United Plugins QuickBass

QuickBass offers a user‑friendly way to tailor bass guitar sounds to fit your mix.

As its name implies, QuickBass is designed to let you tailor your DI’d bass guitar sounds quickly and effectively. Essentially, what we have here is a channel strip that’s optimised for bass guitar. It offers EQ, simple yet flexible compression, saturation and doubling. It supports the usual plug‑in formats on Mac and Windows operating systems at up to (in fact, beyond!) 192kHz, with 64‑bit processing. Authorisation is through a personalised licence file that lets you use the software on any machines that you own.

QuickBass’s graphic user interface resembles a bass guitar body, which acts as a panel for all the controls and is fully resizeable. An intelligent bypassing avoids clicks when using automation to bring the plug‑in in or out of the signal path, and the plug‑in also compensates for latency. It also releases CPU power when it detects that there’s no signal to process.

The EQ is pre‑configured with preset modes: Finger, Slap, Millerize and Pick. Millerize, presumably named after Marcus Miller, treats the mids specifically, to suit slap playing in his style. Because the under‑the‑hood settings are preset, all the user has to do (after choosing the initial style) is adjust the amount control for each of the six EQ stages. Most of the EQ controls are self explanatory, while Deswamp is used to pull back those lower‑mid frequencies that might otherwise allow bass sounds to get messy.

Though there’s no amp or speaker emulation as such, QuickBass has what it takes to make a DI’d bass sit comfortably in a track...

The compressor has one knob to dial in how much compression is applied, another to set the release time and a third control that morphs between Variable Mu, Opto and FET compression styles. This actually results in a lot of flexibility while requiring minimal user involvement. If you want a bigger bass sound, you can also dial in some sub‑octave or bring in a doubler to make it sound like two basses playing the same line.

Of course, no modern production tool would feel complete without some sort of saturation tool, and here you get two controls: one to set the wet/dry balance for parallel distortion, and another to set the intensity of the distortion. Each section has its own bypass switch. That leaves input and output controls, plus moving‑coil‑style metering. A library of presets has been included to get you started and with the styles ranging from warm and ‘normal’ to death metal with an extra side‑portion of death, these cover a lot of ground to show you what this plug‑in is capable of.

Though there’s no amp or speaker emulation as such, QuickBass has what it takes to make a DI’d bass sit comfortably in a track and it offers a lot of tonal range. I’d personally have liked the high‑cut control to have had a lower minimum frequency than 2kHz, and the saturation effect could get a touch too gritty for my taste if applied too generously, but other than that I found QuickBass to be both straightforward and effective. Realistically, you can get much the same results using a combination of more conventional plug‑ins — but having all the tools in one place, controlled using such a simple interface, can certainly help with your workflow.