I’m on a quest to get the best ITB (In The Box) bass tones. Last week I reviewed Softube Bass Amp Room and I have a few more reviews coming up.
Today I’m reviewing Studio Devil Virtual Bass Amp. You can get VBA here: http://www.studiodevil.com
It may not look as fancy or have as many options as other plugins, but this thing ROCKS!
Features
- Vacuum Tube Preamp Model with Boost Switch
- Authentic Tone Controls: Bass, Treble, and a Parametric Mid for variable amp character!
- Bright and Deep boost pushbuttons to quickly thicken or brighten the response.
- Power Amp Drive Control to adjust natural power amp compression.
- Variable Knee Limiter: fast attack limiter variable from hard clipping to soft compression.
- 2 Cabinet Models: FIR-based 4×10 and 1×15 speaker cabinet and post-production modeling filters give the final sound the finishing touches!
- D.I. Box Emulation: bypasses the speaker emulation to allow compatibility with other impulse modeling cabinet & room sims.
- Built In 7-Band Graphic Equalizer with master level and bypass controls!
Installation
Installation of Studio Devil plugins is a bit more involved than most, they use a serial # plus Internet activation. Full instructions are in the user guide. Don’t worry, it’s not bad as Waves or NI activation.
Preamp Section
Pretty standard controls here: Preamp Gain, Gain Boost switch, 3 band EQ with adjustable Mid frequency and two additional EQ buttons for boosting the brightness and deepness of the tone. Simple, easy to use and very musical.
Power amp Section
The Power Amp Section has 3 features. Drive, clip indicator and Limiter. The Drive is like the master volume on a tube amp, turned to the left gives you a clean sound, turned to the right creates more compression/distortion, but in a nice way.
The limiter can be soft or hard, personally I prefer soft, it’s a little less edgy. Even when this is clipping like a MOFO it’s far less harsh than you’d think from a plugin.
Graphic EQ
A 7 band Graphic EQ comes next in the signal chain. It’s really easy to quickly tweak this and tailor your tone. There’s a level adjustment slider as your last gain control, setting your master output volume.
Cabinets
VBA has two impulse based cabinet models and a DI setting. There is a 4×10 and 1×15 cabinet. Both sound very nice, not harsh or thin or fake at all in my opinion. While there’s no options for mic positions or types, it’s quality over quantity, I’ve got no complaints about the sound of these cabinets.
CPU Usage
I’ve been playing with VBA in Reaper running my firewire interface at a 64 sample buffer size. Reaper reports 2% cpu usage when using either of the cabinets and about 0.9 using the DI model. This is really not much at all.
What it sounds like
Here’s some examples of various presets included with Virtual Bass Amp. I’m playing an Ibanez SR500 with active pickups, EQ flat, directly into my Profire 2626 HI-Z input.
Clean Unprocessed Bass
Deep Tube DI
Classic Bass Rig
Pillow Soft
Heavy Crunch – this one I made up to show more extreme settings
Overall Impression
This plug blew me away after my somewhat disappointing experience with the Softube amp. I would like to have a few more cabinet models, perhaps mic positions or different types. A blend of DI and Amp tone would be nice too. The fact that I’m already getting the tones of my dreams with minimal tweaking means Studio Devil is doing something right without the infinite variables. They keep it simple and make it F*cking Rock!
Worth Buying?
If you like bass tones similar to anything I like then YES, absolutely buy it! At this price it’s really a no-brainer. I wish I had paid attention to this when it was first released, it’s made me really happy this week and I’m going to get a ton of use out of it.
Get Studio Devil Virtual Bass Amp Here: http://www.studiodevil.com
Also Interesting:
Try Ampeg SVX from IK Multimedia. It’s not really cheap but I find Amplitube and Ampeg the best sounding amp simulations so far.