EZbass 1.3.3 — Mac version

The Audio Tracker doesn't just sit there waiting for you to play a part. Feed it a drum loop or a wonky keyboard idea and it works out a bassline that fits — pitch, rhythm, the lot. Once it's spat out a MIDI performance you can drag it straight onto the EZbass track in your DAW and tweak from there. It saves a stack of head-scratching when you're staring at an empty arrangement.

In a typical session EZbass sits on its own instrument track, loaded with one of the sampled basses. The library covers finger, pick and slap styles, all recorded clean so you can shape the tone afterwards. I'll often route it through a bus with a bit of compression and an amp sim to get it sitting right against the drums. The built-in mixer handles basic blend and effects, but sending it out to your own bus gives you more control over how it glues into the track.

The Grid Finder taps into the MIDI library that ships with the plugin — a broad spread of playing styles from straight eighths to busier lines. You can audition patterns while your song runs and lock in a groove that works before you commit to audio. If you've already got a guide bass part recorded as audio, the audio-to-MIDI conversion pulls the notes out so you can swap in a better sampled tone without replaying everything.

Ducking bass under dialogue without re-recording

A friend who cuts short films had a problem. The director wanted the bass to duck and swell around dialogue, but the live take was boomy and uneven. She loaded the stems into her DAW, dropped EZbass onto a fresh track, and fed the rough bass audio into the audio tracker. Ten minutes later she had a clean MIDI performance that followed the original line. She auditioned the modern bass with a felt pick, dialled back the low-mid mud in the onboard mixer, and handed off a mix that didn't need a re-record. For quick-turnaround post work where a session player isn't in the budget, it's a proper lifesaver.

Building a bass part from a drum loop

1. Load EZbass on an instrument track and drop a drum MIDI clip onto the timeline.
2. Open the Audio Tracker tab and drag the same drum clip into it. Tell the tracker whether the source is drums or keyboard — here, pick drums.
3. Hit analyse. The tracker maps kick and snare hits to root notes and builds a rhythmic pattern around them.
4. Browse the Grid Finder results. Audition a few patterns while the loop plays. I usually land on something that locks with the kick and leaves a little space around the snare.
5. Drag the MIDI into your track and tweak any notes that clash with the chords. The pitch usually works out, but a quick manual pass on one or two notes tightens things up.
6. Switch bass instruments if the part needs more snap or more thump. I often start with the modern bass and swap to the vintage one for a rounder bottom end later.

If it won't open: On newer macOS hosts, version 1.3.3 fixed menu click response issues that could make the plugin seem unresponsive. If the standalone icon looks odd, that's been sorted too — the Mac icons now match the Tahoe style.

Drag-free MIDI blocks and the right-hand mute

• Right-click a MIDI block in the Grid Finder to send it straight to your DAW track without dragging. Saves a couple of seconds each time, and it adds up.
• The new right-hand mute articulation from version 1.3.3 only matters if you use Rock Legend EBX, but it adds a tight, choked sound that works well for staccato verse sections.
• You can remap keyboard shortcuts in Settings now. Handy if you switch between DAWs and keep hitting the wrong keys for quantise or undo.
• Audio export used to drift at sample rates other than 44.1 kHz. That's fixed in 1.3.3, so projects at 48 kHz bounce in sync without nudging the waveform back into place afterwards.

Searching for an ezbass torrent or ez bass torrent will turn up the current version. If you need it for Apple Silicon, a dedicated ezbass mac torrent is around, and many producers grab the whole toontrack ezbass torrent in one go. There's also a straightforward ezbass free download floating about if you just want to get it running and start writing.

• Right-hand mute articulation now supported for Rock Legend EBX
• You can change some keyboard shortcuts in Settings
• Mac app and project icons updated to the Tahoe look

• macOS 10.15 or later
• ARM or x86 64-bit Mac