Atk Bass

Atk Bass was sampled from a mid range Ibanez Atk Bass with a Seymour Duncan triple coil humbucker (wired parallel) and a Badass Bass II bridge. Strings were Elixer regular gauge.

I recorded each string of the bass chromatically at least to the 15th fret in 2007-08 @ 32/44.1 khz directly (bypassing the volume pot) to an RME Fireface 400. Originally I used HALion 3 which was able to do a form of true legato using momentary key-switches and voice groups.

While I recorded hammer/pull legato layers for all the strings, slide/gliss
layers were -very- minimally recorded and some other articulation ranges were never completed before I sold the instrument.

I had absolutely no experience writing KSP at the start of this year (2025) and Initially I used Murat Yaşar Baskın’s great Simple Legato Kontakt script for legato. After some months of trial and error I was able to modify it to include quite a few of others layers but I still needed 4 programs per string and 16 patches for the whole instrument.

Later in the year I found an exchange I had with Nils Liborg on the V.I. Forum from 2007 when I first recorded the samples and from those few lines
(linked page 5 of ‘Atk Bass – About.pdf’) I made a very basic true legato script more appropriate for the content albeit using a separate code block for each interval.

I eventually worked out a while loop example after completing the instrument, included in ‘Atk Bass – About.pdf’ and separate strings folder for posterity.

Each string was developed as separate patch (included) and then compiled into one, select-able or in combination. I’ve not the time to develop automatic range so there’s rather a lot of keyswitches to access positions 0 – 11 (in yellow). Alternatively two range switches (again in yellow) that give an optimal lower or higher range shown page 3 of ‘Atk Bass – About.pdf’ are sufficient for many cases.

3 Main Articulations
Chromatically sampled up to 4 velocities. X3 Round Robin.
Chokes
Multiple release layers
4 Legato layers including Round Robin legato and open string hammer/pull
Assorted other layers; bridge and fretboard clap, position slide, open slides
full details in ‘Atk Bass – About.pdf’

Alexander Donnelly 27/10/25