Blackice Beta Gamma

great bass plugin for direct recording in garageband. The alloy bass preset with a few tweaks is an amazing modern rock / metal tone!

This is my first positive review of any iOS music production app. I had spent literally days trying to get a decent bass sound out of the free Brand X AUv3 bass amp. I kept adding compressors, noise gates, bass oomphers, and twiddling knobs, thinking that I should eventually be able to get a decent sound I could at least live with. The Nembrini Blackice Beta Gamma price tag kept me thinking I could make do with the free bass amp. No matter what I tried, it never sounded even close to decent; there was no presence and no wallop, and a whole lot of dirty unpleasant noise. Finally, in desperation, I downloaded the Blackice. OMG. Wow. Sonic purity. Ooomph. Clean wallop and growl. Transparent Presence without harsh tinniness. How my bass used to sound running through a Trace Elliot preamp, Crown Microtech 600 watt, and a Mesa Boogie 18. One by one, all the effects I had added to try to get the free amp to sound decent got deleted from my AUM track because each only made the sound worse than just running the Blackice alone. I settled on the Big Cabinet preset, although several sounded good to me. Deleted the beta version of Beef. Deleted Nembrini’s noise gate. Deleted Audio Damage’s Roughrider. The Blackice already has a wonderful noise gate and compressor, and the Beta Gamma distortion is subtle and deep: the natural kind of amp distortion that growls more the more you lay into the strings. Suddenly my bass channel has only one thing on it and it’s doing everything I wanted. At least only one thing on the low pass side: I routed the highs using Blue Magoo Multiband, and added Audio Damage Dubstation2 and Roughrider on the high pass to make the most of the gorgeous upper mids and treble. The Blackice just sounds so pure and legit. The Rotosound Jazz Bass 77 strings ring, thwack, and growl nicely with the Blackice. My early-80s Guild Pilot Bass sounds like her old self though Blackice. Your baby will too.

Absolutely loving the powerful clean or distorted tones you can produce with this app. Very high quality audio as well. Only wish i could also set the output headphones settings in the standalone version to left+right instead of only left headphones channel. There is a small typo in the UI by the noisegate: it should be Threshold and not Thereshold 😉