly from the playable keys, additional keyswitched articulations, such as trills, buzz trills, mutes and pickup claps, are also provided. So, for example, if you'd prefer that open G to be played on the A string with an upward stroke, it can be forced to do so. But if SRB's 'intelligent' choices aren't to your taste, they can be manually overridden at any time via non-latching keyswitches. Like Scarbee's other basses, SRB uses KSP scripting to take care of string selection and up/down strokes automatically. Conversely, the undamped Rickenbacker Bass lets rip with unrestrained gutsy power, long sustain, a rich low end and tons of high-, mid- and top-end detail, enabling SRB to cut effortlessly through the densest of heavy rock mixes. A good example is Paul McCartney's bass sound on 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds'- this was reputedly a damped Ricky 4001 with flat-wound strings. Although muted, the sound still has plenty of body and sustain, with a pronounced pick attack. The Palm Mute instrument simulates the effect of using the damper bar on the tailpiece of the original bass, (removed by the majority of Ricky players!) and favoured by country and western players. nki instruments in two flavours, Palm Muted and undamped.

The model sampled for SRB was a 4003, with Rotosound Swing Bass 66 round-wound strings providing that characteristic 'Ricky' wiry top end. It's the first Scarbee bass to have been played with a pick rather than fingers, so it's tonally very different to their previous bass products. Scarbee's Rickenbacker Bass (SRB) expands on their existing virtual basses with a posh new GUI, built-in effects, and some welcome improvements to the KSP scripting.

Scarbee bass youtube