These notes will help you get the most out of Bass Chorus, the flanger/chorus plug-in for bass tracks. DirectX and VST versions are available.

When the Bass mode switch is on, the signal is divided into two parts - bass and treble, with the Cutoff dial setting the crossover frequency. This is done with a gentle filter algorithm, to preserve the phase profile. The effect is only applied to the treble portion, which is then mixed back with the bass for output. This lets you achieve a huge, wide sound while still preserving the focus and punch crucial for bass.

The Lo-Fi switch controls how much processing is done to preserve the purity of the treble. There are two ways to generate pitch shifting - the quick-and-dirty way by skipping or repeating samples (Lo-Fi), or the more careful way using interpolation or resampling. If you are processing a bass sound that does not have any high treble content, you can't tell the difference, so you are better off saving some CPU power for other tasks.

The Delay dial controls the amount of pre-delay. A minimum setting gives a true thru-zero flanger effect, higher values give a classic chorus sound.

The Depth dial sets the amount of movement in the effect, from static to dynamic, the Rate dial controls the speed of this movement.

The Feedback dial controls how much of the processed signal is fed back into the input, for further processing. The minimum can be quite subtle, higher values ca get pretty wild. The Mix dial sets the balance between the dry unprocessed signal and the wet processed signal. This is typically set at the maximum, but lower values can be used to make the effect more subtle.

The Channel mode switch selects one of four modes of operation:

• Mono mode gives a mono output (even though there are two channels, they will be identical).
• Stereo mode gives stereo by adding the delayed data to the left channel, and subtracting it from the right. This should be used with care, since it can mean that if you mix the resulting sound down to mono, some of the effect will cancel itself out. This mode will also cause problems for bass sounds, so make sure you are running in bass mode, with the cutoff frequency fairly high.
• Dual mode generates two "sweeps" instead of the usual one, each going in the opposite direction to the other. This does not suffer from the problems of stereo mode, and is more dynamic.
• Haas mode produces a modulated Haas effect. This effect is achieved by sending the swept delayed signal to one channel, while the original signal is sent to the other. While this is probably not appropriate to bass sounds, it can work a subtle magic on pads and electric pianos. When Haas mode is selected, the Feedback and Mix controls are disabled.

If you set both Delay and Width to zero, you will discover just how thru-zero the flanger is - zero delay, zero effect, and Feedback simply piles on the volume!

Most of the testing I have done is under Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.0, Cool Edit Pro and Sound Forge 5.0. Under SF5, I have seen problems with saving presets.

Most of the testing I have done is under Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.0. I have tested Bass Chorus on two VST-to-DirectX converters: VST-DX Adapter (Amulet) from fxpansion and VST-DX Wrapper from Spin Audio. I have also tested it with WaveLab 3, and I have been informed that it runs under Cubase and Logic.

fxpansion VST Adapter (Amulet) V3:
++ Works fine, but you must set the "Force Stereo Operation" property when installing Clone Ensemble.
++ Supports VST 2, VST instruments and DXi instruments.
++ Registers all your VST plugins as DirectX plugins.

fxpansion VST Adapter (Amulet) V2:
-- I could only get stereo output if I was processing a stereo signal.
++ it supports VST 2 and VST instruments.

Spin Audio:
++ Works fine, producing stereo output from both mono and stereo tracks.
++ It is available as freeware!
-- Two-step loading (freeware version): load the wrapper, load the plugin.

When testing under Cubase, I have found that the plug-in appears in the list of insert effects, but not in the list of send effects. I don’t consider this a problem – Bass Chorus is not something you’d put an entire mix through!

Have fun!

Trevor Magnusson

www.cloneensemble.com