The story
Deep Jupiter is an analog bass sound module featuring the sound of a famous 80s synthesizer with the name Jupiter in it.
The Decent Sampler library has 8 multi-sampled raw basses suited for electronic genres like synthwave, chillwave, retrowave, and synthpop. The sounds in this module are public domain.
Interface
Reviews for Deep Jupiter
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Excellent analog bass and plucks!
This is a TINY library that grants you access to 8 incredible analog synth sounds, that give you that nostalgic retro vibes with every single press of a key. The sampling is great, and every single pass is different from each other, enough to spark some inspiration every time you play a different one.
All the patches are stretched on the entire keyboard, set in a "bassy" place, meaning that the middle C might appear an octave lower than you may expect. If I had to guess, that's because most patches tend to have more of a bassy character, though I know for sure that many sound great on the higher end as well. My favourite has to be the 4th one, I love those highs!
The GUI offers you all the goodies, including attack and release, and an awesome reverb. The aspect ratio of the image is wrong though so there are some black bars on the side. This doesn't mess at all with the GUI though, just neatpicking at this point.
In a nutshell, this is a great retro-analogue synth bundle that comes in a very small size and with great quality and quantity!
Subarashi Mokusei Beesu !
Superb Jupiter Bass!
Back in the late 70s, the chubby and SH-2000-influenced Roland Jupiter 4 gave just a hint of the yet-to-come hi-tech pinnacle of the Jupiter 8 (and beyond that, the Jupiter 6, my favourite), but the design goal for a 'performance-oriented' analogue polyphonic synthesizer was already set. In the intervening 40+ years, the Jupiter series (yes, even the 4!) has increased in fame and value. So, if the hardware is out of reach for most mere mortals, what alternatives are there for those who want the classic Japanese analogue poly sound?
As if by magic, here we are in Pianobook.co.uk-land with a new sample pack. 8 sampled Jupiter 'Bass' sounds, presented in the Decent Sampler format, and oozing with raw, last century, analogue electronic character, but without any need for tuning capacitor replacements, new microcontrollers, and (in the case of the 4 and 8) MIDI retro-fits.
My advice is to start with Preset 04 - Saw Bass Unison. It sounds really nice, and isn't as unsubtle as the rather raw three preceding presets (but try lowering the 'Cutoff' frequency of the low-pass filter when you do listen to them!...). Preset 6 - Square Bass Deep does exactly what it says in the title, and is probably very familiar from a factory preset emulation in just about every synthesizer from the last 40-odd years. Preset 8 - Tri-Saw Sync Resonant is a little muted, but a sound from a bygone analogue age - I'd have preferred more sync nastiness and a more open filter!
You might want to avert your eyes for a moment, because I'm going to go into nit-picking mode, and comment that some of the loops are a little short (and slightly obvious) by today's standards, but for short bass sounds, then this doesn't matter! Actually, open those eyes, because I would argue that loops where the timbre changes less than perfectly smoothly are a sampling cliche that should be celebrated just as much as analogue tuning drift is! (Or the film reel / analogue photography reference in the graphics!)
Each of the 8 presets just draws on a different sample - the UI controls are common to all of them, and are the usual Decent Sampler processing/effects chain: Low-Pass Filter Cutoff, Ping-Pong Delay, Reverb, plus Attack and Release Envelope controls. Plenty of scope there to tweak the sounds to your preferences.
The story says that the samples are in the Public Domain, and I looked hard for aliasing, high noise floors, intermodulation and all of the things you might associate with poor quality samples, and I didn't really find them. Based on the Marimba from SampleScience, then I know they are well versed in cleaning up samples, and so I have to say that I'm not at all surprised that these sound so good. Some of the samples are truncated, and so are a little shorter than you might expect, but this is being very picky! This is one of those times when you wonder just what that raw source material looked like - I reckon that there's a few excellent YouTube videos lurking in the SampleScience vaults!
Final thoughts, then. Simply put, these are nice, very usable, analogue synth bass sounds with a lot of character. If anything, the loop artefacts enhance their value, and I'm wondering if we will see more of this type of thing - after all, 12-bit reverbs and FM have acquired a mystique! Having now heard two rather nice re-workings of public domain material from SampleScience, I'm really looking forward to what they do next!
